I hadn’t known until that moment that I had so little. Even as an adult, when I had experienced enough to place my own life in comparison, I marveled at the woman’s comment. I wondered what she had expected: sad poor people being sad and poor at every sad, poor moment of their lives? She mistook happiness for what it was—how we survive and build lives out of the strings we hold. But she must have known, deep down, that she was lying to herself. She had said I knew the secret, what was really important in life, what made a person happy. If that was true, it didn’t make sense when she went back home and left all that “happiness” behind.

What I am trying to say is that we told jokes back then, at the detention center. We laughed in our little cot until the other women shushed us. We told jokes about our situation that were funny enough to muffle the dread inside.

Almost a month. That’s how long you laughed in an industrial playground, how long you sat bored in a class full of “babies,” how long you forgot the taste of your mother’s cooking. You can count yourself lucky because on the television now they talk about all these kids locked up in cages. Like it wasn’t bad enough they separated adult family members, sent them to opposite sides of the country. I didn’t think it could get worse. You have childhood memories that are not policed by a guard standing just off the frame. For this, I am grateful.

I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from, so there they left us. Said, Find your way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican. It was all very disorganized. I don’t know how to reach the nuns of the center for deported migrants that fed us that night and gave us a place to sleep beside all the other dazed faces. If I could reach them, I would say simply: Thank you. If only for one night, you kept us safe.