There are three choices for people like us in Mexico. We make our way back across the border and risk even harsher punishment if we are caught, because then we are “repeat offenders,” for us, a second time. We make our way back to our original homes, places we fled once because hunger shadowed, death shadowed. Or we stay with the others like us here, a hard choice too: here, where we’ll be chased and harassed, cash out for yet another outstretched hand in uniform to escape yet another van to yet another unknown. And I just kept thinking of how much harder crossing had become, kept thinking of all those bodies turned skeleton in the desert, all those bodies stacked atop one another in the morgues; so many bodies, too many bodies. Bodies washed ashore. Names we’d never know.

I opted for the last choice, to stay in Mexico, and I hope you will understand someday why I did so.

I know it was hard for you. You couldn’t even write in Spanish since you’d spent nearly all your life studying in English. The water made you sick because your stomach wasn’t used to it. You cried for your old life every day. You begged to go back to Florida and how could I explain it to you, you so small and full of hope still? That the place you called home had never considered you hers, had always held you at arm’s length like an ugly reflection?

I realize someday you may ask why we embarked on any of this in the first place, why I didn’t keep you breathing mountain air in your first home, water the color of a peacock feather, the sound of a guitar in a cathedral plaza, why I didn’t keep you in a place that never called you foreign. I guess the time has come to tell you about my pregnancy, though I have avoided it all these years.