A Map Is Only One Story by Nicole Chung

Author:Nicole Chung
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226790
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

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That was the beginning.

Soon, I was as familiar with his living space as I was with mine—his bare attic room on the third floor of a lopsided house. We entered one day by way of rickety back steps and one fire escape ladder. He explained how he rented this room from a friend and didn’t want to interrupt their family time on the floor below.

“How old is their little girl?” I asked.

“En español, Krystal.”

“Fine,” I said. “Cuantos años tiene su hija?”

“Cinco.”

My Spanish, good before, was now excellent because of him. He now spoke to me only in Spanish, and though my responses were sometimes shaky, we’d shifted from English almost entirely.

I stood by the window as he shrugged off his sweater and hung it inside an old wardrobe next to us. He flicked on a lamp sitting atop a broken table next to his bed and weak light pulsed around the shade. The threadbare carpet beneath my sneakers was stained. Compared to my apartment, where my parents had worked so hard to make it feel like home—my mom painting the walls, gluing decorative wallpaper, and sewing curtains; and my dad tiling the bathroom, making new cupboards for the kitchen, and running wires for new lights—Juan’s meager surroundings screamed desolation, utter loneliness. Everything I witnessed was what I felt inside.

“Who’s this?” I asked him even though I suspected it was his girlfriend. There was a picture of a woman on a CD case. Her short bleached hair was flipped out onto her shoulders. Her eyes were lidded like his but her gaze was intense, severe, her lips pressed into a line.

“Karina,” he whispered, his voice hoarse and low. The way his voice caressed her name sent a warning through me but I pushed it to the side. I didn’t want to deal with that then, not when forging a connection with someone like me was so close, just within my grasp.

In the months that followed, that attic floor became as familiar to me as my own bedroom. I lied to my boyfriend, Michael, ignored the few friends I had, saw no one but Juan and the inside of his room. They couldn’t understand the shadows I existed in, always lying, living in fear.

If I were to get caught doing anything, my family could get deported. Something as simple as supplying identification so I could get a drink in a bar required me to walk around with my passport and explain to everyone, “Sorry, lost my ID and haven’t had a chance to replace it yet,” but that could only work for so long. My friends would get a slap on the wrist, just a warning, and their families would be fine.

Juan lived with the same fears I did every day. But I never told him that. I couldn’t trust anyone with that information for fear of how they could use it against me.

Tangled in bedsheets one day, he asked me to marry him.

“Para documentos,” he clarified.

Not for love. For papers. He

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