I was eight years old when Esperanza fell off the swing. In the backyard, she stood on a flimsy piece of wood, rotted from many rains and held together by two strings, rocking her body back and forth. While she reveled in her weightlessness, I sensed impending catastrophe. From my spot safely in the grass, I pleaded with her to stop. Barely hearing my pleas, she rose higher, closer to the sun with each swing. I turned away from her. Bracing myself, I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears. She called out to me, determined to show me that if she swung high enough, she could see above the hedges separating our yard from the neighbors, above all the rooftops neatly lining around the cul-de-sac, to somewhere even more distant. Perhaps she even believed that she could reach back in time, back across the ocean, to her childhood in the Philippines. So she swung, higher and higher and higher.

—

Esperanza was a short woman with a staccato voice. Her English barreled off her tongue with the same cadence as the Tagalog she spoke to her friends on the phone. Playing on the kitchen floor by her legs, I tried to decipher a language and rhythm so foreign to me I could not tell if she was in a heated argument or reminiscing with an old friend. Once, in my notebook, I attempted to create a diagram of her sound waves, my crayon frenetically flying up and down trying to trace the undulations in her voice. Once her call ended, I proudly showed her my work. She laughed in her usual way, doubling over in a bowing motion before ruffling the top of my head.

I was so young when Esperanza started working for my parents that I don’t remember the first time I ever met her, but her presence echoed throughout my childhood. She had moved to Geneva, Switzerland a couple of years before in hopes of making money to send home to her family in the Philippines. Her visits to our house were marked by the smell of Lysol in the morning and coconut shrimp on the stove by dinnertime. In the early days, she fed, bathed, and clothed me. As I grew older, we’d sit in the living room and she would brush my hair as I regaled her with stories from the playground. Every day when the sun set, as she left back to her apartment, I would run to the kitchen window and watch as the top of her head bobbed over the garden hedge. Just before she was out of sight, she would turn around, peek through a corner of the hedge that had not fully grown over, and wave back at me.

The first time Esperanza took me across the city to her apartment, the journey was almost an hour and included three bus transfers. Each time we got on a new bus, she would tell the driver that I was younger than six to avoid the fare, as I nodded along. Having never lied to an adult before, I sat on the bus, giddy that we’d outsmarted him. We would continue to get away with this lie for several more years, as I was especially scrawny for my age. At the last stop, we came face to face with Esperanza’s apartment: a thirty-story building overlooking a sports complex.

Esperanza lived in a one bedroom with six other Filipino women who had met each other through the extensive network of Filipinos living in Geneva. The main room was filled with bunk beds, pull-out couches, and mattresses strategically placed to maximize the space. When it was time to eat, the women would tuck or roll the beds away to make room for foldable chairs. Then they all sat and ate, crowding around a coffee table covered in an array of dishes I’d never seen before. I remembered how my mother often lamented that Esperanza didn’t have a lot of money, how she worked long hours for multiple families and relied on our diplomatic status in order to stay in the country legally. I wondered what my mother would think of her living arrangement. However, as an only child who longed for playmates, I saw it as a huge slumber party every night. In the mini foldable chair her roommates kept for children, I often found myself lulled to sleep by the chaos of these women’s voices talking over one another, a world away from the quiet, dead-end street that I lived on.

Esperanza was firm, unlike any other adult I knew at the time. Growing up, my parents gave out praise freely and let discipline fall to the wayside. After many desperate years of trying to have a child, I was the miracle baby they adopted from China, a cure to their loneliness. Throughout my childhood, they were always one step in front of me trying to smooth over life’s ruffles. Their friends and colleagues who passed through our house did much of the same. Perhaps my parents could never shake off their first memories of me, underweight and unused to being held, and that drove them to carve an easy path for me. However, in between being shuttled to practices, playdates, and tutoring, when I looked out the car window, or sat in the bath for too long, in moments when the stillness crept up on me, I sensed that life could be coarse.

Life could be abrasive, even grisly in ways that I had not witnessed or could not remember. Falling asleep was a nightly battle with the hollow sensation that sat right under my rib cage, a feeling of chaos and sometimes utter despair that could swallow me whole if I let it. I yearned for adults to let me in on their ugly truths. I pushed boundaries and rules, trying to pierce through their carefully crafted shells. I secretly relished the moments when their tone slipped into impatience or when a tight expression flickered across their face. I was constantly and desperately searching for some proof that I was not alone in my hollowness.

Esperanza was not afraid of the truth. She was not afraid to enlighten me on the grimness that lay beyond the hedges of the quiet Geneva suburbs. Like most adults, she would remind me how lucky I was, but through her firmness, she warned me to work every day so my luck wouldn’t run out. She laid out rules and consequences plainly, never padding them with praise and reassurance. “You finish everything on your plate, okay?” “Don’t talk to your parents that way.” “Enough of that now, you’re too old to cry, you’re not four anymore.” These were not simply lessons in etiquette; they were about surviving. Through her words, she imparted wisdom and an understanding that even if I couldn’t remember it, I, too, had traversed an ocean and now had to find my way in this new continent.

