we drove from the temple (your first time through that hushed and holy space, just days before you donned that black-and-white nametag and flew off to Buenos Aires) straight to your favorite restaurant to celebrate this happy rite of passage lime and cilantro mingled in a spicy jarana; we kept time to the clinking and clattering of dishes as we bamba-ed our way to our table and took our seats we were our own airy island, floating high above the dust of daily things and then— I slumped, and tipped into your startled sister’s lap, victim of a violent inward rupture, and I was sinking, sinking, sinking into thick, dark sludge—a brown-yellow wormhole beyond consciousness or thought too cramped for movement too dense for breath down down down as if dragged into the inky bowels of something ancient and smothering and then— like a bright-white laser splitting stone, your voice—a trumpet call. “By the authority of .