I only have three clear memories regarding splinters. The first, my mom, my brother, and I were at a park in the valley I grew up in. I remember there being a lot of ducks, my brother’s favorite. Beyond the park was just dirt and Joshua trees; we were past even Avenue J all the way out there. In retrospect, anywhere could’ve been classified as a liminal space in that high desert. I don’t remember how, but my brother got a splinter in his finger. We went back to the car and my mom pulled out her tweezers from a side compartment in the passenger car door, where they lived alongside every single other emergency item imaginable. Prepared for anything, like always. This was my first time ever seeing a splinter and its removal, I think; I was weirdly struck by the whole event and my brother was crying. The second, my mom was teaching me how to make Mexican hot chocolate. We use either Abuelita’s hot chocolate or Ibarra’s, both paper packaged nice and yellow and round. My grandpa’s family, for generations, was actually the one making the hot chocolate discs for the whole town, back in Michoacán. And we use a wooden tool called a molinillo to froth up the milk, rubbing and spinning it back and forth. So here I was, quite young, up late at night, and standing next to boiling milk on the stovetop with my mom. I remember looking at our molinillo, made and bought in Mexico and unpolished and decades old, worrying that I would get a splinter. I didn’t fully trust my mom’s reassurances at the time— I was and still am convinced that all of her fingertips and palm sensation has burned off in her decades of cooking. (She was right though. I didn’t get one.) The third, most recent, I was packing up my room after finishing my first year at college. Having worked the Alum’s Reunion celebrations job (I gotta afford my plane tickets somehow, right?), I had cleaned several dozen other students’ rooms and thus knew how much work it would be for the next person to clean mine. It was hot, and there was no AC, but I heard my mom’s voice in the back of my head, reminding me to clean up after myself. So I took a pack of cleaning wipes to the edges of my floorboards, right where they met the wall, wiping hard and fast as I had to leave the next day and still had half my suitcase unpacked. Who’d have thought that the 100+ year old house would have imperfect carpentry? I ended up swiping a long sharp splinter deep into my finger. It didn’t bleed, which made it hurt even more. I bought a round of Abuelita’s hot chocolate when I first got to college, almost two years ago. I haven’t made any yet; I haven’t even opened the packaging. But it sits on my bookshelf, right at home next to the tea my mom sends me. I do drink that though— I don’t have a molinillo here. I think about what tree was used to make ours at home. I think about my grandpa working on the cacao farm at 8 years old. I think about my mom’s hands, about how many splinters she’s ever gotten and which ones she remembers. I think about the 3 hour time difference and 2600 miles. I think about all of this, and I decide to add a fourth splinter to the list.