you buy yourself your own sazon

you bought yourself your own sazon. online shopping, ordering groceries for delivery. seasonings aisle. it caught your eye. 

you bought it, unpacked it, set it on the shelf next to the paprika and the curry, next to the browning your grandmother gave you from a batch she made four months ago. or was it five? 

you watch the sazon on the shelf: orange and tan, pale pink, yellow logo. you imagine your hands as your mother’s hands; washing the chicken, cleaning the tendons, rubbing it thoroughly with the seasoning. get under the skin, a memory says. it sounds like your mother's voice. 

in a minute, your hands are tinted orange, and they smell like salt. resist the urge to lick them but wonder if the red dirt of home tastes like sazon. 

put the chicken in the oven and bake at three-fifty degrees for at least twenty minutes. turn it over. twenty minutes more. check if you can pull the meat from the bone with just a gentle touch. try not to cry when it’s still a little pink inside at your tug. 15 more minutes. you sit and watch the chicken grow slowly brown in the oven and think of that story by Sandra Ciseneros. you think of how much you hate that story. manage to somehow get the chicken out before it was too dry, but you realize it’s not like mom’s. 

yet as you sit on the floor (because you haven’t bought furniture yet), you think it’s pretty good for your first chicken in your first apartment 2,000 miles away from home. 

you call your mother and you tell her you bought sazon. 

the walls feel a little warmer with the sound of her laugh.