Epilogue
Epilogue
It was almost time. The party would be starting soon, and I was hiding in my mother’s greenhouse, wanting to be anywhere but at my birthday celebration. Ignatius and I were celebrating our sixteenth birthday, and he wasn’t enthused about it either. Being around people always made me nervous. Picking up on all the different energies could be exhausting, something Abuela had been teaching me how to control.
Ines shooed me out of the kitchen, so I took refuge amongst my mother’s plants for as long as possible before it was deemed impolite not to greet our guest.
I found myself rummaging through an old large box left open on my mother’s worktable. It was filled with weathered notebooks and journals, the pages lined with poems and herbal formulas, lost memories from her girlhood.
I saw pictures of her when she was my age with Abuela and Tia Samara. Mami never talked much about her teenage years, and I knew the reason was my father. I opened a journal with a single entry dated back ten years, the year my father brought us to Monteverde. The secrets she never shared were left in her words:
I recognized you under the halo moon that night, whispering across time, through the ages.
The rites passed along in the old stories came to life.
Incensing you, hiding in my innocence, fighting the movement, a pull of the sacred current.
You refused the gods, bent the sacred laws of nature to keep me by your side, forever bound.
To feel the force of your love.
A soul unspeakable to the gods made of their own.
Bringer of death.
You laughed when I thought I could escape your world,
Would you have killed me that night?
Take my right for life like you did in the very beginning?
Rob them of a mother.
You stay in silence when my eyes well and you kiss my cheek.
As time passes, I become reacquainted with the spell, remembering the forgotten prayers.
The world fears the myth that lives in the depths of your shadow.
I hate you with deep breaths.
I love you in the exhales of midnight and the gentle touch of day.
The moon is in love, holding new life in her hands.
A light blooming in the dark.
-Dove De Los Santos