A History of Smoking

I miss when a visit to Tita Min’s house involved me holding a pretzel stick to my lips, mimicking my aunt, so confident and composed over her San Miguel ashtray. I miss smelling fish oil in her kitchen and watching The Filipino Channel in her living room. I miss cigarette smoke graying her home’s air, somehow amplifying the Tagalog from the TV, which my cousin Jon Jon would translate, like a secret, into my ear.

After Jon Jon died, Tita Min stopped smoking. She never made an announcement or offered an explanation. My mother didn’t discuss it either. I wondered if Tita Min had lost her taste for cigarettes or if that TV ad of the woman with a hole in her throat scared her too. I even wondered if it was a phase, some less-known stage of grief that would pass, and I’d return to Sacramento from college in Arizona, Tagalog amplified again in that haze.

Yet here I am, at Tita Min’s, one month since moving back after graduation, and her home is still haze-free. She sleeps in her recliner, her right pant leg bulging from the catheter bag underneath. On her couch, I thumb a pamphlet I took today from the surgery waiting area. A history of smoking, one page reads, is a leading cause of urothelial carcinoma. Tita Min’s breaths deepen, become more labored. I close my eyes to her TV’s black screen and try to feel Jon Jon’s translations in my ear. Instead I smell the disinfectant at the hospital earlier. I see again the text from my mother, out of town and panicked—Your Tita Min’s in Emergency. And I hear those smokeless years—when time lengthened between my visits, when cancer grew inside my aunt—all now, in Tita Min’s labored breaths. 

Hit-and-Run

Like a brick against a basketball rim, the loud thump was followed by quiet. Then a neighbor screamed, and the truck screeched away, confirming Jon Jon—and his basketball—didn’t make it across the street.

Like a pin to the floor, Jon Jon lay, face down, on the asphalt. I watched across the block in disbelief and pleaded for him to get up, repeating what he commanded whenever he pressed my face into the carpet: “Tap out, cuz.”

Like a taunt in Tagalog, no one had to translate for me. I knew that, if I had agreed to join Jon Jon for one-on-one in the park, instead of crying when he called my games of make-believe “for sissies,” I wouldn’t have had to rush after him and see the truck reach him first.

Like a nightmare on repeat, Jon Jon haunted Tita Min’s dreams. She phoned my mother in the morning for months, shouting that the truck driver had actually kidnapped her son, or her son had only run off and gotten lost, or her son was awake in his casket and almost out of air.

Like a magdarame during Holy Week, the pain was Tita Min’s penance. She attended Mass every day, fasted outside of Lent, and always clenched a rosary, as if ready to lash the beads across her back because Jon Jon’s death was somehow her sin.

Like an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, there was no explanation, goodbye, or closure. There was only a gap, a wait, a silence.

Like a hit-and-run, that silence would break whenever I visited Tita Min’s for Christmas or Easter. She’d shout her dreams again, as if my presence, my existence, reminded her of Jon Jon’s absence. Then I’d screech away.

Monsoon Season

As a boy, I used to wrap myself in Tita Min’s curtains. I’d wind around and around in the sheer fabric, pretending I was an ancient ruler mummified in an underground tomb. Once, when I unfurled and my mummy reanimated to stalk the night, I found Jon Jon sitting on the front room sofa, sneakers on and ready for the front yard or park. Before I could re-wind, shielding myself from judgement, he rolled his eyes and asked why I still played these imaginary games. “Come on, cuz,” he said. “Grow up.”

When he grew up, Jon Jon said, he wanted to live in a place where it never rained. He’d say this on those long, winter days in Sacramento that were too wet to go outside. He’d look out, not so much at the falling water as through it, like he could see the desert—the sun, sand, and cacti. When I applied for college, I wanted to be a grown-up. I only considered schools in the Southwest, far—I thought—from my youth, from those days of rain-dreaming and make-believe.

My first monsoon season in Arizona I went on a date with a third-year student. He had an internship in an earth-science lab and his own car. He drove me up to a nearby mesa, promising a view I’d never get in California. Atop the flat summit, he pointed to a storm in the distance. A sheet of rain—a microburst, he called it—dragged across the desert floor. As the torrent of wind and water approached us, I drew close to his side, and he placed his arm around my shoulders. He seemed to grow taller, proud of his descriptions of squall lines and downdrafts, while I felt smaller, turning toward him, away from the sheer form, stalking out of my past.