This piece is excerpted from The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
1
The Secrets
They say the accident that left me with temporary amnesia is my inheritance. No house or piece of land or chest of letters, just a few weeks of oblivion.
Mami had temporary amnesia as well, except: where she was eight years old, I was twenty-three. Where she fell down an empty well, I crashed my bicycle into an opening car door. Where she nearly bled to death in Ocaña, Colombia, in darkness, thirty feet below the earth, I got to my feet seemingly unharmed and wandered around Chicago on a sunny winter afternoon. Where she didn’t know who she was for eight months, I couldn’t remember who I was for eight weeks.
They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have, which Mami’s father, Nono, neglected to pass.
