My mother knew I could recite every book on the shelf. Why she tirelessly consented to my pleas for a bedtime reading, I know not. Every night she would sit cross-legged against the foot of my bed. As she read, she would jump lines and insert impromptu words here and there. She twisted and knotted the storyline in this way until it became an indistinguishable spider-web, with no conspicuous beginning or end.  I would not be fooled but would instead interrupt and recite it as it was. And all this because I could never quite forget a story; words would tumble down my throat and then drop, like a wishing coin in a fountain, at the bottom of my stomach. I would store these copper words forever. For me, they had been wishes and life had been their fountain.

How things have changed since then, I thought sullenly, sitting on an icy, hard, wooden chair in front of an overdue Christmas tree. It was yet another December 31st. I had not experienced many since the year of my reminiscence’s occurrence. But such a short time had been enough for me to discover that words and pennies were of greater worth when they remained in your pocket. After all, life was neither a wishing fountain nor a storybook.
You should be celebrating, my inner voice snapped, infuriated by such pathetic contemplations.
Why? I challenged; Because another year has come to take me further from who I once was?
I endeavoured to stop this useless cynicism and to celebrate. I wanted to be enveloped by the New Year jolliness. I did. I so desperately did. But no excitement filled me at the prospect of alienating myself from my childhood even further. The knowledge that, because I was only a child, these gloomy sentiments were not expected of me only accentuated them. Why was I so incapable of feeling as I should?
In the kitchen, my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother fretted like mice in a maze. Heat radiated from the stove, the oven, and the microwave. White noise, the clanking of silverware, the crunching of vegetables under a knife, voices losing their sobriety, and more white noise until I lost the ability to think.
“Come on!”
I looked up to find my father holding a box of estrellitas. He grinned, somehow looking more juvenile than I felt, and handed me an unlit sparkler from the box. I expanded my lips and urged my eyes to play along. With that painful smile sewn on my face, I walked with him outside, where my brothers threw cebollitas at the adult’s feet and watched them pop with a mischievous satisfaction. I watched, hearing the same unwanted sentence replay incessantly from within my skull.
Where had the year gone?

“They say,” my aunt leaned forward towards the bed, her voice projecting with indiscrete factuality; “that when they curl their fingers in such a manner...it’s a sign of approaching death…”
My great-grandmother was beyond the capability of making sense of her entourage. Thus with just as much impertinence, all ten people in the room focused their eyes on her hands. They were the claws of a raven. A sombre silence followed. Beyond it, I could hear the commotion of the New Year festivities and my brothers’ shouts. My great-grandmother’s complacent face seemed more suited to them than to that tomb-like room. Her contentedness was rather out of place here. I wondered if, like me, she had struggled to feel the right things.
“Do you remember,” my mother interrupted softly, placing her hand around my shoulder; “when we used to visit her in her home, in the outskirts of Barinas?”
I nodded. Perhaps a brief flash of green grass in front of a white house constituted as remembering.
“She used to drive a candy cart in her free time. Whenever we went she’d have the pink and white striped box on wheels displayed outside. You’d want all the sweets. She could never quite say no to you…”
“Yeah,” I replied slowly, dragging the words; “I loved going.”
She smiled and squeezed my hand. My heart was suffocated by her grasp.
“I’ll miss her,” I reassured her.
I will, I promised myself.  I should.

The next day, the room smelled of hospital, that strange blend of hand sanitizer and warm last breaths. I was not allowed to go inside. My parents did not want me to see a corpse, reasoning that I was too young for such a thing. Regardless of this, I had entered the prohibited room and found, laid on the bed, nothing more than my great-grandmother’s body, as skeletal as when she was alive. I felt no disgust, no dismay, just the texture of her translucent skin as I held her hand in mine. I felt terrible for not feeling terrible.
You should be grieving, my mind insisted.
Why? Because your mother is, because your grandmother is? Because you would feel guilty if you didn’t? Another voice replied, exasperated by such undesirable emotions.
That’s not mourning.
While these conflicting thoughts battled inside me, the emotion I had to suppress grew just when I needed it the least. I felt like I had committed a mortal sin when I left the hollow woman’s room with a sensation dangerously close to ambivalence.
Meanwhile, relatives that had never visited my great-grandmother during her lifetime flooded through the living room door. My grandmother ushered them in with a handkerchief pressed to her face, as if to stop the gushing of an open wound. On the sofa, my father was stroking my mother’s hair. Her tears stained the collar of his polo shirt. My brothers were in their room, watching a movie as my mother had ordered. No one had told me what to do. I retreated to the margins of the scene.
You did not know her, said an inner voice forgivingly; you were too young.
You’re only consoling yourself, was my own despotic response.
I was lucky to find that, when my mother came up to hug me, tears could be called on demand. However, my sentiments were deaf and I continued calling for the right ones in vain.

I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, when my father entered the room. He had noted my comportment in the living room. He sat at the edge of the bed, worried. I held my breath, guilty. Ashamed.
“Are you alright?” He asked quietly.
There was only silence.
“You’re not,” he replied soothingly; “none of us are. Your great-grandmother was special to everyone.”
“She was...but it’s not because of her that I’m not alright,” I murmured, wishing that I was lying.
“Then, what is wrong?”
“Exactly that.”
He mused over this, as if my emotions were comprised of pluses and minuses and the solution to my problem was to be found after an equal sign.
“When you were about 5 years old,” he shook his head, laughing at the sudden memory; “you ran up to me, when I was brooding over the car engine. You crossed the road unattended, which caused me great distress. You were sobbing, so I didn’t reprimand you. I looked up and saw that the collar of your little dress was soaked in tears. Your pigtails were coming undone. You said daddy twice after I had answered the first time. Yet you still wouldn’t explain what was wrong.”
I remembered.
“Finally, you told me, with such austerity that you seemed twice your age, that there was something you had to confess. Almost sweetly, you whispered that you did not love me at all. And how you cried, apologizing interminably for not being able to change that. Do you remember what I told you?
“You chuckled, as if I’d said the contrary,” I smiled; “then you explained that the fact that I felt guilty for not loving you was almost the same as doing so. I didn’t understand you. Why weren’t you moved by what I’d said?”
“It’s the same thing that’s happening now. You feel guilty because you don’t think you were affected enough by your great-grandmother’s death.”
I nodded, already knowing what he was about to say.
“And you think,” I continued; “that feeling guilty makes my mild indifference forgivable?”
“We can’t control what we feel. When you said you didn’t love me you wanted to be able to say otherwise. You might have read your emotions incorrectly or gotten confused. After all, you loved me enough to suffer and feel guilt for me. And yes, that does make a difference.”
It was simple, ridiculously so. A negative for carelessness, a positive for guilt, and I was left with neither. My conflicted emotions slashed their swords one last time before cancelling each other out.