The sun dips low over Abuela's land, painting streaks of tangerine fire and molten gold across the horizon. I stand there, toes digging into the cool, earthy soil where I used to help her map ancestral stories—not with GPS or rulers, but with whispered songs and remembered pathways. Her voice—soft and scratchy like dried corn husks—echoes in my head, as if she were standing beside me instead of buried under the tejocote tree she loved so much.
"Mi corazón, nuestro idioma es una llave," she used to say. Our language is a key. Nahuatl, that beautiful, ancient tongue I only half-understood as a kid, now feels like a cracked heirloom, fragile and teetering on the edge of oblivion. My ADHD brain always scattered the words, but Abuela knew how to gather them, to make sense of the fragments.
She left me more than words, though. In my palm is a carved disc that shimmers like it's alive, veins of turquoise and inlaid gold twisting in patterns I can't quite follow. A compass, almost—except instead of N, E, W, and S, it's etched with constellations and waves and curling vines that look like the neural pathways I'd sketch in my research notebooks. I swear the vines shift when I blink, like they're trying to grow, trying to connect something larger than just lines on a page.
"This isn't for finding the earth," Abuela had told me the last time I saw her alive. Her gray eyes gleamed with something between amusement and warning. "It's for finding yourself." For finding the connections my academic mentors said were impossible—the invisible threads between memory, landscape, and consciousness.
I run my thumb over its surface, and the world spins too fast. The sky becomes a black sea littered with stars. My stomach somersaults, my knees give out—and I'm not standing on the earth anymore.
I'm crouched in the dirt, tiny against an infinite tapestry of light. Stars map endless pathways that hum in languages I don't know but feel. Rain hits my tongue. My blood vibrates with molten rock, ancient and alive. Fragments of maps I've studied—Polynesian star charts, Aboriginal songlines, my grandmother's whispered stories—all converge into a living, breathing network.
I gasp, clutching the artifact as the world rushes back into focus. The disk in my hand pulses faintly, alive in a way that feels as much a part of me as my own heartbeat—and something inside it, and inside me, has awakened. Something defying every cartographic rule I've ever learned.