Las Lagrimas Del Recuerdo

Endless Indian summers were spent in his embrace, the only time as a child that I remember feeling safe though the danger lurked mere bottles away. I have only seen the sea with a child's eyes, but I remember the waves that hit the tawny Corpus sand and washed over us as we ran to shore. This was where he took us to escape from the heat of Dallas, to escape the demons in his mind, and I haven't once returned. Perhaps it is fear holding me back, or knowing that I can never re-visit a memory. I often picture him, our footsteps etched into the earth, the way the light hit the water and reflected off my tiny pink bathing suit, the way his arms carried me to the surface, arms that held me, strong. Perhaps this was why Grandma saw something in me, and she would beg me to beg him. Maybe I could be the toughest of them all, me, tiny as a thought. She wanted me to swallow his addiction whole, be his saving grace, be more important than the bourbon. Leave the bourbon on the shelf, I was supposed to say, pick us over your war-time ghosts. I'd only ask it now if I thought that he would stop and listen to an eight-year-old's desperate pleas. And he left a part of me in the ocean, in sand dollars and singing sea shells, in the mermaids' eyes that he claimed to have resembled my mother's. He left me with my own ghosts that I often dance with to the sound of Tejano and a mariachi's haunting croon. I fight to remember the goodness of my grandfather because he is still my endless Navajo summer; He flows through me, unstoppable, and unreachable, in the memory of tears.