Earth to Me

A few nights later, I was floating through space.

There was no air flushing in or out of my lungs, no wind throwing me around, and nothing to stop me from falling deeper into the galaxy.

All around me in the distance, there were a ton of them – stars. Bright, blinking, some smaller than others. There were planets in the corners of my eyes, more than I had ever seen in textbooks. The Milky Way to my left, countless constellations to my right, and below me, there was nothing except everything around me going off in every direction.

My eyes were open, but I could barely see. When I blinked, the stars went blurry and watery, so I had to refocus everything. There was no sound, not even the sound of my breathing, not even my own heartbeat.

I shouted into the vast navy-blue expanse, “Hey!”

Nothing. Not even an echo.

There was nothing to bounce my nonexistent voice off of, not even my own limbs flailing in the depths.

I panicked. With my heart racing in my too-small chest, I looked around and tried to swim somewhere safe, not realizing that the nearest planet was still light-years away, and when it dawned on me and I started crying in hopelessness, I finally felt something.

Despite my random tears dripping into space (I knew at that point that I was dreaming; I wouldn’t cry that easily in real life), I felt hands on my hands, but when I looked down, I didn’t see anything at first. I held out my arms, looking harder.

Something was happening. The soft hands I felt wrapped around my own were materializing, deep olive skin, and in a static wave, thick arms grew out.

At the shoulders, a lilac veil shifted downward into space, as if it were a dress made of planets and galaxies, and while I was looking at how it rippled with no wind, that’s when this person’s head appeared.

We were trapped in slow motion, and suddenly I moved as though I was underwater, my lungs felt like they were filled with liquid as soon as I locked eyes with her. Her deeply tanned skin was bright against the darkness, her freckles a galaxy across her face. She had big, round hazel eyes and a beautiful smile, one that contrasted the way I never showed my teeth in photos; her chocolate hair billowed out in waves that extended into the universe in the same way her dress did. She wore a crown of baby blue and yellow stars, gleaming.

The woman blinked, long eyelashes sprinkling stardust that caught my tears.

And I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t find the words to convey everything I had to say to her. She was the world to me, she was right in front of me; her hands were warm and held me close in this unpredictable universe.

“Mamá?”

I heard myself say it and it was the clearest thing I had ever heard. My voice wavered and broke, and then I had fallen to pieces.

She gathered my tears that fell from my own hazel eyes and threw them into space, and I watched as they twinkled into shooting stars, careening through time and everything that never made sense to me. Letting go of my hands, she placed her familiar palms on either side of my face, guiding me to look up at her in all of her glory. I couldn’t get any air into my lungs; it was as if I had just noticed I was in a place with no oxygen.

“Oshie,” she breathed, smiling like the crescent moon on its side, “mijo.”

Brushing the wild hair out of my face, she leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my forehead. And I closed my eyes, cherishing the moment, savoring the fact that I hadn’t seen this woman since I was four years old in a hospital room, sitting next to my sobbing dad who held her hand all through the pain, while I misunderstood everything and carried a weight on my chest for the rest of my life.

But she let go, and she swept her hands from my face, moving them down my arms and back to my hands again before a nonexistent gravity pulled her away from me.

My eyes wide, I gawked and held her tighter, the first contact I had with her in years – I couldn’t let her go like that. “Mom! Mamá!”

She just smiled as if she knew something I didn’t.

“Don’t leave me!”

“I will never leave you, mi cariño,” she said, her voice bouncing off of every star, every planet.

She dissolved. Her face scattered into a trillion tiny pieces and disappeared into the nothingness, her hands stopped holding mine when they dissipated. Her hair and gown wavered in a solar wind before finding their way back into the void.

I didn’t have time to scream again before I was ripped out of my slumber.

My eyes were wrenched shut when the sound of my own crying faded away. Somebody was calling my name – but it wasn’t in the Mexican accent my mother always had, it was a raspy panicked Chicago accent belonging to my best friend.

Tegan hovered over me when I opened my eyes and tried to blink away the sleep paralysis. Her blue eyes were wide open, her tiny hands on my arms, kneeled over me.

Suddenly, everything came back to me. It was the first Friday of the school year after a few nights of nightmares, and Murray had gone home for the weekend, leaving Tegan to watch me while I slept. Tegan, though, fell asleep with me, our backs to each other in my little bed.

As it all played through my head again, I caught my breath, gasping like a fish out of water.

“Oshie, you’re alright! You’re good, you’re good, I got you,” she gasped, her face softening upon realizing that I was, in fact, alive. She squeezed my hands. “Don’t worry, you’re alive, buddy. I got you.”

When my breathing had slowed down, I took a deep one, feeling my throat tremble.

“I saw my mom,” I simply said.

Tegan froze. Her face went blank for a good ten seconds before she tilted her head and whimpered, “Your mom?”

