I recently wrote about exchanging pieces of ourselves with others as a form of adoration. It made me think: what parts of me originally belonged to someone else? What parts of others who are not around anymore will I always carry? I remember seeing a video about mosaics, how every person is just a mosaic of a million others. I remember thinking to myself that couldn’t possibly be me, but my Aquarius sun has a habit of making myself out to be far more unique than I ever was.
I’ll start simple. I mispronounce some words on purpose because my best friend mispronounces them without meaning to. I say the word Tupperware like Tubberware because I spent so much time around her it just rubbed off. Every single time I read the word queue I call it a “kwee”. Mischievous will always be “miss-chee-vee-us”. Triscuits will always be “tris-quits”.
I’ve stolen a lot of her habits, like the way I walk when I’m around her. I swing my hips a little more to keep up with her. I always put on an extra layer of blush because she’s always said that it’s the first thing to go when you start to sweat your makeup off. She also says there could never be too much of it, and who am I to deny her, or excess?
My favorite number is 43 because in September of my sophomore year, my seven friends and I decided to name our friend group the ‘7eductive 7exy 7even’. The name is long, and to shorten it we did some easy math, finding that seven to the third power is 343. Since that early fall day, I’ve never stopped seeing that number. It follows me like a ghost, and those friends, though I still cherish them, aren’t as close to me as that number is anymore. I miss them every day, I am reminded of them every day. I’ll carry a piece of them with me every single day.
With every 43 I come across, a memory of girlhood returns.
43. The house we’d always spend our Fridays at, how we’d sit at the dining table and eat our weight in cheese bread. 43. Driving to a pizza place and flirting with the pizza boys behind the glass panel. 43. Losing one of the seven and remaining a tight knit unit of six. 43. Missing the 7th’s presence but never admitting it. 43. Laughing with our guy friends and arguing over who got to ride shotgun in the Mustang or the Porsche one of the boys drove. 43. The last moments we were really close, each sitting in our car and hanging out in a cul-de-sac dozens of feet apart mid-pandemic. We were never really the same after that, our group chat was once a lush garden and is now a barren desert. Our memories are saved but never really treasured.
43 means something to me, and though I don’t know if it still follows the other girls the way it does me, I can always count on the fact that there was a point in time where it did, and 43 tied us together.
Whenever I arrive at a new place and I need to mop the floor, I put holy water in the bucket because my mother always does. I do the same thing on holidays. I’m not even that religious.
I always wear some sort of white on New Years. It was my mother’s friend, Shirley, that pushed that agenda on a family trip to Cartagena before the pandemic. She said everyone was to be in white, that wearing black and dark colors would only bring darkness into the new year. 2020 took a turn, but wearing white and dancing the year away in a limestone alcove with my friends and family gave me a sense of hope I hadn’t felt in awhile. I try to recreate the magic of that new year with an homage to the dress code Shirley forced in the 3 years that have passed since then.
There was a massive oak tree in the driveway of my first home in Miami, and it created a wave of pollen that lasted the whole year. Every morning on the ride to school, I’d sneeze twice, and without fail, my father would announce “It’s a morning!”. The days I didn’t sneeze right away, he’d watch me expectantly, as if my allergies were the only thing that could kick start his day. I would force a sneeze, and then another, and laugh at his reaction every time. We don’t live in the house with the oak tree anymore, I don’t live at home anymore, but whenever I sneeze twice in a row, I tell myself it’s a morning.
When I see fireworks I’m reminded of my grandfather. When my cousins and I were little, he’d give us backpacks full of fireworks and set us walking down the streets to sell them to cars stuck in traffic jams. Safe? No. Memorable? Undeniably so. I’ve never been afraid of explosions for this reason. Fireworks are just a manifestation of the endless amount of chaos he brings, whether it's the good or bad kind. I don’t tell him I love him as often as I should, but whenever I hear fireworks, I close my eyes, hold my breath, and listen to the boom. I smile. I hear him in every blast.
I don’t like chocolate, but every single time I see my paternal grandmother I make sure to have some. I grew up with her and the bottomless jar of chocolates at the table beside the door. It doesn’t matter if it was milk, or dark, if there were almonds, or jam, or rice cakes folded into the chocolate, all that matters is that she smiles when she sees me reach into the jar before I walk out the door.
The one thing my mother has always told me is that we should never go to sleep angry. I don’t get angry a lot, but I get angry enough. I’ll always lick my wounds and re-open them in the morning if it means going to sleep knowing the last thing I said to someone was I love you.
Whenever I’m home, I don’t leave the house without telling my parents goodbye. Whenever my dad would drive me to school the last thing he asked me before we left out the door was whether or not I gave my mother a kiss as she slept upstairs. When I started driving to school, I made sure to say goodbye to both of them, and I started asking my sister the same question when it came time for us to ride together.
There was one morning that I was in a bad mood and my sister noticed. She asked me if I was sleeping on the right side of the bed, and ever since then I can only sleep on the right side of the bed. I might not wake up happier, but at least I always wake up on the right side.
I had a friend that would always write her essays on purple paper because she thought it made her more efficient. I started writing mine on pink paper to see if she was right, and now I get them done twice as quickly.
I remember the way her poodles would stand on their hind legs for minutes on end, how the tile in her pool looked like glitter, how my friends snuck onto her roof and how her mother screamed at them after. I remember skateboarding in the wooden halls of her house, making cupcakes in the smaller kitchen with a view of the golf course she lived on. I remember how she taught me how to straighten her hair, and how she told me when you curl the ends in you look like a first lady. I always curl the ends of my hair if I can.
I haven’t spoken to her since I was 15. The way I shake hands comes from a coworker of my father’s, who told me I had a weak shake. He made me shake his hand a dozen times before he told me the reason it was weak– I didn’t look him in the eye the first eleven.
I always close the windows if there’s an animal in the room because when I lived in France for a summer, the woman I stayed with told me it was bad luck to let an animal’s energy float away. I don’t know if she meant that or if she was afraid of her cat jumping off the seventh story’s windowsill, but either way, it’s stuck.
I’ve never worn red lipstick, but I always keep one in my makeup bag because my mother said that if there’s one thing that you should always have in your artillery, it’s Ruby Woo.
My mother also said I should always have a pen on me, so I keep one in the pockets of everything I own.
To clarify: Ruby Woo, then a pen. Priorities, people.
There are a billion things that others have bestowed on me. I am nothing without the people around me and the things they’ve given me. I could name more things from more people, and I probably will, but for now, I’ll leave you with this.
Thank you. You've made me, whether you meant to or not.