The Dust Doesn’t Settle Here

No one talks about "el rancho."

Not in town, not even in whispers. The road that once led to it is half-swallowed by mesquite and dust, like the land itself is trying to forget. But I can still see the outline of the gate when I close my eyes- the rusted arch, the crooked wire fence, the silence that wasn’t really silence at all.

“I don’t know where the wind is taking me,” I whisper, staring down the dirt road. “I can’t go back. It disappeared.”

People say the wind carries memories out here. That it knows things. That it saw things. When it rushes through the dry fields, it sometimes sounds like voices. But maybe that’s just what happens when you’ve lost too much and said too little.

They took my name first.

Not with a gun, not with a shout—but with a clipboard, a look, a number. I was fifteen. Maybe sixteen. I stopped counting after the gates closed behind me and the sun disappeared. Not just behind clouds—gone. As if the land swallowed it whole, just like it did with the others.

We were told not to speak. Not to remember. They made us repeat numbers, rules, codes. They watched our skin blister under the sun and our silence. Some nights, they took one of us. Some nights, the wind did.

I think I forgot my voice before I forgot my name.

“All my certainties in the wind,” I write in a notebook no one will read. “I don’t know how to go back to who I was. I want to erase all those marks, those shadows behind me. I can’t go back to who I was. It disappeared, and if I did, it would never be the same.”

Sometimes I wonder if I even existed before the rancho. If that boy who wore his sister’s red ribbon on his wrist and danced in the rain was just a dream, I had during one of the nights I wasn’t allowed to sleep.

They said it was for science. For progress. For something bigger than us. But all I saw was how easily they broke a body. How quickly they tore the soul from it.

They built new names for us. New truths. New wounds. I still carry them, like ash in my lungs.

The nights were loud.

Not with music, not with joy—loud with metal against bone, with screams swallowed by walls too thick for mercy. The dogs barked until they bled from the throat. We’d flinch at silence more than at noise, because silence meant it was your turn.

They said we were lucky. That we’d been chosen for something higher. That we had to earn the right to rest. We dug trenches that led nowhere. Hauled bricks that crumbled in our hands. They took our blood, our breath, our dreams.

At some point, I forgot what pain was. Not because it stopped, but because it never did. It became the language we spoke. The only truth that stayed.

One boy used to hum while he worked. Just under his breath, barely a sound. They took him too. After that, we hummed inside ourselves, where they couldn’t reach.

And now that I’m out—or whatever this is—I lie awake under skies too big, too empty, and whisper:

“Please tell me the ending. Please tell me how it all ends.

Tell me if there's a happy ending.

Tell me where will I lay down.

Tell me the end.”

Because I don’t know where to go. The wind took everything. My voice. My people. My name. The ones who called me brother. The ones who held my hand when they made us watch.

I am dying to go back.

I am dying to be that boy again.

But I know—I know—

I won’t make it back the same.

There’s this sound—I can’t tell you if it was a song or just the wind on the hills back home. But it plays in my head sometimes, soft like my mother’s hand on my hair. There’s a color too—not quite red, not quite gold—something like the dress my sister wore the day we caught fireflies and promised never to grow old.

That’s all I have. A sound. A color. A maybe.

Sometimes I see them—my family—waiting for me at the old gate, the one that creaks when you lean on it. My father shading his eyes. My mother holding something warm in her hands. My brother sitting on the fence, already calling my name before I cross the road.

So tonight, I wrap myself in my own shadow. The sky above me is too quiet. The wind is too kind. I can’t bear it.

“I shall better go to sleep for a bit,” I whisper, “to see them again.”

You and I know it.

There’s no soft ending to something like this. No gentle conclusion. We thought there was—we prayed, we marched, we wrote names on walls—but after knowing this… after hearing what the ground remembers… I wonder if there was ever a chance.

A chance to change.

An opportunity to shift the path we’re on.

To say “no más”, and have the world actually listen.

But maybe that chance died the same way we did—silently, beneath the sun, with a number where our name used to be.

There are places where the reality fades.

Vultures indicate death in these places.

We turn into names.

Eternal photographs with names.

People shouting our names.

Mothers shouting our names.

Because they attack the core values.

They don’t just take bodies—they take what held us together.

They attack the most important thing in Mexican culture: family.

They break them.

And mothers—mothers must stand up and look at death straight in the eye.

They dig with their bare hands.

They raise crosses in dry fields.

They memorize teeth, scars, the shape of a nail.

They become warriors for the dead—because no one else will.

And what about them?

The ones who search?

The ones who still believe that one day the phone will ring, or the gate will creak open, and we’ll be standing there, thinner, maybe—but alive?

They live in doubt, in a purgatory that doesn’t end. Their prayers hang unanswered in the air. Their eyes scan every crowd, every headline, every unidentified photograph.

Without notice, their heaven left them.

And our memories? They linger as shadows in their hearts.

Fading, changing, never certain.

Were we taken? Were we still fighting? Did we whisper their names before the end?

They do not know.

And maybe not knowing is its own kind of death.

They hold on to fragments—birth certificates, school photos, half-sent messages—like rosaries. As if they believe hard enough, we might still return, whole.

But the truth is, we are not whole.

We are stories buried in silence.

We are bones scattered in fields.

We are dust that doesn’t settle.