Snapshots of a Past By Clara Oropeza

In the dream, you are a passenger inside a car that turns right onto the sleepy cul-de-sac of Bierenberg Place. On the left, you recognize the two-story brick house that sits behind a low-picket wooden fence against the backdrop of green hedges filled with bird feeders. With conviction and a sense of urgency, you walk up to the front door, ring the doorbell. You hear it vibrate through the closed windows. A few seconds later, you hear the click of a door unlatching. 

***

You spent the decades of your twenties and thirties visiting her at this home while married to her son. Then you both decided to move back to Los Angeles to pursue graduate school: him in architecture, you in literature. Six years later, he let you know that his vision of the relationship diverged from yours. Only silence had pervaded over the void left when he first moved out of the bungalow you shared on Jackson Street. The burden of packing the belongings that the two of you had accumulated in your fourteen years together fell on you since he was already gone. Left behind were the previous day’s white dress shirt on the unmade bed, his grandfather’s gold watch on the nightstand, and an open Architecture magazine on the Eames coffee table. 

The one item you placed with the most intentionality into a cardboard box, with large back letters bearing his name, was the oversized white linen-covered album filled with wedding photos of both ceremonies (one in Brussels and one in Tucson). Each photo contained a memory like a strand, weaving together remnants of a life that no longer existed. The mere possession of the album sent sharp pain through the cells in your body. You left him the album. Not much time would pass before deep regret over this decision permeated your bones and hovered there for years. 

Then, one day, in a frivolous mood you opened an email, not realizing it was from a probate lawyer in Los Angeles, informing you of his death. You were asked to sign off on the car on whose title your name was still printed. You learned that he took his own life on the date that would have been your ten year wedding anniversary. You had managed to grieve for him once, following the divorce, and nearly four years later, you were grieving him for a second time anew because now he had surrendered himself to the sea. 

***

It had been eighteen years since your feet had last stood on Belgian soil, yet there you were, visiting your ex-mother-in-law in the brick house that sits on the sleepy cul-de-sac on Bierenberg Place. Alongside your new husband, you are ready to face the sharp-pointed emptiness that once overwhelmed you. The three of you sat around a white metal garden table, under a blue and white floral umbrella, providing unequal shade over the three of you. She wore a red and white striped blouse with no jewelry, her straight hair just shy of shoulder length. Her smile, soft.

You exchanged pleasantries not quite as strangers but like two women who had loved one another for decades and were now bonded by his tragic death. You warmly monitored each other’s utterances and the tone of each word. She asked if you were still teaching, you asked about family and friends. 

Somewhere between catching up and bites of Le Roulé, she posed a statement followed by a question: “I have something that belongs to you. Would you both like to see it?” You both nodded yes, and as if to reassure her – and yourselves – you both vocalized your desire to see it. 

“It was sent to me along with some of his other things when he died,” was the explanation for how it had come to be in her possession. She delivered to your lap, bearing the weight of a fragile infant, the white linen-covered photo album that you had left him in the cardboard box eighteen years earlier. 

In the photographs, you see your 29-year-old self, brave, beautiful and unafraid to dream and to create the life that you cherished with him. There, in the gaze of your vivid brown eyes and his bright smile, you found a meticulous light that shined on your past, making the haunting darkness no longer possible.  In that moment, you found the capacity to hold the paradoxes of having once been in love with a beautiful man whom you would come to grieve twice: true was your joy, true was your sorrow. True was also the relief that you had accessed the past while living fully in the beauty of the present. 

And in this manner, talking about the losses and gifts of life, the glow of the afternoon sun arched across the summer Belgian sky until the time came to drive away from Bierenberg Place. 

Clara Oropeza is a Latina writer and educator. She is the author of Anais Nin: A Myth of Her Own.