When I was little, I loved playing this game:

“Guess how to spell my middle name! Guess!”

“How do you say it?”

“Sh-ee-ah-na”

“Sheeana?”

“Sheeana”

“Okay. S-H-”

“Nope!”

“Z-?”

“Nope!”

After dragging the guessing part out for as long as possible, I could finally unveil the true name like a trophy: Xiana. I’m sure my mom loved the routine. I was several years older when she took me to my name’s  place of origin for the first time, to meet the family my grandparents had left behind.

In the coastal town of Ferrol, winds whip through stone streets where old men and women smoke and talk and drink in plastic chairs pushed out onto the cobblestone. Colorful apartments are stacked on shops and bars with doors thrown open to the world. The food is plain but much fresher than what we have in Texas. It’s small, humble, but inarguably beautiful.

I hated visiting. To be honest, I hope to never do it again. I have not told my mom this because, one, I would seem ungrateful, and two, she  wouldn’t understand why. It isn’t easy to explain.

I’d never felt so small as when I was there. Small as a particle of dust tracked in by a tourist in the cavernous Santiago cathedral. Some say Hispanic people are obsessed with death. Our particular region of Spain is obsessed with witchcraft (it’s true). I turned and rubbed the red, blue, and white clay charms between my childlike hands there, charms said to ward against misfortunes.  I exhausted myself trying to catch snippets of translatable Spanish shooting rapid-fire from my relatives’ lips.

“Did you hear about the two young people who died after an elevator fell in Galicia? Only eighteen! So young! So tragic!” My Spanish relative went on with these strange tabloid stories. I don’t even know how we’re related. We were visiting the place my relatives are buried. Tiny box after box forming apartment window rows of remains. A cramped cemetery in a cramped country. No more room for its ghosts.

Later we visited a relative we call Meluchi, the last of my great-grandmother’s seven sisters. It’s not her real name, but that’s commonplace; everyone in Ferrol has a unique nickname —“Chinto,” “Meluchi,” “Peeley,” “Marianjoles.” My mom had a secret agenda: to get the ancient, family-kept recipe for a brew that is supposed to protect life, made with special herbs picked under a full moon or some such. Witchcraft, I told you. White-haired, wrinkled, hunched, as very old ladies typically are, you would never have expected Meluchi to be so funny. Her quick, good-humored jabs made us giggle even after translation. I watch her at family gatherings. How old—? She once looked straight at me and spoke something in Spanish which I felt in my teenage brain had to be of utmost, cosmic, personal significance. The calm, unsurprised disappointment in her expression, when I just replied I didn’t understand, sent that sinking dread right back to my stomach.

Surely at her age, Meluchi wasn’t all there. She thought she still ran the Loteria she had owned decades before. And yet, when my mother pressed her through a combination of pleasing smiles and a forceful tongue—my mom can be very persuasive—I swear Meluchi’s knowing face flashed mischievously while she clung to the claim that she’d lost it, or didn’t remember, or gave it to such and such forever ago. Her pale eyes twinkled at us, us unknowing foreigners. After a long time my mom finally forfeited. We left without the recipe.

I may be named after the land, but I knew, I could tell, that it didn’t  want me. It’s okay; we agreed mutually to stay apart, and split amicably. I watched movies on the flight home and tried to ignore visions of falling airplanes. Slowly, I stopped feeling like I was going to die all the time.

And I continue to think of Meluchi, who is older than she should be, and who still lives yet.