Selections from "Things That Make Me Feel Human"

After Sandra Cisneros

Written December 16, 2020 – February 6, 2021

I. Grandfather

Michael is seventy-one & when I talk to him it feels like I’m talking to my grandfather—smiles like a black hole, smiles & you can forget the world. I call myself a writer & yet my words escape me when I talk to him because he reminds me of someone too much like me. Grandfather, who’s an ocean away, who makes me feel small because he knows physics & once smuggled a coconut from a foreign country. Grandfather, who knows how the world works, who I saw a sliver of in Michael’s toothless triangular smile, like a fallen star fragment glistening in someone else’s eyes an ocean apart. Whom I called but could not bring myself to talk to, only conversing with in wordless Bach sonatas. Who, not understanding—yet wanting to—listens.

II. Windows

It was what expansiveness felt like, if expansiveness can be felt at all. So much feeling & music in a single stretch of sky, that elusive blue indigo thing like a fresco hanging above the world. We reach for it not knowing that its children live among us, not knowing that when we climb to pick at its stars, it bubbles beneath our feet. Mom was closing windows at 6pm & when the last shutter hit the windowsill I knew what it feels like, to be so full yet contained. I could fill this home with more than a thousand of my own bodies but the sky’s child, dwelling in my room & leaking out every time I open my door, seeking refuge through an open window, makes the walls turgid. I knew I wanted to swim in it & let it take me far, far, away, picking stars & laughing at how small the world looks from above.

III. After Esperanza

I live in a room covered with pea-green stripes. Green is good for your eyes, they said, so I picked green in sixth grade & couldn't get rid of it ever since. In this house, I do many things. Sometimes, I knit when I’m bored, & sometimes, I let my eyes wander to the ceiling. Sometimes at Northglen, the asbestos ceiling became a sky full of stars, each carcinogenic lump the start of a constellation. In that way, I let myself dream. But my ceiling at Hendy is cream white & smooth like ivory. No stars, no constellations, just a clear night sky. That's how I know, someday, I will leave Hendy the way I left Northglen. & when I leave, it’ll just be me.

IV. My neighbor

After a while, I decided not to erase the moment. As a first-grader I swallowed the memory whole, let it transpire like sweat. We talked about your passing at the mall that day, hushed, Mom holding a shopping bag from Gymboree, the news swimming through my eardrums. I remember feeling nothing, the word funeral at the back of my throat, meaningless. It felt like I never knew you, & now it has been ten years & somehow I’ve lost it all—I've lost something I've never known before. Now I do not remember your face & the second-grade yearbook is all I have left of your eyes but I won’t look because for some reason I believe that if I open it, if I look for you after all these years, you won’t be there. It'll just be your second-grade picture warped, infinitely consuming light like a black hole, expired. & today I would rather forget than remember your emptiness.

V. Purple flowers, my daughter's name

Some homes in this neighborhood are blessed. Which is another way to say that they have purple flowers growing in their backyard, in the tiny space between their garage & their trash bins. I imagine the flowers would be lonely, growing in such a place like that. With nobody to love them except me. That’s why I always take a good look at every flower when I pass by them. So beautiful, so purple, so vibrantly violet I can’t take my eyes off of their petals. & when they fall on the floor, my mom has to remind me not to pick them off of the ground, because they could have coronavirus & you’re not taking that home. When I grow up, I’ll have a backyard filled with purple flowers. Lavender, princess flowers, lilac, wisteria, all of it. I’ll have a purple wedding & the ballroom will be covered in purple petals. My daughter will be named Bora in Korean & Violet in English. She will be queen of purple, queen of the most beautiful thing in the world.