The Orientation of Cells and Tissues

I.

In a dark room, breasts aching, I study my scans as I might study poetry. I search for a willow of understanding: one small coil of wood that I can use to commence the act of weaving thought into something strong enough to hold me—to hold the anxious tides flooding me. I’m seeking epiphany. I’m seeking answers to this tremoring replacing my heart’s beat. 

The radiologist tells me I have dense breast tissue. A trait, he guesses, inherited from my mother. A trait I know she inherited from hers. I’m fidgeting in a pink gown, naked body beneath. I draw the gown tightly around my body: he’s literally viewing the willows inside me, things even I don’t understand. He recommends a risk assessment, genetic testing. He mentions how much better the imaging is at cancer centers. As he talks, the images of my breasts become nebulous. I’m looking at clouds and mist, frantically searching and simultaneously fearing dark voids: the mysteries of my maternal lineage. Could this be our only legacy? 


II. 

On a summer evening before my mom’s cancer metastasized, three generations of women danced in her living room. My daughters shrieked and mouthed lyrics they didn’t know. My mom stood in place, bouncing to the rhythm. I don’t remember why we danced, but I remember a lightness. I remember the brevity of loving one’s body. My two daughters had yet to grow into their bodies, but they shuffled their feet and shook their hips. I felt their giggles rush into me. Four hearts thrummed to the same baseline. 

And then my mom fell. 

Mom! With my shriek, my daughters ceased movement, awaiting my next move. My throat burned; my hands shook. She laughed as I slung her arm around my shoulders and helped her stand. She spoke, but I was entrapped in a state of fracture. 

Mom! Memory reverberated through my body. I was a child, screaming as my father’s fists crashed into my mom. I was watching her collapse to the ground over and over and over. 

Ruthless tides razed my body. I could feel the willows I’d tried to forget unfurling, multiplying. Why is memory so heavy?

A therapist once told me that my mom’s trauma can dwell in my body, my trauma in my daughters’ bodies. This scares the hell out of me.


III.  

Seismic waves are energy, energy commencing with suddenness. Whether a slip in a fault line or an abrupt motion, it’s a relationship between suddenness and the consequential strain—a strain that leads to fissures, or, in some cases, complete destruction. There are perceptible signs before an earthquake—foreshocks warning of the larger tremor—but it’s the wave itself that damages. The greatest damage occurs closest to the hypocenter, or the place where the earthquake started. In seismology, the term displacement is used to describe the damage: the difference between how the earth’s surface rested before and how it remained after the tremors. 

There are four different types of seismic waves broken into two categories: body waves and surface waves. P-waves, which are body waves, usually arrive first, tugging and pushing at the earth, followed by S-waves that rattle the earth’s materials back and forth. Surface waves come next and cause the most damage: the Rayleigh wave and the Love wave. Rayleigh waves undulate and ripple; Love-waves, named after the seismologist A.E.H. Love, move side-to-side like a snake, creating enough damage to devastate a structure.

The first time I articulated my obsession with seismic waves, I was co-facilitating an online workshop on the power of story in the classroom. I had developed a hyperawareness during the pandemic, unsheathing hypocenter after hypocenter with little time to write about my discoveries. After posting about seismology—about energy and light and bodies—feelings of ineptness curdled inside me. How could I share the innerworkings of my willows, offering subtle allusions to the anxiety and anger that I have tried to swallow whole and digest into nonexistence?


IV. 

When my daughters were little, I would kiss their tears away. Cantaloupe, I would say, or watermelon, or pears, maybe lavender or mangoes or strawberries and sun. By the time I finished listing the flavors of tears, both girls would be smiling, deep-belly giggles replacing their sorrow. For my second born, tear-tasting became ritual. On nights when her dreams cleaved through the grains of her security, I would whisper moonlit jasmine and the pained craters would soften—lips pursed, corners twitching upward. One more kiss and I would whisper butterfly pie. Her eyes would widen with shock at how quickly her mood changed. She would pretend to take a bite out of my cheek and swoosh it back and forth in her mouth: Pizza! Cookies! 

Other times, when the dreams clawed into her marrow, she would say, Take my tears, mommy, and I would lean close, catching her tears with my lashes. 

Mommy’s tears, she would choke before curling her body into mine. She seemed confident that in taking her tears, I could understand the very source from which they sprang. 

Just the other day, my daughter, now a young woman, reminded me of our ritual of tears. She held a paper with her diagnosis code: F41.9: Anxiety disorder, unspecified. 

