In my tío’s old room, I’m looking for a book made of water.

He used to keep it under his pillow and read from it a story full of storms and men made of seafoam. I noticed that I was never thirsty after he read to me. My stomach felt full, and I usually dreamed of drowning next to him in a grand shipwreck.

But the book wasn’t always made of water. For a few years, it was made of plants clumped together in a knot. That was when I started growing tomates in my sleep and waking up with seeds in my hands. I’d jump out of bed and run to him like a little fool.

And in a flash, he would gather me up and listen to a child’s musings as though they were saint-like and wise. As if I was the poet of seeds, he followed me to the garden and obeyed my every wish of where to plant and where to tunnel his brown hands down.

A little later in our life, the book seemed to be made of only paper.

My tío still read it to me, but now it read like an impossible map. It named and displayed every face and bird and river he found as a boy in México. It described intimate memories long dead in my tío like when he saw his father crying behind their orange tree. Tío nudged me awake to show the tender illustration of his trembling father as well as the long shadow cast by the tree and the number of fruits still hanging on it.

The topography of the map was impressive, and I started to appreciate the thoughtful footnotes that filled us in whenever we were baffled.

One note was particularly precious and useful to me. It was a lifelike sketch of a textile factory in Coahuila that had burned down. Crowds of workers were weeping in the street and among them was a tall man with a unibrow and beautiful eyes.

“Apá,” my tío sighed, and he squeezed my hand like a child with a fever.

He told me how he was so young, no one told him anything real. It didn’t make any sense why they were leaving for America. Why they could abandon the land where he learned to dream for a place where he would need English to live? Childhood was over.

The map took the time to depict the place where my tío started to change and feel afraid of change. There was a little river where he once caught a fish with his bare hands. He tried for hours to do it again, but they slipped out and eluded him until he cried from frustration.

The map noted that this failure would one day remind the boy of trying to learn English.

My tío turned over in bed after we read that and said the room was too hot and could I turn on the fan to max strength and let him sleep?

I did, but when I slipped out, I stayed by the door and saw from an open sliver my lonely tío, still awake, obsessing over the marvelous map on his own.

To be honest, my tío was the type of person who didn’t understand the middle of life.

He understood well the aching mountains of childhood, where all things are impossibly larger than you, and you are nobody, and you are nowhere near the land where work happens and marriage and love are expected. He understood too the solemnity and slowness of old age, the quiet ways people take away your responsibilities and cease to expect you to fall in love.

But the middle of life, what many consider life was a great and painful confusion to him. He avoided speaking of that era of his and eventually began to avoid me when I approached it myself. That was unfortunate because he was like a father by then.

I’d followed his steps and his stories and his habits—I was even a bit reclusive myself—but what really connected us was our affection for the book under his pillow.

What continued to move me about it was the way it aged with us, the way the book adapted to our needs. When we talked to each other less, for example, the book had more and more to say.

One night, when we hadn’t spoken all day, and I’d been staring at my reflection like I didn’t like it, I slipped into his room and for some reason he didn’t ask me to leave.

He almost smiled when he saw me, not exactly happily, but with the satisfaction of knowing what I wanted. He pulled the book out from under his pillow and now it was covered in feathers. It looked like a kind of bird, like it might fly out of his hands.

When he opened it, I saw at first pinned photographs of cardinals and finally small moving images of my tío in his wandering thirties.

I saw his round brown face and sad blue eyes staring at the mouth of another man. It was a lovely man with gentle lips and long eyelashes. They kissed in what looked like an eternal summer, over and over. My tío was completely silent as I watched.

Neither of us made eye contact. We both just looked down at the shifting images and saw young love explore the boundaries of need.

He closed the book when my young tío took his shirt off and the suddenness made the book clap the air with red feathers.

I didn’t know what my own body needed, and I didn’t understand what had happened to my tío. Did an American boy break his heart, or did his Catholicism break it?

Had he ever kissed another man again? Had he ever kissed anyone again? I didn’t know but I didn’t think so. The man I grew up with hardly left his room anymore. His dark brown walls were covered in crosses and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Near the end of his life, my tío didn’t read to me too much but sometimes I read to him. I’d reach under his pillow when he was having a fitful sleep and find to my comfort and surprise that the book was beginning to attach itself to his bed.

Now he slept on maps of his old country and unsent love letters.

By his feet, I found poems about the sea and by his shoulder I found several failed attempts at rewriting them in English.

Finally, when he had the strength to, he’d lift up his gray head and invariably I would find seeds in his hair. A part of me wanted to instantly bury them in the garden, just to see what strange plants my tío kept in his memory. But I buried them instead in a little drawer, and only imagined what sweet fruits his body needed to remember.

Now that I’m beginning to understand my history and my own queerness, I’m trying to compile another book made of plants and feathers and elaborate maps.

I start and stop constantly.

One morning, I’ll find two birds sitting together during mating season but there is no love being made. They are only singing to the sun, and I’ll put them in my book.

One night, I’ll spy a growth of fungus with so many genders it takes my breath away. I’ll caress it into my book, and try to sleep, but I keep missing something.

My map of México is as rudimentary as a child’s scrawl. I don’t remember its heat and mountains and snaking rivers. I can’t even imagine the orange tree where my tío’s father wept.

Moments like this are when I need him most. I want to ask him again to show me the drawing of the tree’s long shadow. I want to count the hanging fruit. I want to see a father’s beautiful eyes looking towards his home.

© 2024 Angel Leal