The earrings of …. (o: Tres aretes)

by Ximena Prieto

When Tía Ayari wrote to me, she said we cannot control the chaos, but we can express that from which we are all made. 

What are we made of, more than grasped belief and yearning?

Objects, memories… appearing, vanishing, reappearing, perhaps all they want is to remind us of what we once craved and forgot to treasure, of how quickly craving turns to residue. 

Please remember this. I have seen it many times. You may have seen it many more times.

Tell me, how many is many to you?

When I was a girl, my mother and grandmother taught me to tie a string and say a prayer for San Aparicio when I lost something. 

I have said this prayer 1,987,574,888 many times, but in truth have also lost count of how many many, so now I will tie a string for that, as soon as I get home, I will tie a string, I promise...

One night, years ago, my mother and I watched The Earrings of Madame de…in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I was trying to find my way after an extended depression. 

I had lost myself and was slowly finding who I was again, through an unknown path, a path I dared to hope was full of promise. Perhaps if I had known that at that point, I had barely touched the surface of grief, if I had known that on that path that lay ahead, I’d find profound joy and loss interwoven, perhaps I would have been more wary. Then I remember, such losses came because of something beloved. I would do it all again.

Materiality as negotiable.

By extension, loss as negotiable.

August 23rd 2005:

The day after my grandmother passed away, my grandfather was organizing a bookshelf, trying to distract himself from the weight of grief. They had shared over 60 years together. He had not known a day without my grandmother since he was 23.  

As he grabbed a book, a note fell out. It was a newspaper cutout with my grandmother’s scrawl. She had written the day she saved the cutout: May 10, 1986. On the note was a poem. It read:

Death is nothing at all

I have only slipped away into the next room. 

Whatever we were to each other, we still are.

I am I, and you are you. Call me by my old familiar name 

Speak to me in the same easy way you always have 

Laugh as we have always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together 

Play, smile, think of me, and pray for me.

Life means all that it ever meant. 

It is the same as it always was.

There is an absolute unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of your mind because I am out of your sight?

I am but waiting for you for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. 

All is well. Nothing is past. Nothing has been lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

Only better. Infinitely happier. We will be one, together.

My grandmother had once found consolation in these words, saving the poem for another time, another time, another time…to accompany her, knowing or not knowing that this other time would be nearly 20 years later, the day after her death, the day my grandfather needed to read the words she found. The consolation would be through her, not for her.

The years continue; the summer that two people I love pass away, I return to the note. It is proof, I try to return to that belief.

I feel a stirring in my chest. This is a letter to no one and also to you, just to you, like the letters I wrote as a girl, expecting someone to find them in some distant future, to find and understand what I needed them to understand. What not even I understood. Childhood letters enveloped in that innocent trust in magic and belief that beckons…

Behind this belief lay the knowledge that objects have always played games of (dis)appearance in my life, in the lives of others. Like the note. Like the earrings. Like that coat, the one, you know the one.

This strange fact of life, like a negation of lineal materiality that has its own (very obvious) name: The Disappearing Object Phenomenon. 

My mother’s family attributes such occurrences to Aluxes - trickster spirits that like to confuse us and keep us on our toes. I think of it as a game conjured by the objects themselves; they carry the essence of all who cherished them before we did, and someone or everyone wants us to pay closer attention. To what? I don’t know. I want to think the objects whisper that nothing is final. Nothing is permanently gone. Is it? “Nothing has been lost.” Or has it? Up until a few years ago, I clung to this trust when in solitude. In truth, a chamber of my heart still partially does.

Sometimes these games of reappearance are all I can remember with detail: sadly, sweetly.

Disappearing, re-appearing. 

Those we love, that which we love, that we dislove, dislocate, what we once cherished and now reject but still sort of love, that which we misplace, or misremember completely. 

We pretend that we can control this. Just a little, just this time, we walk through a cemetery, and believe we and all those we adore will be exempt. (Perhaps you don’t. I did, and somehow, sometimes still do.)

Even once they have passed on, a not-so-small part of me would hold a whisper, a vibration insisting that they are secretly waiting somewhere, not in a metaphysical sense - in a literal, tangible space nearby. In a large house with an overflowing garden. I will find the house one day by accident on an unplanned walk; they’ll say it’s all a great joke we were all in on. They only played the joke because they knew I knew the truth along with them. (The truth…)

I even dreamt of the house once. The sun was setting. My father’s parents, my grandparents, were there, waiting. When I dream of my grandparents, the sun sets and envelops them in golden, late afternoon light.

Now, the dream fades. As those who I held close are no longer there, life continues as if monumental circumstances haven’t altered the fabric of reality. (They have.)

I believe less and less. And yet, a lingering doubt remains. It is an ember I want to feed by writing this, by igniting that illogical doubt in your own mind.

(Can you lose a room?)

Perec wrote that there can be no room without a purpose. As soon as you try to imagine a room without a use, you have given it one.

Even empty rooms can become vessels for what their previous or future inhabitants could have been or could be, at their brightest…

And a room can learn to inhale, protecting its inhabitant.

A childhood bedroom, one that holds all possibilities. 

Mine would wait, for all eternity, even as the world turned angrier, even as my heart broke, even as I remembered it was actually my second childhood bedroom, this room would wait, always with pillows softer than the edges of more complicated memories, always sweetened by the scent of objects carefully chosen and placed by my mother, objects that quelled anything untenable.

