Christmas, 1970

We assemble the silver tree, our translated lives, its luminous branches, numbered to fit into its body. place its metallic roots to decorate our first Christmas. Mother finds herself opening, closing the Red Cross box she will carry into 1976 like an unwanted door prize, a timepiece, a stubborn fact, an emblem of exile measuring our days, marked by the moment of our departure, our lives no longer arranged. Somewhere, there is a photograph, a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken: I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree, her first apartment in this, our new world: my sisters by my side, I wear a white dress, black boots, an eight-year-old’s resignation; Mae and Mitzy, age four, wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles, on this, our first Christmas, away from ourselves. The future unreal, unmade, Mother will cry into the new year with Lidia and Emerito, our elderly downstairs neighbors, who realize what we are too young to understand: Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists.