Esmeralda's Road

This is the first post of a series called Flashbacks. I will share some of the many standalone memories I have of growing up in LA as the child of Salvadorian immigrants. My brain has blocked out large chunks of my childhood. To keep me feeling safe, I’m sure. So what I do have is a multitude of flashbacks. Vivid images and moments with very little context and a lot of feeling. Some of them scary, some of them happy. The following is my earliest memory, the first of countless to come. Enjoy.

SCARRED

I am three. We walk into the Food 4 Less, it’s nighttime. All I know is I want a bottle of Kerns Mango nectar. In the 80s and 90s glass bottles were widely used for juice and were allowed on the very bottom shelves of grocery stores.

I step away from my mom, who must have been distracted with my 5yo sister and wanting to get in and out asap. I grab a bottle of the delicious juice nectar which is almost as big as I am.

I waddle back and am promptly told to put it back. Her tone severe, which was not unusual. She didn’t have the wherewithal to think that perhaps I’d need help with a glass bottle that size. She was 27.

Twenty SEVEN! I’m almost a decade older now and I still can’t fathom the idea of being a mom even now (despite biology saying otherwise). Anywho, I waddle back to the aisle — right around the corner from where she was. 

I distinctly remember putting it back and noticing that it was crooked.

I take it out of its little spot to straighten it and suddenly SMASH! It crashes down, juice and glass splayed across the cheap tiles of the store. The shards forming a semicircle around me, the golden liquid likening them to glaciers in a body of syrupy concentrate.

“I’ve done something wrong, something bad. I’m in trouble now.” was my very first thought. I vividly remember my mom appearing at the end of the aisle. Her face bunched up in horror. “¡Quédate ahí!” She screams, kneeling down, her hands up signifying STOP, begging me, don’t move! 

Her unmistakable terror lets me know that I am not in trouble, but definitely in danger. I hear her words, I notice her body language – STOP. But all my shocked little toddler body wanted was to run to mommy. Her shriek saying “stay right there!” is the last thing I remember as my head hits the ground.

I awake to commotion all around me, adults in a frenzy. My mom must have been panic-stricken given my much too recent brush with death, not out of the woods yet.

All these years later, an immigrant myself, I now realize she must have also been sweating bullets. Nervous that they would find out her undocumented status or worse, take me away from her. Negligent parenting they’d say. Now that I think of it, this must have been the reason we didn’t sue the store. We could have made a hefty settlement. The life of an immigrant. How many missed opportunities…

The fogginess of my head trauma, or perhaps my age, made it hard for me to understand what was going on, When I look down at my arm, propped up on a bag of ice, it’s covered in thick streaks of fresh blood oozing from two open wounds. Crimson rivers threatening to consume me. Despite the blinding fluorescent lights, everything goes dark. 

I come to one last time for just a moment, in the car. A thick sense of worry hanging in the air. I remember my sister, Vero, holding my hand in the back seat as I pass out again, knowing I am safe. 

I awake in a small, dark hospital room. Someone is working on my arm, someone else is holding my free hand keeping my attention as I try, without luck, to look at the stitching. I am promised a lollipop once we were done, if I am “a good girl.”

Even at that young age food, had that power over me, but I digress. The rest of it is all a blur. From the hospital home, from fresh stitches to two keloid scars dangerously close to several veins. Nothing.

This my friends, my earliest memory, ends knowing that I never did get that lolly.