That anonymity feels sacred.
So you sit quietly with the envelope tucked under your blouse like contraband and wait for the bus.
The ride to Oaxaca is long enough for the body to remember pain in layers.
At first you feel only the immediate hurt. The divorce. The humiliation. The years in Guadalajara spent trying to become acceptable to people who measured worth by usefulness and bloodline. Then, as the highway unspools and the cities thin into dust, hills, and long stretches of open heat, older griefs begin surfacing too. Leaving Oaxaca at twenty-eight because marriage was supposed to be the start of a wider life. Your mother’s proud tears at the bus station. Your own small hope that love might make the world less narrow.
Instead, marriage had narrowed it.
Not all at once. You know that now with painful precision.
