Kiara Huertas ‘14
Major: Creative Writing
Minor: Religion
Hometown: Waterbury, CT
To an Ex-lover
We are not bombs waiting to
explode beneath each other’s feet,
scattering limbs until I cannot
tell where my frame ends and yours begins.
Neither are we paintings waiting
to be finished by the next artist that passes.
And while I may be like a fruit
spoiled by sun on a windowsill,
I hear my own cry beginning to
rise from rubble,
baby girl, no one can ever steal
your shine.
I still look upward as if the
sky could exonerate me.
***
Imagine this: every time you come across something in
life that you want to remember, you pull out a post-it note and scribble down
details about it. You might scribble down a nice thing that someone said about
you. Maybe you record a sentence or two about that one moment, when the sun
shined on water so perfectly, you couldn’t help but think of the most recent
conversation with your schizophrenic mother—when she didn’t sound crazy. Maybe
you scribble about the first time you realized your best friend was no longer
your friend, but you don’t write on the post-it that your friend isn’t your
friend anymore because you haven’t learned that yet.
Instead, you describe the quick flicker in her eyes
that you might have missed but didn’t. You don’t write anything more about the
flicker either, you just write that it was there, and what it looked like, but
not what it meant. You’re not ready to discuss such things yet.
Eventually
you start to color code your post-it notes. You scribble down the things that
you remember fondly on the pink post-it notes. On the blue ones, anything that
feels like tears, or anger, or all the times that a white person responded to
the rolled r in your last name with: I have a good friend that’s Mexican. On
the yellow ones, you write the things you haven’t quite decided how to feel
about, like prep school, which ultimately equipped you with more words and more
ways to use them to depict all of these moments, but also inspired more than a
few of the blue post-it notes.
Imagine
now that your room is overflowing with post-it notes. They are on the walls and
the bed post. They are on your desk and computer, and covering the whole window
so that you can’t see sun, or rain, or people walking by. There are so many
post-it notes that you’ve even filled your underwear drawer, so you resolve
that you have to do something with them. You have to be able to open the window
without fearing that some of your post-it notes will fly away before you can
make them something beautiful. So you sit Indian-legged in the center of your
room and start peeling away at the post-it notes that you can reach first. They
aren’t necessarily the most compelling post-it notes, but they are the ones
that you can grab without rising. You don’t know exactly what to do with these
post-it notes, but you know you’re not ready to rise again and you don’t.
Now
that you’ve started to read the post-it notes, you begin to cry over them,
making ink trails between them. Suddenly it hits you: you’re not crying over
any single post-it note but at the joy of having them…to remember. The thing
is, as you remember, you don’t look at the post-it notes the same way. You
decide that they don’t do enough for the memories, and you need to record them
in a way that surpasses scribbled, abrupt words. So you begin to string post-it
notes together on a page. The page is longer and wider, so you weigh it down
with words too heavy for post-it notes. You use words in a way that makes you
ache so thoroughly that it doesn’t feel like pain; it feels like metaphors
spilling from rooftops because the clouds got too heavy to hold them (that’s
the best way you can describe it anyway). This is the joy of writing:
deliberately placing post-it note memories onto a page so that those words don’t
just sit where you stuck them. They fly now from mind, to mouth, to ear, to
soul, and back again, and the movement is so great, so unsettling, and
grounding, that you stay right there, on the middle of your floor,
Indian-legged, and you breathe the breath of someone just trying to take it all
in.
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