Text by Emily Dee Grant and Merritt Wuchina

Photos by Emily Dee Grant

Three years ago, on my first visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art as a Pitt student, I read this message on a blue cloth bracelet that hung from the wall of an interactive exhibit. I tied it on my wrist. These thin cloth bracelets contained a collection of unique wishes that would come true after the band fell off from wear and tear. An artist might have designed it, but it was my wish – I want to love and be loved in big cities. So for two and a half years it clung to me. I both noticed and ignored its presence; it shriveled into my skin, a thin blue line that circled my wrist like the vein running in the opposite direction. Sometimes I would pull on the strings, trying to make it slowly unravel, but for the most part I left it alone. I always felt the day it left me would be extraordinary, but instead I found it lying on the floor while eating tomato soup one night, excitement staining the corners of my acceptance letter to Buenos Aires. In a box of mementos, I folded the ribbon between the broken friendship bracelets of childhood and the “do you like me?” notes from middle school – unos recuerditos finitos de mi ninez.  Here, in the most ordinary moment, I would be unwound.

***

It’s 12:38 and the buzzer jolts the silenced apartment. Pipa knocks on my door to let me know that a package has arrived for me. I shuffle to my bedroom door and thank her. The door shuts quietly.

I sit down on the bed and open the package: Muma’s cupcakes, all perfectly made with a baker’s touch, right out of a postre magazine. I sigh. I love cupcakes for their finite sweetness – an unexpected moment of joy. But today, I have little appetite for savory moments. A note wrapped kindly with a ribbon around the box reads, “To my sweet Em: wishing you a very happy birthday. Love, Mom” I shut my eyes and everything is silent. I can hear my erratic breathing – the kind of breathing that precedes tears. I let my whole body feel the pain of my true birthday present – missing the warmth of someone to share this fleeting sweetness with me.

As I sit on the park bench, waiting for him to arrive, my body shakes with a non-existent chill. Words keep buzzing in my head in whatever language seems fit, but I can’t escape the phrase: todavía estás enamorada con ella y no me querés. Everything else doesn’t seem to matter. I have no argument to make him change his mind, to stop him from attending her going-away party, leaving me alone on my birthday. I have nothing. He arrives, filled with tears and sorrow, apologies and guilt, but it doesn’t change anything. I hand him the Edgar Allan Poe book he lent me: I am the tell-tale heart, beating silently below the floorboards. I kiss him good-bye and walk away. I have no memory of what happens next because I do not exist. The world I created with him is shattered because it was never real: a void of hope and desperation, longing and lust. The box of cupcakes remains untouched; the plastic “Feliz cumple” candle tilts to the side with swirls of dulce de leche mocking me like an off-kilter smile.

Today, as we lay in bed, his fingers trace my belly and my arms, memorizing every inch as we doze off peacefully. A different kind of void fills my silence: a sorrow that longs for endless time –  that this moment does not end. I learned to forgive, as he learned to love again. I lean into his ear and ask him how to say cupcakes in Spanish. He has no idea, so I describe a tarta chiquita, como si fuera una tarta individual… glaseada a perfección. He raises his eyebrows with interest. I tell him when we wake up from our siesta I want a cupcake: something sweet and savory; momentary and finite like us.

***

Today, as I sit in my parent’s country home, I rummage beneath my clothes and Historias de Horror by Edgar Allen Poe and pull out my box of mementos, the ribbon more tattered and frayed than I remembered. The writing has long faded and the wish only survives as an etching in my memory. As I drive into the sunset instead of descending into the subway, as I look up at stars instead of streetlights, and as I fall asleep to a chorus of crickets instead of bleeding sirens, love and loving in the big city has never felt so far away.

My birthday is next week and I am filled with bitter-sweet memories. I begin to imagine a couple sitting on a park bench exchanging te quiero for the first time. I smile to myself: a new beginning. But I no longer feel his fingers tracing a shape of a heart on my skin. I can only imagine the goose bumps I used to feel.

This year, my mom ordered an ice cream cake that reads, “To sweet endings and new beginnings that don’t necessarily melt away.” Now, I have a new bracelet that I bought. It’s thick and sturdy with a pattern of multicolored squares. I pull the strings together. I take a match and light the ends to form a hard, waxy bond. With a singed connection, the bracelet won’t break until I choose to put it away in my box of mementos, an ordinary memory stilled in time.