Similarly, the stories Esperanza shared with me about her life back in the Philippines were not like the books my parents read to me before bed; hers were cautionary tales with no clear beginning or end.  “I never hit my daughters with anything except for a clothing hanger. Once I did it so hard that the hanger broke,” she said suddenly one day while folding laundry. She paused a moment before bursting out laughing. Then she would go back to buttoning my father’s dress shirts like nothing happened. She would often start a story like this, in the middle of the memory, while she was washing dishes or ironing. Then, as soon as she started, these fragments of her past would peter out into listlessness, and all you could hear was the rush of tap water or the wheezing scream of the iron.

As I grew older, in between dinner and bedtime, if I had been good, Esperanza would sit at the kitchen table with a glass of red wine and let the memories spill out of her. Slowly, I was able to sew her fragmented stories together into a timeline that revealed the patchwork of her life. Under the dim light, her stories transformed into ghosts. One ghost took the shape of her younger daughter, whom she left behind in the Philippines. One ghost took the shape of her older daughter who got divorced and then followed her to Switzerland, leaving behind two children of her own.

As the wine gave her voice a melancholy lilt, Esperanza told me how her husband cheated on her and how, right before throwing herself into oncoming traffic, she thought of her daughters and decided to stay in the world of the living. She alluded to ghosts in the shape of dreams she had as a little girl, dreams that were too sorrowful to utter, weighed down by the shame of them not coming true. She told me about ghosts that followed her around every day, bearing names like visa, insurance, benefits, and other words that I had never heard before her.

There were times, when the moon shone through the kitchen window, when I thought that she, too, was a ghost, only tethered to this country by her job, which could change any day if my parents were re-stationed. Part of her was here with me, sitting at the kitchen table, an invisible chain linking her to our house. Part of her longed to see her grandchildren grow up and walk with them on the buzzing streets of Manila. During these stories, I was silent, insatiably hungry for each word. Maybe I, too, held a placeless longing inside my half-grown body, a longing so young, it did not yet have a name. Maybe I recognized her ghosts, for they were the same faceless, nameless ghosts that followed me through the playground and sat with me at my classroom desk.

Esperanza and I only fought once. After that day, I respected her more than any other adult. I don’t remember what started our argument, but I remember sitting with my arms crossed at the top of the stairs, refusing to comply. It was still the early days when I was pushing boundaries and pulling stunts in order to break the unwavering patience of adults around me. I had thrown around hurtful words, familiar tools I used when I was not getting my way. That day, Esperanza turned the truth back on me. “Okay, I’ll just go,” she bit back and started heading towards the door. She’d seen me anxiously wait for her after school, fidget outside the bank when she withdrew cash, and tearfully try to fall asleep when my parents weren’t home.She knew what I hated most was to be alone.

No one had ever threatened to leave before. I’d never been home alone before. At that moment, I started to cry, plead, and reach out for her. She gave me a piercing look and said, “Ha! You see.” Reflected in her gaze, I could see my ugliness: the fear of being by myself. In that moment of silence, we were no longer sitting on the stairs, me at the top step and her further down. We were two beings who were torn away from everything that we knew, trying to feel less alone. We were together, adrift in the vastness of the world. Perhaps she also carried my fear of loneliness, perhaps every human born on this earth carries seeds of loneliness with them. All I knew is that when she said, “you see,”this woman, whose face resembled my own, was telling me that we needed each other. In order to survive, we needed each other.

We never said sorry and hugged it out like my parents always did. Instead, we went to the gas station at the bottom of the street, and she bought me ice cream. Years later, after my family moved to America and Esperanza returned to the Philippines, I still remember sitting on the curb, silently enjoying the sweet crunch of frozen chocolate.

—

The day that Esperanza fell off the swing, she had a lightness to her step. Maybe she fell because the swing wasn’t like the ones she grew up with. Maybe the swing’s ropes were not long and spindly enough to accommodate her dreams. Maybe with so many years away from the humidity of Asia that softens the skin and loosens the bones, she had become brittle, so her knees wouldn’t bend in time with the rope.

When she fell off the swing, I didn’t see or hear it happen. I wondered how long she lay there before I overcame my dread to open my eyes and see her on the ground. I ran to her, brought her inside, propped her against the kitchen chair, and held an ice pack to her chin like she had done for me every time I fell off my bike. “You see,” I said softly, throwing her line back at her.

– Celeste Bloom

Author’s Note: An earlier iteration of “The Day That Esperanza Fell Off The Swing” was published in A Good Little Girls Zine on January 19th, but it has undergone significant edits since then.