When the fire came, most of the objects, so carefully placed, could not survive

Though they did not burn, they were imbued with chemicals that made them untouchable. They look the same; they are not. 

Precious trinkets collected and left for safe-keeping, discarded without any goodbye, without any game of appearing and disappearing, which all objects are entitled to, of course.

Many people live similar events and move on, as a part of life. I do so now, too, slowly.

The room is empty. It will never be as it was, but this is fine, because it did not burn, and because most rooms are once one thing and then are not. Aren’t they? 

What is the purpose of such a room now? 

I want to apologize for always wanting the room to wait for me, even as I took it for granted. I see now: a room is the objects it holds; the objects are the people and moments infused within.

I also know objects will do what they want.

For me, earrings are the objects that play the game of loss-find-loss-find-most often.  

A friend once told me that when jewelry is permanently lost, it is protecting us, serving a purpose.

I tend to return most to three such times of (accidental?) earring loss that made me doubt that anything is ever “forsaken”  (forsaken, a melodramatic word I loved as a girl, yet I rarely use, and here it mostly works.) To return, to emulate the Knight of Faith, holding on to irrational hope.

Why three times? Three is one of the few odd numbers that is a comforting number to me. Do you also have numbers you feel comforted or disquieted by?

I want you to remember them all now, to feel comforted. 

I, too, want to feel comfort, from you, from me, by loss, by finding, by not finding, by allowing the possibility that I once held that nothing can truly perish, as we conclude with these tiny tales of earrings as proof of a belief I want us to give credence to. Can you try?

To accept: we cannot control the reaction, be it to losing, finding, to the stranger, second loss, then the newer, stranger finding of what promised to have become irrevocable. 

To have become irrevocable.

Think of the numbers that comfort you. I will recall the earrings, as I wanted to, before I became distracted thinking of my childhood bedroom.

Pair 1:

Inherited. Lost.

Belonged to: Maternal great-grandmother.

Materials: Gold and obsidian

It is winter, I am 21, and it is almost midnight. I find myself retracing my steps, scouring the Koreatown pavement, in search of an earring (one earring, great-grandmother’s) as my sort-of-boyfriend-of this-time watches from a distance. 

We both know we’ll never be in love, but we are attracted to one another, and as we are kids playing at adults, that’s enough. 

For a few months, we see each other daily, and I find our extreme difference in disposition amusing and enticing, knowing our time is limited. Accepting time as limited often makes things better for me. I just wish I could see living in this way.

He acts jaded, but he is kind; now, I wish I had been gentler with him. On that night, the sort-of boyfriend mumbles about the famous musician having an after-hours party at a house I imagine sits on a hill surrounded by weeping willows. We both grew up in Los Angeles but met in New York. He likes to laugh that I am pretentious about the fact that I am from Mexico, not Los Angeles.

I am still looking for my great-grandmother’s earring. Someone says if we don’t go soon, we may not make it. 

They mean: give up looking for the earring, it’s just an object.

Friends leave. I will not stop looking, even if he leaves. In a way, even now, I still keep my eyes alert on certain street corners as if a sacred object may reappear in front of me at any time.  

This has happened to my mother, to my sister, to me...

Only with specific objects, at specific times.

Objects that hold a memory of another life. Perhaps they hear the past calling; they return there for a brief moment. Most often, they must make it back in time before the wearer even notices. Only occasionally, they stay in that past, with their previous wearer, reliving the night they most refracted in the moonlight, the night they were most appreciated. The earrings I lost existed in 1910, adorning my great-grandmother’s ears, shining with the moonlight on the island of Cozumel, as they listened to the sea cascading home.

I search around the dark pavement. It is gone. I never even felt it fall. 

I hope as it fell it returned to great-grandmother María, to the island, to listen to the waves.]

The only earring I wear every day is the first of my life: a little, tiny, faded, precious thing that I don’t remove, one that always looks like it’s about to fall out.  This looks-about-to-fallness scares strangers, often someone stops me, a look of dread on their face, bracing to tell me the news that my earring just fell out, another is about to. I wonder if a part of me feels if I wear something that looks like it is about to be lost, it will ward off other losses.

The gold and obsidian earrings never reappeared. Years later, my mother gifted me another pair that belonged to María, the same great-grandmother. They are almost exactly alike, only these are not obsidian but a coral mamey. Smaller, subtler, perhaps less precious, to me more beautiful when resting in my hands.

Years later, one of these earrings falls off. Again. I don’t feel it fall.

I search the house, the entirety of the house, then outside on the street. Down the block. Then the next block. They are not there, they are gone.

I tie a string for San Aparicio.

That night, as the sun set, they reappear, in a corner where I had already searched three times.

It feels like the first earrings appeared for a moment with them.

I untie San Aparicio

Ximena Prieto is a Mexican writer and artist exploring the creation of rituals, inherited memory, and myths through performance, poetry, installation, and film. Her pieces play with merging narratives and have presented in Mexico City, New York, Charlotte, Turin, and London. Celia, Betty Jeanne, a collaboration with Jill Publications exploring Prieto’s contrasting relationships with her two grandmothers will be presented this year. @ximpri