Our Own Making

Years later, a living room erected like a colonial church altar, thousands of miles from our beginnings.
We returned to one particular shop often then, days which had a feeling of age and antiquity I
could never explain. The wood and dust breathed into me a sense that time, between those walls,
was fragmented. Imaginary. I had lived a hundred different lives and they were all happening at
once.
The box, I found on the shelf of a mahogany ceramics cabinet in a corner in the back. It was simple—a
delicate brocade of blues and greens on a grey background, it’s lid fastened down with a
little plastic button that looked almost like a fang. Inside it was covered with a silky, pearl colored
lining. Holding it was like trying to remember a dream that has just slipped from your memory. I
felt as if I had known it all my life, and yet, I wasn’t sure where that life had gone. For days I held
it to my chest like a toddler with a new plush toy, looking for something—just the right thing—
to steal away inside it. My little runaway box.
—
The small beetle was making its way along the sill of my bedroom window when I found it, its
back the pearly black that shimmers green and indigo in turns of light. My little brother, standing
beside me, reached over and nudged it with his finger to see if it was alive, and the small body
scuttled a few steps forward. I picked up a leaf and coerced the insect onto it so I could bring it
closer and stare. I then held up the little box and gently laid both the insect and leaf inside. We
named the beetle Whiskey, because we had met a dog named that once, and because the world in
English tumbled in our mouths like something sweet and a little bit foreign.
We leave in early spring.
—
By four in the morning we are awake, getting dressed quickly, tossing bags and blankets into the
trunk. In the cool morning our breaths are fog, each of us floating in a little cloud of our own
groggy exhalations. The whole garden is a cool blue at this time, draped over with a gentle notyet
light, so that the green of the trees and grasses floats tantalizingly beneath the blue haze. The
smell of rotting fruit is softer than in the afternoons, when it is buoyed by heat.
I hold the little box with my small friend in it tightly to my chest. My uncle comes around the
back of the car and hands me a rolled up quilt. Seeing what is in my hands, he reminds me to
leave the lid cracked open for air. He tells me I can sleep in the car, plants a small kiss on the top
of my head, and makes his way over to the driver’s seat. In his gait nothing gives way, in his steps
not a single sign that he is giving up an entire life. The rest of us follow and we begin to