Witches by Brenda Lozano

Author:Brenda Lozano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646220694
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

12

In their first session, a psychologist explained to Leandra that the act of talking about a loss moved the event, neurologically speaking, so it no longer carried the same weight. I once read an interview with Emil Cioran where he says that when he gets angry he curses nonstop until his rage is all used up. He says that he once wrote about suicide in his newspaper column; a woman found his number and called him to say that she was suffering terribly, that she was sick of being alive and wanted to know what had kept him from killing himself. He answered that if a person could still laugh, there was no reason for suicide. I read the interview at the office one day, and it hit me that Leandra had laughed that Saturday afternoon we spent together. A little less than before, but she’d laughed. She didn’t talk about any of it directly, but she hadn’t lost her sense of humor after my father died and the incident with that piece of shit Fernando. The fact that she was laughing but not talking about any of it seemed to me like symptoms at opposite extremes, like touching a hot surface with one hand and a cold one with the other to balance out daily life, knowing that if she took her hand away from either side, the other would freeze or burn.

Sometimes I wanted to ask her how she was, how she really was, but I also wanted to respect her process. I noticed she was laughing more often. Back then, Leandra was going to therapy once a week; my mother had good benefits at her job. Leandra worked afternoons at the dentist’s office, had a photography class on Saturdays, and was finishing high school. The next time we talked about it was after it had come up naturally in a conversation and Leandra had replied, without hesitating, It was unfortunate, Zo, but not as unfortunate as being that guy, being Fernando I mean. Imagine. That’s really gotta be fucked up. The way she talked about him—and just the fact that she was talking about what had happened—made her seem stronger again. She was moving the memory. She started gaining back some of the weight she’d lost. One day, I noticed that her lips were almost red, without any lipstick, and her cheeks would flush when she was warm or laughing. One day, she put her hair up in a bun with little strands pulled free at her temples, and we chatted about nothing while she drank whole milk straight from the carton.

At the newspaper, I started spending more time with Julian, who was a year younger than me. I liked the gap between his front teeth; his hair was short and I was really into the single dreadlock that hung from the right side of his head. Sometimes he carried a skateboard in his backpack, and he almost always wore a white cotton T-shirt. He wore one, once, that had a hole near the neck and I thought that was really sexy.

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