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And our mother's arms closed around us

And then our grandmother's

Our aunts'

Our uncles'

It was there in our new home that I started to lose Celenia

She had our randmother She had our aunts All of these woht I could ever have

She clung to them, moved away from me

And, finally, in my early twenties, I was free to pursue my own interests

I got friends and occasionally dated

It was the following year we lost our grandmother The one after that, our mother to a freak blood clot

For a long while, Celenia and I clung to each other as we tried to make sense of this neorld, one without our mother

But then she started to find co for days or weeks at a time despite my—and our family's—demands she come back to the barrio

Celenia had always been pampered, had been coddled, and as such, she'd developed a stubborn streak she had gotten too old to work out of her

Eventually, she moved out of our somewhat crowded home

And after a particularly nasty fight over one of theover her—that had been old enough to be her father—I had made the impulsive decision to leave, to head back to what had been ree