I nodded, and the way her entire demeanor softened was enough to break me down into a million tiny pieces and disperse into the stars. I cried like a baby again, sobbing so hard that I coughed, miles worse than what I did in the dream, and she quickly had her arms around me again.

“Shh,” she whispered, her own voice trembling, “you’re alright. I’ve got you.”

“It wasn’t a nightmare this time,” I choked out, the words chopped into pieces from my cracking voice. “I don’t know what it was. But it wasn’t a nightmare. It was the first time I haven’t had a nightmare in months.”

Tegan was quiet and leaned her head against my shoulder. With her arms around my stomach, I felt like a toddler again, thrown into something I could never control.

“Your first actual dream, and you see your mom in it?” she asked, so softly I almost didn’t hear her.

I gulped down some mucus and nodded, chewing on my lip.

She idly rubbed her thumb back and forth under my ribcage. “Have you seen her in your dreams before?”

“Y-yeah,” I sobbed, “but not in months. And I never directly talked to her.” Dreams about my mom were pretty common, at least when I was younger. Ask anybody who ever lost someone close to them – that sort of thing happens all the time. “She…she talked to me. She kissed me, she called me ‘mi cariño’ and I can hardly even remember her saying that when I was little, but Dad always says she called me that.”

I didn’t realize Tegan was crying until I looked up and saw her face all red and scrunched up. I had to do a double-take, but she was definitely crying – she wiped her eyes with the shoulder of my t-shirt, sniffling.

“Tegan, don’t cry,” I said feebly.

She didn’t say a word; she just shook her head.

“If you cry, I’m gonna cry even more,” I tried to laugh. Instead, I just sobbed once more, digging myself into a deeper hole.

Burying her face into the crook of my neck, she held onto me, and I did the same to her. We were no strangers to cuddling, especially on cold movie nights, but this time there were too many differences to list. Tegan was my rock. She was the only thing I had to remind me of home every single day and almost every single moment of my life in college, the constant I had ever since we were in diapers.

She saw me lose my mom, though I was barely sentient when her dad left their family. She was at my mother’s funeral, where I couldn’t stop crying mostly because my dad kept crying, where countless family members wavered in and out of my life to give their condolences. She put up a lemonade stand at the edge of her driveway a month after my mom died, and in a weekend she had made twenty dollars.

She donated the money to brain cancer research.

And years later in fifth grade when some bully told me to “hop the border back to Mexico,” she planted her feet on the ground and beat the living snot out of that kid. When I got braces in sixth grade and someone made a remark about me finally being able to lose weight because of it, she socked them in the eye, even if she got suspended for a day because of it. When she was harassed in junior high because she had came out as a lesbian, I would find the foulest words in my vocabulary to stick up for the person I held closest to my heart.

So maybe that’s why she was crying so hard while simultaneously trying to calm me down, and maybe that was why I did the same to her, all the while sobbing about my weird dream.

Her breathing went back to normal long before mine did, and she pulled her head back up, looking me in the misty eyes yet again.

“I dunno what this dream means, but I don’t think it’s something we can brush off,” she spoke lowly. “It was bad enough knowing you had to sit through those nightmares and screw with the electricity in the building. Now you’re causing power surges and having fucked-up dreams.”

I don’t know what it was in that sentence that made me smile, but for some reason, I had to.

She hugged me tightly once again and sighed in my ear, warm air flushing over my chilled skin. “If this happens again, please tell me, Oshie. And if it happens when I’m not around, tell Murray, okay?”

I’m sure she felt my muscles go stiff when she mentioned him. Murray didn’t know anything about my mom, and that wasn’t something I could just casually bring up.

“Murray’s not gonna pity you or berate you over something like that. Just be honest with him if it happens,” she said. “You told him about your other nightmares. If these get out of hand, he’ll find out eventually. And he cares way too much about you to get his balls twisted over it.”

I tried to laugh, but I couldn’t. My hands were shaking and tears were still falling, even if Tegan was gently wiping them away with her index finger.

“I know I’ve said this more times in the past year than I ever have to you in our whole lives,” she murmured, “but I love you, Oshie. You’re so important to me. We grew up and you made sure I was comfortable all throughout school, even if some people made it hard on us. I wanna make sure you’re safe and happy.”

I couldn’t have been any warmer on the inside if somebody was roasting my intestines on an open fire.

“And I’ll always be here, okay? I’m literally right down the hall, just like how I was right next door to you. Shit, Osh, I’ll sleep here every night if it makes you comfortable.” She kept on staring into my eyes, her voice strong. “I forgot how hard it was to watch you cry at your mom’s funeral like that, and…now it’s all coming back to me.”

My face crumpled and I just nuzzled my face into her shoulder.

We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the night after that. I fell asleep with her arms around my waist, my hand on hers, and there was nothing behind my eyelids, no dreams, no nightmares, no space. Just a blackout sleep that I desperately needed after months of chasing sleep away in fear of negativity.