My family has always been proudly, if subtly, matriarchal. As the firstborn son of a firstborn daughter, who was herself also the firstborn daughter of a firstborn daughter, I've always felt a responsibility, a duty, to stay connected to my "feminine side" (although I hate calling it *that*, it makes me feel like an art student trying to get feminists to fuck me). I was a crybaby kid, I got scared easily, hated fighting and violence, I was a drama class and poetry kind of kid in school. It could be that, or maybe I'm just kind of a pussy.
Anyway.
I had a happy and normal childhood. As I said, I was the firstborn, but I was also the only boy in my family until my brother was born almost ten years later. In my country, family relations are close-knit and I grew up among my female cousins and younger aunts. I was both the only boy, and the youngest by far, so I was babied, coddled, spoiled in all the ways a little guy could've wished: I spent an entire summer at the age of five at my great-aunt's Ericka huge beachfront house, being taught how to play Super Mario by my aunt Colette, who was barely ten herself; my cousin Nidia taught me how to build sandcastles and bait weird little crustaceans out of the sand with ham and bits of pork. My aunt Liz, Colette's oldest sister, taught me how to fish, and her boyfriend played soccer with me until I dropped like a stone from exhaustion soon after the sun set where the beach meets the ocean.
I'm telling you all of this because this is not a story on how I met my sister on Tinder and then I railed her on the kitchen counter, or how my mom gifted me a creampie for my eighteenth birthday. I want you to understand that I loved my primas with all my heart. They were the older sisters I never had, and growing up I thought they were all the coolest, most beautiful girls in all the world.
Nayo was my favorite of all of them, and I was hers. Her name was Ingrid, but we all called her Nayo; our great-grandmother one day started calling her that when she was a baby--she had wanted a granddaughter named Naomi and I guess that was reason enough. She was Colette's and Liz middle sister, and the one I spent most of the time with all those summers, spring breaks, and long weekends ("puentes"). She read her dumb girly magazines to me, a boy nine years her junior, gave me palm readings, holding my little hand in hers, and napped with me laying with her in a hammock as the evening tide rolled in before having my uncle put me to bed. I, in turn, recited to her all the dinosaur facts I could memorise and everything else I learnt in school. She was my best friend and my favorite prima.
I didn't realise it at the time, but we were *all* growing up together. I remember my primas fighting with their parents over things I did not yet understand (boyfriend), things I did (grades), and things I still don't (proper use of sunscreen). As the years passed, they were entering their adolescence while I was still just a kid. Liz's fights were mostly about her boyfriend, Colette's about her sucking on her thumb (she was seventeen), and Nayo's about everything and anything. She was politically minded, an artsy type, and also she just liked to yell and be yelled at. I guess she was right on some things, as she did grow up to be a successful musician. Not the yelling though, that really had been just a phase.
The summer I was twelve, things were starting to change. Liz was out of college and working her first job, Nidia was beginning to develop her own womanly mysterious aura, and was too cool to hang out with me, and Colette was, well, still sucking on her thumb. I had grown taller than all of them during the last year of elementary school, but not taller than Nayo.
Nayo had been, in retrospect, a very weird twenty one year old girl. She was wholly uninterested in guys, and in fact never mentioned them at all except in the same derisive tone she had used as a little girl before. She had grown opinionated, and I barely understood her musings on the astral and the mythical. Her messy, frizzy curly hair that was always tangled with sand and seawater had grown long, thick and beautiful. She kept it either down, past her shoulders, or tied in a knot that always seemed about to burst.
We went on long *hikes* together, climbing over rocks and trekking up to ten kilometers back and forth in a single day before making it back home by the porch lights of our auntie's neighbours on the darkening beach. We would snorkel together, bringing cool clamshells up from the muddy sand. We spend the daytime mostly together, but at night, if they hadn't gone out, the rest of my cousins and I would gather around the TV and watch a rented movie or two. I laid my head down on her legs, she would play with my hair, and I could tell her skin had been growing softer year after year.
That was the last year I spent with my primas for a long, long time.
My parent's relationship with my mom's side of the family had deteriorated quite a bit. It was a money thing, as they tend to be, and it got ugly. I was getting too old to hang out with a bunch of girls anyway. *They* were getting too old to hang out with their parents and little cousins, too. Smartphones and texting weren't really a thing yet, so we all kind of fell out of touch. I would still see them in larger gatherings, but even *I* eventually grew too cool for family gatherings.
Six years passed. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, and I was on top of the world. I was going into college, and I was going to own the world. I was a pretty insecure kid growing up (I did warn you I was kind of a pussy), and I finally felt handsome, cool, masculine. I was going to spend my summer out of high school getting drunk with my friends and absolutely failing to attract any girls. I was ready to become a dude, a guy even.
On the early days of summer, my mom sat with me at breakfast.
"Hey!" she said to me, looking up from her phone. She said in the way she says "hey!" when she had exciting news to deliver. I nodded my head at her, inviting elaboration.
"Wouldn't you like to spend a few days with your auntie Ericka at the beach house?" she asked, in a chipper tone she used when she *really* wanted me to work with her here but also very pointedly did not want any further questions.
"Ericka? Don't we hate her?" I asked her in a cloyingly innocent tone. This seemed to annoy her which made me really happy.
"We *do not* hate your aunt. We had some issues with her sister that you already know of. Are you going or not?"
I was not going to prod further. It seemed diplomatically important that I spend a few days at auntie Ericka's house. I was the firstborn son of a long, proud matrilineal heritage. I was *not* going to eschew my duties. If I had to sleep on a hammock and swim all day while my aunt cooked for me to heal my family's divide, then so be it.
Besides, I had a few friends also staying nearby for the summer. Some of those friends happened to also be hot girls, who I could then see in swimwear. Really, it was the move.
I packed my bags and drove to auntie's old, beloved beach house. It was forty minute drive.
On the way there, I was filled with nostalgia and a bit of excitement. I had seen enough of my other cousins over the last few years to make my peace with the end of my childhood. My closest male cousin had grown from a boastful, endlessly fun older kid to a rather competent car salesman. Whatever my primas had grown into, I wasn't going to know who they were anymore. I steeled myself to face that loss in person, after more than half a decade. Liz would be some dull accountant. Colette would be more likely to suck liquor out of a bottle than her thumb. Nayo... Nayo would hopefully be someone I could relate to. I hoped.
But my auntie Ericka? She had been a loving, mirthful fat little lady last time I had seen her. She would not have changed much. She would be the same woman that had sang to me, cared for me and showed me how to skewer a marshmallow on a stick.
The house was pretty much the same. It was a nice, warm shade of scarlet red on the outside, and the windows were now framed out of shiny, rustproof aluminum. The slanted roof had a mustard yellow stripe running along the edge, and the door had the same cream-on-coffee fingerprint whorl that had been at eye level one day.
I knocked. I heard a spoon fall onto a pot, and then the crunch of plastic chanclas on a sandy ceramic floor.
The door opened.
"Sobrino!"
My auntie rounded my chest with her arms, held me daintily, tightly. She was, of course, much shorter than I was, with greyer hair, wider, thicker glasses, and an embroidered purple-pink traditional square dress. She was pretty much exactly as I had last seen her.
"You look so handsome now. Look at you! Your cousins will love to see you. You haven't seen each other in a while, have you?" she said. She was obviously overjoyed at seeing me, like she always was. I felt a pang of loss for the years we'd missed. She beckoned me inside.
"Auntie, you look great yourself. I am so glad to see you and I thank you for the invitation." I was such a polite boy. "No, I haven't seen my cousins. Will they be coming?" I said, leaving my duffel bag on the floor.
