Burns.

As usual, I don’t remember many details clearly. It was a normal school day. My sister and I used to go to school to pick up lunch and bring it back. On the way, we’d stop by a tree always heavy with zapotes, the most delicious fruit at the time. My mom tells me now that I had a teacher who adored me and wanted to ‘adopt’ me—not necessarily relevant here, but I wasn’t totally alone, and my sister Ana was always with me.

That particular afternoon, we came back from school. I can’t recall what triggered it, but he began screaming, throwing things, tossing whatever was in his reach. My mother was outside at the sink, wearing a long, ugly flowered dress, mostly white. She was just washing clothes. He was angry—I don’t know why.

He tore her clothes off, broke their bed in half, and then set it on fire. The smell of burning fabric and the heat made me nauseous, and I started taking my younger siblings outside. My mother screamed for my father to get out of the fire, while my sister and I tried to save ourselves and whatever belongings we could.

That night, my mother woke us and told us to get ready to leave. We gathered what we could and left. Her right eye was as swollen as a grapefruit, and she was bleeding everywhere. She took us to a neighbor’s house, and from there, my memory blurs. I wish I remembered more, but I don’t. My sister says my mom was in poor condition and taken to the hospital, while we were taken to a Christian home.

Why does anger burn like it does? It starts in the chest, a pulsing, nagging feeling that only worsens with time, yet it lasts only seconds.

I often swallow my anger, stifling it inside until it turns into a headache, a bloated belly, or just a snarky-comment kind of day. I’m insufferable when it comes over me; I can’t even live with myself. As a child, I prayed to be quiet, to have a calm spirit governed by silence. I longed to be a ‘mujercita.’ I was obsessed with it. But I’ve become anything but a ‘mujercita.’

Something awoke in me when I had my first child. It wasn’t just a rupture of flesh that a few stitches could fix. It was my soul splitting into a million pieces. I’ve tried, as best I can, to gather those pieces again, slowly, painfully, through the process of writing—for others to see, for others to judge, and for me to release the need to care about that judgment. This is where I begin to unpack my anger. But I am nowhere near the beginning of it all.