I don’t like the word “disorder.” Makes me sound really messed up, right? There’s something about witnessing one’s daughter contemplate her fissures before you—the fault lines, the point of breakage. Of course, there’s the need to protect, but there’s also an innate instinct—like stumbling upon an animal in her natural habitat. You want to observe—to witness—and, when your DNA courses through her veins, to reflect on what you have passed on to her as she navigates the pain. Instead of responding, I closed my eyes, envisioned myself leaning forward, capturing the code in my lashes, allowing it to absorb into time—a time when anxiety was a tremor that only displaced the infrastructures of my body.

And yet, just as my mom passed dense breast tissue on to me, I have somehow allowed this irrepressible wave that is anxiety to travel from my body to hers. I think about nights I felt sure that my anxiety could slice me open, expose my lungs, tighten her grip around my heart. I think about the fear in my husband’s eyes as he reminded me to breathe. I may not know my daughter’s anxiety, but I know a creature of my own.  

I wish that love could be netted, only allowing warmth and goodness to flow into our daughters’ vulnerable hearts. I have spent my daughters’ entire lives sifting through the murky waters of my existence, trying to pick and choose the qualities and lessons I hope they adopt. There are few traits I hope they inherit.


V. 

While an earthquake technically only has one magnitude, the different intensities of each wave vary. Like the vibrations of these willows inside me, seismic waves are not always destructive. Yet there’s that one tremor, its vibrations stronger and its undulations more erratic than all the rest. 

Earthquake preparedness teams remind us that we cannot stop earthquakes, but we can be ready for them. When it comes to this body, I disagree.  

I started thinking about the relationship between my body and the vibrations of this earth—of motherhood and womanhood and human existence—about two years ago. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would close my eyes and envision a seismograph, much like a heart rate monitor, displaying the erratic tremors in me. I thought about childhood, my mom teaching me about energy. 

She taught me that we are all connected through energy, yet most of us are too entangled in our own minds to foster connections with others. She taught me how to channel light—to understand all living creatures—before they speak or act. I learned how to witness, to close my eyes and discern it like a seismic wave undulating through the earth. We all witness differently. My mother explained that some people can identify the color, shape, or even taste of energy. Most times, for me, it’s inexplicable: a tiny sensation, an intuition. I briefly know a splinter of a heart. And hearts change; we are constantly changing. 

My mom could absorb someone’s energy to relieve tension and pain. She could detect the origin, release the negative. Sometimes my phone would ring, my mother on the other end, already aware that I was upset before I could speak. 

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Healing—absorbing someone’s energy whether purposefully or accidentally—can hurt. To this day, I will massage my husband or daughters only to carry their heaviness in my body for days. My shoulders ache, my arms pulse with lightning strikes—bursts of unpredictable force with no place to stabilize.

When anxiety returns or stress corrodes my mind and heart, I cannot detect anyone’s energy, not even my own. I become numb.

Sometimes, in my dreams, my mom is a seismic wave vibrating through my body—my daughters’ surfaces—displacing heartwood with sinew.


VI.

I once had a boxing coach that told me real power does not come from upper body muscles or even our core; instead, the power is in the movement of our feet. If a boxer is agile and remains in motion, she is harder to defeat. If we plant our feet too long, even for a moment of hesitance, we become vulnerable. We become weak. If we are especially observant, we can sense our opponent’s next move based on the movements we feel with our feet—we absorb their vibrations and anticipate a blow before it’s delivered.

  I hated this advice. My feet have never been quick; they’re no match for the tremors in this heart, constantly writhing to a rhythm that echoes so many histories of me that I found myself in the ring—willowy thoughts attempting to join without a coil of origin for them to cling—only to be knocked down by someone with quicker feet and a steadier mind. Boxing is not like fist fighting. Fist fighting is primal: adrenaline and stomach acid and mottled reality. Boxing requires skill, patience, resolve. I was a girl that just wanted to punch and claw at others. I wanted to hurt someone to get the hurt out of me. I wanted to unhinge my jaws and release the raging waves in me like locusts. I didn’t want another lesson on energy.

I resorted to punching the mattress my middle school counselor attached to her door. There was no need to bob and weave, to backpedal or retreat. It was supposed to be a technique to help me manage my anger and to keep me from using my fists against other bodies. Still, I hated how the mattress stood upright no matter how hard I punched and kicked. That mattress didn’t need quick feet; it had inner stability that the erratic waves of my body could not defeat. 

It was while boxing that I spoke the words I can’t do this for the first time. 


VII.

