Creosote and Susto

 

My heart broke in San Francisco, but the crack did not stay in the city where it happened. It traveled with me, tucked behind my ribs, an invisible shard cutting at every breath as the plane lifted off the Bay and carried me back to the desert that made me. By the time I reached Phoenix, the break had become its own weather system: a low, gray pressure that followed me from room to room, seeping into my sleep, my appetite, my judgment. I stopped recognizing myself in mirrors. My skin grew sallow, my thoughts scattered like trash in an alley after the wind had its way. Every night, my body lay down in my own bed, but my spirit refused, pacing somewhere outside, unwilling to come back inside my chest.

I kept trying to outthink it: reading articles about trauma, scrolling through strangers’ advice at 2 a.m., counting my breaths like loose change. None of it helped. The susto had lodged itself not just in my mind, but in the quiet places behind my heart where doctors don’t look. Night terrors came like unwelcome visitors, heavy-footed and familiar, and I woke up with my jaw aching from the effort of keeping myself together. I could feel my spirit fraying first, then my body, then whatever part of me used to make good decisions.

In that unraveling, a single thought rose up: I need my mother.

The thought was almost embarrassing in its simplicity. I was grown, past the age when you’re supposed to call your mother to fix things, but the need did not care about age or pride. It moved my limbs for me. I got out of bed in Superior, Arizona, in air that tasted like desert dust and old heartbreak, put on whatever clothes were near the edge of the bed, and stepped outside. My car felt like a raft; I barely knew how to steer. The drive to my mother’s house stretched longer than miles, pulled tight with the weight of everything I didn’t want to say out loud.

By the time I stood at her doorstep, I was more shadow than person: dehydrated from crying, hollowed out, trembling with a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep. I knocked once, the sound thin and unsure. The door opened almost immediately, as if she had been standing on the other side the whole time, hand already on the knob, waiting for some signal only she could hear.

She took one look at me and didn’t ask a single question.

Her eyes moved over my face the way her hands used to move over a pot of beans, checking without fuss, knowing by scent and steam what needed to be done. She stepped aside, and the house exhaled around her. I crossed the threshold, that invisible border where the city’s noise thinned and my mother’s world began: the murmur of a TV in another room, the smell of old wood and coffee, the faint sweetness of something floral underlying it all, like a memory that refused to leave.

Without ceremony, she guided me toward the sofa with a gentle pressure at the back of my shoulder, the way you guide a child who is sleepwalking. “Siéntate,” she said softly. I wept in her arms; she wept with me. Sit. Then, a moment later, “No, mijo, acuéstate.” Lie down. Her voice carried the quiet authority of women who raised children, grandchildren, and plants on very little money and a lot of stubbornness.

I lay down, body heavy, heart buzzing with static. Words spilled out of me, jagged and disorganized: the breakup, the way the relationship had rotted from the inside out, my shame, my anger, the ways I had tried to numb it with distractions that only made me sicker. I told her about the night terrors, how I woke up choking on grief, how sometimes I felt my spirit hovering somewhere above my body, unwilling to come back. I told her about the susto of a broken heart, the shock that doesn’t show up on any medical report, the way it makes you forget your own name.

She listened the way the desert listens to rain clouds: without interrupting, without impatient advice, just a deep, steady attention that makes room for storms. Her face did not twist in judgment or panic. It stayed open, serious, a little sad, as if she had been expecting this storm for some time.

When I ran out of words, she nodded once, like a doctor confirming what she already knew. Then she left the room without explanation.

I heard the small sounds of her bedroom opening: the creak of her dresser, the faint clink of glass on glass, the whisper of fabric as she moved her apron aside. In that room, she kept the family pharmacy, the altar, and the conversations with saints who didn’t need phone lines. Her bedroom was where medicine and prayer shared a single language.

She returned with her arms full of light.

In one hand: a Virgen de Guadalupe candle, her green-blue mantle already haloed in wax drips from other emergencies. In the other: a candle of San Francisco, the saint who shares a name with the city that had just broken my heart. She set them down around the sofa, building a small perimeter of flame and glass. When she lit them, the room shifted. Shadows leaped onto the walls, my dark thoughts suddenly given shape and movement, climbing and twisting in the flicker like they were trying to flee my body and didn’t know where to go.

