What was happening in your wrists and forearms had been happening in my ankles for months. Maybe longer. But it was in those past months that the wild rush of dancing was no longer enough to mask the pain lighting up my tendons.

I did what you did. Well, almost. I smiled harder to keep myself from wincing, while you held your jaw to keep the stoic face of a concert musician. I lifted my body to pretend there was no weight on my ankles, while you bent lower to the cimbalom, trying to make any pain seem like a fierce intensity.

It ended anyway.

My parents tolerated me burying my face in the sofa for only the first two weeks of summer. Then they told me I would help with the flower harvest. A petal at a time, I would help bring the village my bisabuela loved closer to clean water, and electricity that flickered out less often, and roads that wouldn’t take out a transmission with their ruts and potholes.

So they brought me to my bisabuela’s small but tidy house, with that aluminum roof. (You asked once what it sounds like when it rains, and you know when you used to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on the cimbalom with hard leather beaters? Like that, only louder.)

My bisabuela knew you and I had something in common, an echo of familiar pain in our bodies. She knew that each evening, you were working at the cimbalom in frustratingly slow movements, the old man teaching you to keep something you love without letting it take everything from you. She knew that every sunrise the curanderas rubbed chili powder and turmeric into your forearms; when we gathered for the harvest, I could see it tinting the brown of your wrists red and gold.

And my great-grandmother knew I could not dance, not like I had been dancing, or in a few years I might not walk. I could dance for the joy of it, the doctors told me, and that was as little comfort as being told I could breathe, but only on weekends.

It was into las canastas de palma you carried that I collected marigolds and cuetlaxochitl, petals the color of the fire we felt in our tendons. It was into those baskets that I set passion flowers, green-and-red and yellow-and-purple, that curled up from dry roadsides. You were chivalrous enough to look away when I cried while plucking morning glories, because as a child I learned that la campanilla morada was a symbol of unrequited love, and the only unrequited love I had known up to then was dancing. It took my heart. It told me I was beautiful.

And then it ravaged the body it had so completely possessed.

The sun beat down on our backs as we filled the baskets, fluffing the petals to let them air.