I was delusional. When I got older, and first my father died, and then a few years later my mother, I told myself that they had gone on extended vacations. What a laugh, that people like my parents would have ever taken a vacation! But, as I said, I was delusional. The permanence of their condition never seemed possible. I watched my mother die in the hospital, silent as ever, not giving an inch, and yes, I did have some desperate moments of thinking bleak thoughts; I thought about suicide, about dying, about ending the whole family line right then and there—the world was a hard place, and no darling kitchen memories could change that. Perhaps my father had been onto something. But I kept going. I told myself: extended vacations. Mother and Daddy were somewhere together on a warm island, happy, drinking from coconuts. And before I could get too deep into that particular fantasy, Geannie and Jim came along.

After that, love had always hung over me like a sword, the moment of departure looming ahead of me in the shadowy future. Romantic love was no different. I had loved Hernan and he died. He was shot in the head, skull cleaved in two, brains spattered all over the cigarettes behind the counter. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere that I used to believe—maybe his skull was my heart? Cleaved in two? And his brains were . . . love? And the stacked cigarettes that received his brain matter, and some stray hairs, and flecks of blood and plasma—were they the abyssal hole where love goes?

Maybe. Or maybe he just died, and in the numb weeks following his death my wild insomniac brain kept trying to make sense of the senseless, my skull clanging with the memory of his life streaming out of him in the color and form of blood. Hernan had not been my boyfriend. We had never kissed, had never touched beyond a brotherly hug. My feelings toward him are difficult to state even now. Since I always tended to romanticize things in the privacy of my mind, I could say it was romantic love, but it may have been a level beyond that; in my fantasies I imagined simple, silly things, too shamefully tame to utter aloud. Falling asleep together holding hands, for example, or talking earnestly over a book we both had read, or taking evening autumn walks (the weather was always cool in my fantasies; I had a severe preoccupation with fall). One of my most detailed dreams involved me cooking him dinner in my trailer, and he would sit down at first and keep me company—laughing at me, calling me Bon Bon with a familiarity that never failed to shock and delight me, doing impressions of customers we knew from the market—and then he would stand up and walk over to me, place his hand on my shoulder, and tell me he wanted to help me prepare the food.

In this dream I didn’t have to instruct him, or give him directions; he knew how to do everything. He chopped vegetables while we laughed and exchanged banter, like in a commercial, and he would man the sauces (for there were always multiple sauces) like a professional chef. The dinner was perfect, nothing burned and nothing bland, and we ate together in silence. Had anyone come to know these banal domestic fantasies, I would have been deeply ashamed, more so than if they’d been the most perverse sexual desire imaginable. Their sincerity was mortifying.