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But it wasn't the same.
Just the two of us.
The absence of our mother was a gaping wound in our hearts, in our psyches, it became bigger than anything else we had going on.
Until, eventually, we made the decision to get our passports, to gather what was left of our savings, to break our lease, and to go to our mother's homeland for the first time.
We hadn't known what to expect. Aside from stories about our family we'd never met and the food they all used to make together, we didn't know much about our mother's hometown.
We had been accustomed to apartment buildings and single-family homes separated by little yards.
That wasn't what we were met with as we made our way down the street toward the address our mother had put on the last letter she'd sent to us.
There was a high hill with little rectangular, brightly-colored homes seemingly stacked on top of each other all the way up to the top, occasionally broken up by a single green tree.
"How do they get from home to home?" Celenia asked under her breath.
I wanted to keep being the mom to her, imparting the wisdom that came from being eight years her senior.
But just this once, I had no idea. Because I had been contemplating that myself.
As it turned out, though you couldn't see it from the direction we'd come in, there were little streets of the barrio and staircases between all the homes as well as a town behind them.
It wasn't long as we made our way down those little streets before we were discovered by someone claiming we looked just like our mother, though, clearly, these days, Celenia was the holder of most of the beauty in our family.
This group of women had saved us from walking around cluelessly for hours, since we had no idea which house we were looking for, or even how they were situated so we could figure out the numbers. They led us toward the top of the hill to a bright red home, making Celenia and I shared a worried look, wondering how more than our mother and her mother could fit in that home. Would there be space for us? Had we made a major mistake?
But then the door flew open.
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 mother who no longer needed to work so hard. She had our grandmother. She had our aunts. All of these women with more wisdom to impart on her than I thought 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 new world, one without our mother.
But then she started to find comfort in the arms of boys instead of me, leaving 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 the many men who had been salivating over 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 my homeland, to finish my degree.