One afternoon, I abruptly lost focus. The tremors awakened, but they were not mine. I knew the feeling. Before my firstborn daughter left for college, I didn’t know the breadth of our connection. I’d written a letter to her before she left, assuring her that our threads were plaited too intricately for us to ever be unyoked by distance; yet, when it happened, the suddenness of her energy overwhelmed me. Nauseous, my mind beheld landslides—fault lines entirely displaced. I felt her heart waves on the brink: something was wrong. For a moment I was back in the steamy boxing studio, feeling the vibrations beneath my feet and knowing the blows were coming. Despite my knowledge of the impending blow, I didn’t know how to dodge it.

I texted her: What’s up?  

My daughter’s face appeared on my phone. 

Mija, what’s wrong?

I…I don’t know. I just wanna go home. I just wanna be hugged by someone who loves me.

It was her first semester and microaggressions had propelled her into her professor’s office. 

It didn’t go well? 

No! 

I paused. She needed time to feel before she could speak.

Incoherent. That’s what she called my writing. She kept saying it. Incoherent. Apparently, I need a tutor. I need to acquire my English. That’s how she said it, mom! Acquire my English. Like English is a language that will never belong to me.

My daughter’s only language is English. My mom told stories of being paddled or being forced to keep her nose pressed to a chewed piece of gum in the corner for speaking Spanish. She told me about facing suspension for belonging to a Chicano alliance club. As a child, I only knew Spanish as a language of reprimand or gossip. It was never a language passed on to me.

My daughters speak less Spanish than I do, only able to nod when my grandmother asks them questions. As a young mother, I was faced with daily scrutiny. I quickly learned that if I could speak in a manner that others deemed as “educated,” the scrutiny was subdued for a moment of hesitance—surprise. I studied English with fervor, falling in love with language. Like the slow emergence of dawn, words mended the lacerations, the shadows, of self-doubt. For my girls and me, words are a precious family heirloom. Years ago, I learned the word empathy comes from the Greek word empatheia. Passion. Language is empathy, I would tell my girls, and empathy is passion. Our passion must be about learning to love ourselves and learning to love others. Language is the only way I knew how to save them.

Still, my firstborn has my mom’s earthy brown complexion. She has her dark, unruly hair. She has a name with Latin roots; her syllables feel like Spanish on the tongue. 

She had never once been told that she was remedial or that she needed tutoring. She graduated in the top five percent of her class, and had a youthful arrogance because of it, and, well, because of me.

Mom? I know I’m a good writer. I was the head editor. I’ve won awards for my writing!

Yet she also learned from me how to navigate this world with self-doubt, deeming oneself an imposter in her own skin, and the second wave—the stronger one—was soon to follow the first: Am I a bad writer, mom? Maybe I just can’t do this. Maybe I’ve never been that good at any of this.

And then the surface wave, the destructive wave named after a man named after love. I’m sorry. I’m making a big deal out of this. Don’t worry. I’m fine

Somewhere along the way, she learned to suppress—to defy the physics and feelings of it all. I know I somehow taught her this, but I can’t grasp the moment of origin in my memory. All I know are her patterns. She will blame herself. She will absorb every sliver of pain. And she will cradle it deep within her willows, not even recognizing how they quiver, about to snap.

Quantum magnitude: tiny increments of energy rippled through her surface, my surface, the legacy of our surfaces. I knew this moment would displace—that it would sever.


VIII. 

I can’t stop thinking about that which we give our daughters. When my mom died, I spent months teaching myself how to make her red chili. She had mastered a meatless version just for me, and I developed new lines on my forehead and dark caverns under my eyes trying to recreate it. When she was alive, I would not allow her to teach me how to cook. I wanted nothing to do with her submission to my father—with her choice to cook and clean and work and please. I was young and ignorant; I didn’t understand her, even as her legacy uncoiled in me. 

I inherited her nose, her laugh, her artistic approach to damn near everything, but I refused to learn how to cook. Yet in her absence, I spent day after day adding chili and flour and oil to a pan, cooking to just the right color and fragrance, all the while holding in tears and fighting away the waves of grief that tugged at me, vibrating into my daughters—into anyone near me. It was my mom’s habit: to cook and clean away every problem that plagued her. 

What have I given my daughters? My doctors worry that it might be my dense breast tissue, or worse, my genetic predisposition to cancerous cells that will betray our bodies just as they betrayed my mother’s. Their teachers hope I gave them my mind—they expect my daughters to be small versions of me. Extended family members have commented that it’s too bad that only one of my daughters got my complexion—calling me güerita with a tinge of jealousy that makes me hate this body even more. 