“It’s going to be ok, Mijo,” my mother murmured to no one and to everything.

From the pocket of her apron, she pulled out a small tin, dented and worn, the kind that once might have held cheap candies or mints before it was promoted to something holier. She opened it, and the smell rose up—sharp, resinous, green-brown, and ancient. The scent of rain on desert rock. The scent of childhood baths with steam curling up from the tub. The scent of hands that have always known what to do when there is no money for a doctor and too much fear in the house.

Creosote.

It sat heavy in the air, that smell, like an old auntie settling into the room, rolling up her sleeves, ready to work. This was not a scented candle approximation of “desert rain”; this was the plant itself, condensed into salve, carrying in its body the memory of every storm it had ever witnessed.

She scooped some of the salve out with her fingers and warmed it between her hands, rubbing palm against palm until the heat pulled up even more of the scent. Then she began.

First, my chest. Her hands moved in slow, deliberate circles over my heart, pressing just enough to remind my spirit there was still a body here worth returning to. The salve was cool at first, then warmed with each pass, seeping into my skin, the creosote traveling down through muscle and bone, seeking out the hairline fractures in me. She hummed under her breath, a tune older than any song on the radio, something passed down between women while they sorted beans or peeled chili in doorways at dusk.

Then my shoulders, where I carried the weight of old guilt and newer disappointments. Her fingers kneaded away the tightness, the way you work dough that has refused to rise. She did not rush. She had survived poverty, migration, men, and illness; she knew better than to rush healing.

She moved to my neck, my arms, my hands, each finger getting its own attention, as if she were counting rosary beads made of bone and flesh instead of glass. She rubbed the salve into my feet, pressing the points that made me gasp, that sudden bright pain that feels like a door opening. Creosote sank into the soles that had walked away from San Francisco, into the arches that were tired of carrying everything alone.

As she worked, she spoke, not to me, but above me, around me.

“Virgencita, ayúdame con mi nino,” she whispered. Little Virgin, help me with my son. “San Francisco, tú que sabes de caminos y ciudades, acomódale el corazón.” Saint Francis, you who know about roads and cities, help arrange his heart. Her words moved through the room like birds, landing on the candles, perching in the shadows, circling over my body.

Then her voice shifted, reaching further back.

“Abuela, Abuelita, todas ustedes,” she called quietly. “Ayúdenme. Su nieto está cansado.” Grandmother, Great Grandmother, all of you, look at him. Help me. Your grandson is tired.

I felt them before I saw them: a change in temperature, a softening at the edges of the room. The air thickened the way it does right before a monsoon, when the sky lowers itself to eye level. The sofa became a small altar, a bed in a village far from here, a pallet on a dirt floor where a child once lay with a fever, and a woman with my great-grandmother’s hands mixed herbs in a chipped enamel bowl.

My great-grandmother’s presence slid in like a familiar scent, one I had never consciously known but carried anyway. I could almost see her: apron tied over her long skirt, her long silver hair braided down her back, creosote drying on a line in some border-town backyard where chickens scratched the earth. She knew this plant as a protector and purifier, boiled in water to wash wounds, crushed and mixed with fat to draw out pain. She had used it on babies with coughs, on men with bad backs, on women whose hearts had broken and needed to keep working anyway because the tortillas were not going to make themselves.

Next to her, my grandmother Guadalupe, rosary in hand, lips moving around prayers that skipped across time zones and generations. She had lit her own candles in cramped kitchens, asking saints to guard her children in a country that mispronounced their names and eyed them with suspicion. She knew creosote as a shield, a line drawn around the house against bad spirits, a bitter tea sipped slowly when the body needed courage.

They stood with my mother now, shoulder to shoulder, a line of women spanning deserts and decades, all of them with the same stubborn set to their mouths, the same insistence that poverty might dictate the size of their house but never the reach of their medicine.

My mother rubbed more salve into my chest, her thumbs pressing into the soft space between ribs where grief likes to nest. “Santo Niño de Atocha, Santa Marta, San Judas,” she murmured, the saints rolling out of her like a litany, each one an old coworker she’d called in for another overtime shift. “Mis abuelas, mis tías, todas las que saben, vengan. Pónganle paz en el corazón. Regrésenle su espíritu.”

