I constantly have to fight with her placing her image in front of my mirror. I constantly have to push her aside to accept a compliment.

I constantly wonder when the day will come that I can understand that I’m beautiful,

and I more often wonder when someone else telling me the same will stop sounding foreign.

I was throughly a part of my sister’s wedding this past weekend, and I wasn’t out-of-body or shocked from amazement- I was crying because it was so beautiful, and I felt so grounded, so in the moment, so exuberantly happy and calm for her, that I didn’t know what to do with myself.

It is something to be cherished, when you see that two people can love eachother as much as my sister and her now husband do. It is something to be celebrated and reiterated a million times, with a million thank you’s and kisses.

After the evening was done, my sister married, shipped off to Hawaii, I sat in my room, calm, done, praying to God to let everyone who wants to experience the feeling of being called husband and wife, husband and husband, or wife and wife, be able to do so, in some capacity that makes them feel whole and human.

Sylvia, my best friend in college, had that cool factor young gawky girls from the country always seek. It never helped my envy when I took the time to realize that she ironically was a gawky girl from the country, too, but only in the way that is great and unachievable to other rural bumpkins like me. She wore beautiful scarves all the time, and silver jewelry, and had a laugh like Lana Turner. She oozed out luxury and sex in all the best ways; she was independent, bright, whimsical, and generally in the know about everything before you could even think it. I don’t know why I’m writing of her like none of this isn’t still true; completely opposite, in fact. Her confident and oh-so-Sylvia aura has only grown since I met her on an orientation bus trip in downtown Santa Cruz at the tender age of 18. I was the awkward virgin that, in so many ways, wanted experience, and she- well, she was the guru I adhered myself to in order to learn for the next four years.

Sylvia and I had our share of escapades. We had adventures all over Northern California, and spent nearly every day together in early Santa Cruz months, explaining our philosophies, our lost loves, our dreams, our realities. Some of my best moments in those years were with her, sitting at the Stevenson Cafe, drinking iced tea, laughing about life. She often brought up her desire to get a tattoo around her ankle from her all time favorite story, The English Patient, and recited the quote to me so often that it essentially became tattooed on my own skin.

This afternoon, as I sat at my desk, gazing at the sunny day outside, the quote drew up like a fast wind into my thoughts. I recited it, slowly, smiling, recollecting Sylvia, and pleasant moments, though at the time, they seemed hectic and frenzied-for different reasons, to be sure-but their aftertaste now reads to me as simple and lovely.

Life always manages to seem dreamy when it’s been removed from reality for a while, but it is safe to say that those days were quite dreamy even when they were reality.

We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we’ve entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we’ve hidden in – like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Where the real countries are. Not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.

-The English Patient

Sylvia is on my map.

Who’s on yours?

xx, Christy

I’m a Mac. PC life just doesn’t cut it.

My Aunts, Dad, sister and I would all arrive in the backyard those Saturdays, climbing up the cherry red painted cement porch, through the security screen door, and into the avocado-toned kitchen, full of sweet delights of all shapes and sizes. I’d pass her collection of antique tea cups and race over to the candy jar, finding artificial orange taffy peanuts in the canister, and just like the cups lining the counter, thoroughly enjoying the crunch of the foam once my teeth met their surface.

The Aunts would bring Malfatti from the local liquor store. Mal fatti, I found out later, much later, in a college Italian class, comes from mal meaning bad, or poor, and fatti, from the verb fare, to make. Badly made. They are sausage link-shaped ravioli that have been rejected as traditional, mixed with spinach and bolognese sauce with mushrooms, and cooked in a non-traditional kitchen in the back of a liquor store in Napa called Lawler’s Liquors.  Why a liquor store made Italian home-grown cookin’, I didn’t ask until I was in my twenties. All I ever knew in my childhood was malfatti. My otherwise delicate, thin, and appetite suppressed Aunts drooled over the plastic bins it arrived in every Saturday, and I came to love the smell of malfatti sauce in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of loving food: It reminded me of you, Grandma. It reminds me still of you, and your soft laugh. Your ring finger on your right hand that was bent from one summer when a mattress fell on it; your curled hair that you had washed and styled only once a week at Glamorama salon. Malfatti might mean badly made, but nothing else in your life ever seemed to be.

Years after our malfatti Saturdays came to a close, after you were laid down beside Papa Chris in Tulocay cemetery, I still remember those smells, that laughter, and you, each morning the weekend begins. I often want to order a vat of malfatti from the liquor store off Jefferson Street, but never bring myself to do it; malfatti to me just symbolizes family, and ordering it alone doesn’t feel right.

I tell you the first thing I’m going to do, Grandma,when I have a home, and people to fill it. I’ll make my own malfatti, and know that each time I do, you’ll be in the kitchen with us. I’ll make it as much as I can manage, because I know that.

http://napavalleyregister.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_f1e0cd06-8e35-11df-bbbd-001cc4c002e0.html

One spot of light emerged from the midmorning’s clouds and shone through our bedroom window, landing directly underneath the arch of your eyebrow. I kissed you awake three times, knowing full well a smile was the best I could hope for. Your alertness does not falter summer or winter. It always remains in a state much dissimilar to my own. I love you for it.

I crawl out of bed to make some coffee.

The spot of light that had found you asleep has now disappeared, and I am left in the quiet of our kitchen, dimly lit, scooping coffee from the grinder and hearing a satisfying sigh of the french press, as I watch the grounds shimmy their way into the water. I grab my abandoned reading from the morning before, page marked via a ring from yesterday’s coffee mug, and began to scribble out lecture notes.

You stumble out, sliding your toes against the hardwood floor, peeking around the corner.

“Did I smell coffee?” you ask, hopeful, desperate.

“Cup’s on the counter,” I reply, ” but a thank you to the chef is required upon consumption.”

The clouds moved and swayed in unison with the wind outside. A patch of sun shone through the windows, placing itself on my left shoulder.

You leaned down and kissed it.

“I go where the sun leads me,” you said.