Worldwide Web

From the guest bedroom in my parents’ house I worked as a translator for a medical device company in Venezuela. I found it on the internet. One day on MSN I asked Francisco about a word I couldn’t find in any dictionary. We started chatting, and she congratulated me on the baby.

“I saw on Facebook,” she said. I looked, and there was a picture of you in a hospital gown holding a baby.
I had reached a sort of peace with my imagined version of you. We were just taking a break, and someday soon you would call, and come home. That peace folded up like a map, and all the narrow lines I’d charted between cities were obliterated. I stared out the window of what used to be my high school bedroom, all my books and posters now carefully arranged in the closet. Somewhere in the world there was new life, but it was not mine.