I worry that I gave them everything that corrodes: my anxiety, my vanity, my anger, my dense breast tissue, my denial of my own mother’s legacies. I worry that I gave them a bloodline of deceit: cells that detonate.

When I was a young girl, I traveled to the city with my mom for a mammogram. She decided it would be a girls’ trip. I remember feeling her unease. Sometimes I practiced on her, resting my hand to hers and closing my eyes—pretending to hum to a song when I was really humming to the vibrations of her heart. That day, she was afraid, so I became afraid. While her cancer had yet to emerge, she knew her fate. Of course she knew.

I have my mom’s curvy hips. Her dense breasts. Her history. Her memories. Her ability to channel energy, to heal. Yet, I can’t heal. She never had time to teach me how, and despite her promise that I would just know, I don’t. 

Maybe it’s because of the moon. I envied her birthmark: the shape of the lunar mare skipped me only to stretch itself across my daughters’ skin. In my dreams, my bare skin burns, confirming it’s the reason I can’t do anything successfully.

This autumn, she will have been gone nine years, yet these willows—her willows—remain in me. I suppose they’re my willows now. The more time I contemplate and try to understand, the more the nebulousness of it all aches.


IX.

Behind the radiologist’s computer screen, a poster hangs with an image of a woman, layers of her inner breast exposed. I cannot make out the words in the dark, but I already know what I want the poster to say: The Orientation of Cells and Tissues. From conception to this moment, standing here in this hospital, it is all about how our cells and tissues—the willows of these vessels we call bodies—are formed. My anatomy book informs me that dense tissue is interwoven, irregular, and the word that temporarily heals me: resistant. 

Resistant. When I sat next to my daughter as she read her diagnosis code, I wanted to feel what she felt. I wanted to know her willows; I wanted to know if the damage of this wave would be permanent. I wanted to tell her how Resmaa Menakem, in My Grandmother’s Hands, refers to resistance as a flow that can travel from one body to another so long as our energy is linked. 

We are a bloodline of resilience and resistance, I wanted to tell her. 

Yet sometimes it’s not as easy as kissing away tears and assigning them flavors. Sometimes, it’s not as easy as channeling energy, understanding the seismography of its movement. If it was so easy, I would be able to find the words (read: strength and courage) to write the memoir I’ve planned and started and redrafted for years instead of being taunted by the black lines on my screen, flashing cursor pretending it knows the rate at which my heart beats. My mind tells me it’s all a Darwinian game; I don’t have the substance to survive. I have nothing to say.

I know we can’t simply write pain, or even legacy, away. We can share our pain—feel comfort in one another’s stories—but as with any true Love wave, the damage and displacement are what remain. When I’m on the verge of writing something, I thread my thoughts into conversations—casually—play with ideas, try them on and see how they fit. But we can’t experiment with love this way. We look at our daughters, feel the immenseness of love, and promise we’ll never hurt them. It’s our first lie to our children.

Yet when I look beyond surface fissures, I see a young woman with my chin and hips standing at a podium, reading her winning poem about anxiety.

I see another young woman’s face—my eyes, my nose, my voice—Facetiming me as she gathers and weaves ideas for the next article she wants to write for her university’s newspaper: a piece about how professors can influence a student’s success with just a few words. 

I see me. I see my resistance to the confines of a diagnosis, to a formidable bloodline, to a nightmare that lingers, to unspoken trauma, to an unexpected left hook, to microaggressions and systems meant to keep us in our place, to the density of tissues that we refuse to give power.

A seismic wave is energy. 

We are all energy.

*

I beheld my daughter’s diagnosis code. I gazed at my bookshelf. Words are how I heal.

My daughter inhaled, looked at me with her chin slightly raised: Mom, calm down. I can feel your energy…but I’ll be okay. 

The orientation of our legacy.

 

Color portrait photo of the author, Adrianna.

Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez is a lover of words, trees, cats, and lavender tea. Her recent work appears, or is forthcoming, in Drip Literary Magazine, Complete Sentence, The Plentitudes Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Brooklyn Review, The Nasiona, and Fatal Flaw.

Image description: Digital color photograph of Adrianna, the author, a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. She tilts her head to the left corner of the photograph and smiles with a red wall behind her. She wears red lipstick, gold hoop earrings, two small gold chains, and a seafoam green sleeveless shirt with bird print.


This creative-nonfiction, short story first appeared here, at Prose Online.

Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez

Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez is a lover of words, trees, cats, and lavender tea. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drip Literary Magazine, Complete Sentence, The Plentitudes Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Brooklyn Review, The Nasiona, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. Learn more about Adrianna at adriannasanchezlopez.com.


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