Before I’d been born, scientists had found evidence of former life on Mars, from back when it had oceans. My third-grade teacher had told the class about the tiny organisms discovered on Titan, swimming through the planet’s ammonia oceans and looking like something I’d sneeze up. Public schools had been big on STEM, then, and the teacher had been dropping words like “organisms” and “multicellular life” and “flagella-like structures” in both English and Mandarin as me and the other kids had poked oversized gooey models of the Titan creatures. The Titan news had sparked riots at first, outside of the UN Headquarters and the Vatican. No one cared much about dead cells from a million years ago on Mars, but living creatures on another planet messed with them. Like, you’re not so special on your little hunk of dirt.

“It was like being mad at the sky,” my mom had told me of the riots, which had happened when she’d been in college.

Me and my mom were already talking a lot more, then, after my little overdose at the tail end of my sophomore year, and I’d shriveled, and wheezed, and screamed for half of that summer in rehab. Self-healing, blahblah, and talk therapy, and a journey that I’m supposedly on to this day, which made Genesis give me shit about my weed use and occasional tip-toeing into tequila territory until her death. Even without the Social Skills forced conversations at school, my mom used to sit me down every day—after making me cut off contact with my friends, after taking my bedroom door off its hinges for weeks—and we’d talk. Even if she was exhausted after another overnight shift as an ER nurse at the clinic in Dorchester, she’d sit me down, still in her scrubs. You can’t shut me out, anymore, she’d told me. We have to figure out how to be on each other’s sides and move forward together.

I’d heard her praying at night through our cardboard-thin walls, begging Mary. Avé Maria, cheia de graça, o Senhor é convosco. Please guide me. I know you have a son too.

“Be mad at it if you want,” my mom had told me about the Titan discovery, though obviously it was more about the black hole of rage I was carrying around, “but what’s that going to do?”