The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide waves.

Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.

But here, in her family's home, she was river and salt and that same sea found her. She was the mouth of an ancient god who would swallow the world. She was an ocean of stories, memories, thousands of little moments that made up her whole being.

When she'd met Orquídea Montoya, she saw a whisper of a girl who wanted to become a scream.

[...] We don't talk. None of us. Why don't we ever talk? Silence is a language of its own in this family. A curse of our own making. That's the inheritance my daughter got from me, and I am very sorry.

That was the way of missing people. You wished for them, you longed for them, you forgot them. Then you wished for them again.

Orquídea met her daughter-in-law's eyes and said, "What is is like to live without rage in your heart?

You could be born into a family, but you still had to choose them.

You have to focus all of your energy on that connection every family has. It's in our bones, our blood. More than that, it's in the questions we need answered. The secrets, the traumas, and legacies that we don't know we've inherited, even if we don't want them.

Orquídea's favourite colour was the blue of twilight - just light enough that the sky no longer appeared black, but before pinks and purples bled into it. She thought that colour captured the moment the world held it's breath, and she'd been holding hers for a long time.

There were not enough words that could be spoken. They were entangled deeper than roots and always would be, and that was enough. Sometimes silence said enough.

He didn't want to hurt her the way an alcoholic didn't want another drink.

Everyone said New York City was for creatives, for artists, but that was a washed-up remnant of the past. New York wasn’t for artists anymore. It was for steel and glass and suits. It was for fifteen-million-dollar Central Park apartments that remained empty all year round, ghost homes, tax shelter homes. Artists were as common as subway rats, except subway rats had free food options. New York gutted artists, used them as food, sucking out their marrow to make the glamour stronger.

After all, belief was like glass - once broken it could be pieced back together but the fissures would always be there.

There were so many ways for a person to be gone that had nothing to do with their mortality.

All you have is each other. Protect your magic.

When she’d met Orquidea Montoya, she saw a whisper of a girl who wanted to become a scream.

Latino families just think they’re cursed because they won’t blame God or the Virgin Mary or colonization.

I belong wherever my bones will lie! Wherever my bones will lie.

How could something that had never been his leave a hunger nothing else could fill?

I spared you my birthdays. Which is why I'm asking you all to celebrate my death.

Tantinelly would never be a painter, a writer, a celebrity, a scientist. She didn't wait to be any of those things, and that was okay. Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide ways. Tantinelly might have been ordinary, but she was not weak. And she'd been saving the gift Orquídea had given her for a moment that mattered.

There were hundreds of things Marimar wanted to know. Why is this happening? Why can't we stop it? Why didn't you try to tell me sooner? Who are you? Why do this? What broke your heart so completely that it's splinters found their way through generations.

People think they know about misfortune and bad luck. But there was being unlucky-like when you tripped over your shoelaces or dropped a five-dollar bill in the subway or ran into your ex when you were wearing three-day-old sweatpants--then there was the kind of bad luck that Orquídea had. Bad luck woven into the birthmarks that dotted her shoulders and chest like constellations. Bad luck that felt like the petty vengeance of a long-forgotten god.

It was as if there was something jagged within her, a bruise that she had passed down to all of her kids, and maybe even her grandkids.

How do you fight a thing that believes it owns you? How do you fight the past? With gold leaves and salt? With silence? With new earth beneath your feet? With the bodies, the hearts of others? With hearts that are tender and bloodied but have thorns of their own. With the family that chooses you.

She’d learned how to arm her face the minute she stepped out the door because of boys and men who cast lines her way like she was another fish in that filthy Hudson they called a river. She learned New York evolved because it survived on blood. It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard. Marimar had longed to add her dreams to that song but when she tried, her voice was a whisper.

A stain in her mother’s perfect life. The bastard child left behind by a man who’d used her. Seeing her mother was like pressing on a bruise that had never healed. It had festered, rotted. It seeped down to the bone. She’d only learned to live with the pain.

Hadn’t I done the same thing to her? Pushed her away because of my own shame? I shouldn’t have left, but I did. It’s my own fault. We don’t talk. None of us. Why don’t we ever talk? Silence is a language of its own in this family. A curse of our own making. That’s the inheritance my daughter got from me, and I am so very sorry.

Why?” Rey asked. “We’re millennials. We’re desensitized and have no shame.