In my earliest memory, I am falling. The last of the afternoon light is nothing but a whisper as dusk makes her provocative entrance—a lingering tease before the dark comes all at once.

I am three years old, playing where I shouldn’t. My brother pulls me from the dirt, and we follow the path trodden with our doll-like footprints back home. My face is wet where I press my fingers. Water is coming out of my head, I say, believing it.

It isn’t until we reach the front door, and I see the panicked expression on my father’s face—eyes wild as twin monsoons, mouth a jagged O—that I taste blood.

Things don’t hit me when they’re supposed to. That has always been my truth.

I know this as I watch my grandfather die on a couch in a one-bedroom apartment. I’m twenty years old and understanding why people talk about things like the ends of eras. He hasn’t yet settled into this strange new home, signature fresh on the deed of the family house he sold. Too many cords swarm his bent body. A faded photograph of my teenaged grandmother sits on the table beside him. I hold his socked feet as he takes his last breaths. They’re like two misshapen hot water bottles—feet that don’t look like feet, I think.

It isn’t until later that the bottom drops out and my grief unspools, always the slow bleed. That’s when I find myself back in that living room. I suppose in some ways I’ve never left.

I am both here and there. No where.

My sister tells me they put quarters on our maternal grandfathers’ eyelids the day he dies. She is six and I am eight. For years, I have visions of undertakers from some phantom funeral home wielding cold, heavy coins. I later learn it’s done out of superstition—to bestow wealth in the afterlife. When I think of my grandfather, I see hands, mottled and smooth like the rocks we find as kids playing in the field. I see teeth in a glass of filmy water. Towers of presents wrapped in newspaper. A stash of peppermint candy stowed away in a drawer, reserved for the grandkids.

My mother weeps on a chair in the kitchen for a long time after he’s gone.

When I am very young, I think that eventually my brother and I will trade places with our parents. We’ll become the adults and they’ll be our babies, and we’ll continue switching that way in a never-ending loop. Life is like that, when you think about it.

When I am a little older, I cry knowing that one day my parents will grow old. I am haunted by the image of them snowy-haired, tending to folds of papery skin.

Call home sits unchecked at the top of my to-do list.

I keep seeing the desert. It’s in the red on women’s necks and fingers like sand rubies, the knuckled shapes I trace against steamed glass, the terra -cotta streaks flying wild outside the window, the framed saguaro hanging crooked on the wall, the sun melting in your eyes.

Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m feeling too much or nothing at all.

Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you, says Peter. I try to be that for the ones I love. Make me a receptacle for your sadness. Fill me up.

There’s an art to that kind of misery.

When I’m a little girl, the crescent moon in the night sky reminds me of my father’s thumbnail. It makes me feel safe, protected. Against reason, I never quite grow out of this.

I’m sixteen when I wake one bright morning to find my father sitting at the foot of my bed. He tells me his sister is gone.

They say she was found slumped over the kitchen sink. When I am very little, the cut on my forehead still smarting pink, my aunt makes me gooey scrambled eggs in a sunlit kitchen. The eggs are speckled things that her hens lay in the backyard coop. She tells me the cat-like wails echoing in the hills behind my grandparents’ house are coming from a band of peacocks.

He calls me her name for awhile after she’s gone. It’s me, Dad, I tell him. He looks at me strangely until recognition seeps in, as if waking up.

It’s a school day when I hear my grandmother has passed away.

I don’t think this until many years later. But here it is. My grandmother is that house—the one Grandpa sells after she dies, not long before he moves into the one-bedroom apartment. She is the nicotine-stained walls holding the rumored whispers of ghosts; the grand piano laden with aging family photographs; the tiny locked door at the foot of a staircase; the worn burgundy novels shelved in the living room. In the fields out back, I imagine the peacocks still meow.

Somewhere in time, my grandmother remains in bed, emptying glass after glass to her lips.

