The Year Between Us

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

My aunt is only a year older than me.
When we were children, that year felt like a flicker—
a leaf between pages,
a secret we didn’t mind keeping.
We were close in the way
only cousins raised like siblings
can be—barefoot, half-wild,
always sun-warmed and sweet-stained.

I remember the afternoons
we spent picking Kerson fruit
in their backyard.
We climbed the low limbs
as if they were the rungs of our future,
plucking the red, plump beads
that burst on our tongues
with a joy no candy could match.
We’d eat until our lips were stained,
our fingers sticky,
our laughter careless and whole.
Between bites,
we talked about what we’d become.

She’d be a nurse, she said.
I’d be someone who wrote things
down before they disappeared.
And we did it—
we reached out,
and the world gave in.

But dreams come with trade-offs
no one warns you about.

Now she lives in Texas.
Not just lives—
she stays there.
She works the night shift,
heals strangers’ wounds,
and doesn’t answer
when I ask about coming home.

She does not talk to anyone,
my aunt, who once shouted
across fields just to tell me
a dragonfly landed on her shoulder.
Now she disappears between months,
her voice locked away
in some linen-scented hospital corridor,
in a home that smells like sterility
and not once of Kerson fruit.

I sulk.
Because I miss her.
Because I do not know
what exactly broke—
only that it did.

And maybe she misses me too
in the quiet way people do
when they’re haunted
not by tragedy,
but by the golden weight
of memory.

She hides
in white rooms and shift rotations,
in foreign streets that ask nothing
of her past.
Maybe Texas is not home,
but a place where
no one reminds her
of what we once were.

Still,
life is a joker—
and we are
its punchline.

Children once bonded by fruit
and futures,
now reduced
to silence.