Give him peace in his heart. Return his spirit.

The creosote listened. Plants always listen, even when we pretend they don’t.

The salve warmed and then cooled, leaving behind that unmistakable smell: wet earth, green resin, the first breath after rain hits hot pavement. My thoughts, until then a blur of regret and longing, began to slow, each one stepping forward to be seen, then dissolving like steam. My lungs, which had been tight and shallow for months, began to stretch, to remember what it was like to pull in air without bracing for impact. She wiped my tears as she kissed my forehead and told me "Mijo, tears are medicine, let them flow."

I slept, I cried, I wept.

I slept in a way that felt less like rest and more like surrender. Three days folded themselves around me, soft and dark, while my mother kept vigil. I sometimes woke to the sound of her moving in the kitchen, the clink of a spoon against a pot, the small whoosh of the candle being relit as it drowned itself in its own wax tears. Each time I surfaced, she would feed me caldo, then her hands would find me again, reapplying the salve, whispering to her saints, to her grandmothers, to the plant itself.

Creosote did what it has always done: it remembered.

Where I had forgotten what peace felt like, the plant knew. Where my body had forgotten how to be safe in itself, the plant knew. It carried in its leaves the memory of storms survived, of dry seasons endured, of roots holding on in poor soil while everything conspired to call that soil empty. It remembered the prayers my great-grandmother muttered as she stirred salves in tin cups. It remembered the nights my grandmother blew out candles in tiny bedrooms, trusting that the smoke would carry her worries upward. It remembered my mother’s tired knees on tile floors, her hands learning the exact pressure to soothe a child’s cough, a teenager’s panic, grown sons and daughters, and her own heartbreak.

When I finally woke fully on the third day, the room looked almost the same. The candles had burned down, wax thick around their bases like melted time. The shadows on the wall were softer, less frantic. My mother sat in a nearby chair, head bowed, hands folded, not in pious prayer but in the brief, practical rest of someone who knows the work is never really done.

I took a breath. A full one.

The crack in my chest was still there; heartbreak doesn’t vanish just because you sleep and pray and rub plants into your skin. But something had changed. The edges of the crack were no longer raw and jagged. They had been washed clean by three days of creosote and whispered names. The susto had loosened its grip, my spirit inching back into place, wary but willing.

I looked at my mother, at the candles, at the small tin of salve on the table, its lid smeared with green-brown fingerprints from her work.

“What did you put in it?” I asked, my voice hoarse with sleep and salt.

She shrugged, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Lo de siempre,” she said. The usual. Then, after a beat, “Creosote. Un poco de esto, un poco de aquello. Tus bisabuelas me ayudaron.”

The usual. A little of this, a little of that. Your great-grandmothers helped me.

It was not a joke.

In that moment, I knew this was our lineage, written not in official documents or framed diplomas, but in the way my mother’s hands moved over my body with plant medicine. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, all of them had stood in small rooms like this, mixing leaves and oil, calling down saints and ancestors, refusing to let sorrow have the last word. Creosote had been there with each of them, the quiet witness in the corner, the rain that remembers.

I pressed my fingers into the salve, lifted them to my nose, and inhaled deeply. The scent wrapped around the broken places inside me like a shawl.

Somewhere, far beyond walls and city lines, the desert breathed with me. Years later, I now know that once things collapse, everything that is supposed to "be"  falls into place. 

in "beauty'....jeffrey

"In Mexican and broader Latin American traditions, susto is 'fright sickness,' a culturally specific illness believed to occur when a sudden scare or trauma causes the soul or vital essence to separate from the body, leading to emotional, physical, and spiritual imbalance. Susto is deeply tied to Indigenous worldviews of the Americas, especially Mesoamerican and Andean traditions, and only later braided with Spanish colonial Catholic ideas."

My mother, may she rest in "Beauty"  in front of our altar we built together for "Dia de La Virgen de Guadalupe" 

My Great Grandmother Natalia Lopez Trujillo, who raised my mother. 

jsf