“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”

We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.

I’ve never seen the rooster next door that crows at dawn. And during thunderstorms. And during the ubiquitous fireworks—this is Oaxaca, after all. In the afternoon, when he’s tired of scratching at the same dirt hoping to find something different, but it’s just the same fucking dirt, he crows a little louder.

“I hear you,” I whisper over the fifteen-foot wall that separates us. “I feel you.”

Hasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. These words had become my mantra. “God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.” These were the words that I would recite thousands of times a day that winter. I would repeat this phrase in the early morning hours when I couldn’t sleep. As I heard myself murmur the words, my own voice seemed to lull me into a trance-like state, as if I floated out of my body.