In ancient times, they see peacocks, with their iridescent flash of feather, as a symbol of immortality. Some believe their flesh does not decay. Others recognize a deathlessness in the shedding and renewal of feathers following each mating season.

For others still, it is the eyespots. Greek myth holds that Argus Panoptes, a hundred-eyed giant, dies as a loyal watchman of goddess Hera. One version of the story is that she immortalizes his all-seeing gaze as adornment in the peacock’s feathered train. Imagine such everlasting protection.

Now and then I think I’m doing well, like it is before my head gets sick. It’s gentle at first. A familiar tug, a tap on the shoulder, someone I should know but don’t recognize, or lyrics I once knew by heart but somehow forgot. The violent swell hits me before I realize, that cursed delay, and again I’m falling. It gets harder every time, takes everything in me, but sputtering for air, I somehow rise again. I fear sometimes that part of me will take over for good. Other times I will it to.

What is it to be homesick for a time and place you’ve never experienced?

When I’m a young adult, the sting of ethanol is the cure. I want to drown in it, let it obliterate everything that makes me me. Let the liquid seep into my pores and pickle my insides. I do a pretty good job of it. I become someone else—someone buoyant, gutsy. I curse, I fall, I slur, I scream. What a way to die, I think. And yet somehow the next day I always come to.

After, there are stains on my clothes and shoes. Raw from the bite of sobriety, I wash them carefully, watch as murky water drips and pools in the drain. I long to do the same to my life: to cleanse, rinse, and polish myself until I am shiny and new all over again, before being placed on a shelf for picking.

Part of a line I once read has always stuck with me, something about how no one is just one thing. I tell myself this to gray wash my black-and-white view of the world, the heart of which is just a rejection of the multiplicity in me.

The truth is I am so much more than one thing. I am too many.

The year my mother receives a terminal diagnosis is the year my daughter is born. The year I am acutely aware of firsts, and of lasts.

The cancer has metastasized from her colon to her ovaries, webbing through her abdomen like a sick constellation. It’s the same fate her mother succumbs to decades before I am born.

As my pregnancy and her illness progress, we begin to mirror one another in a perverse sort of way. We speak on the phone regularly, giving one another updates. It’s the cool season in Arizona, she tells me. The baby is the size of a squash, I say. The weight of the tumor is like carrying ten-pound twins, the oncologist says.

It isn’t the moment my mother is in the hospital bed that I break. Always later.

My daughter is born around the time the chemo kicks in. Our swollen bellies vanish. Months into postpartum, as my hair begins to gather in nests in the shower drain, my mother dons a headscarf.

The echoes of those who came before are undeniable in my daughter. Mom’s profile in the sonogram, Dad in the brightness of her eyes. My in-laws in the curve of lip and chin. My husband in the fan of lashes against her cheek. The flash of me in her knitted brows. She is at once both herself and all of us.

I think of the way beings are born and reborn, of the perpetual rebirth of peacock feathers.

After my mother is gone, it’s my daughter who catches my tears.

I become too aware of time passing, like images ticking recklessly on a projector. I can’t stop it. I fight it anyway. I fixate on passing phases and changing seasons, reach for moments and golden leaves that crumble in my fingers.

In the thick of motherhood, most days I find myself rising before the sun to steal a few moments of peace. It reminds me of waking up afraid in the wee hours as a child, my fear melting to relief when I realize Mom is awake like a guardian in the next room while the rest of us sleep, tinkering around in solitude between slow sips of coffee.

I sometimes wish I could go back and meet her there, if only for a moment of companionable silence between two mothers.

When I return to my first memory—nightfall closing in, dazed by the metallic stink of blood, my brother’s hand clasped in mine as he leads me home—I think I see the genesis of my truth. Maybe it’s a gift I craft then for my future self. Maybe it’s an ancestral wisdom that comes from deep within my spirit, from a time before me. Not a curse, but a mercy.

Maybe I turn my little head up to the sky, thanking the watchful stars that stare down like so many unblinking eyes.