Childhood Memory
Micro-essay 2. Assignment for Nancy Sommers’ Creative Writing Workshop. Harvard University.
Everything in the room is suddenly yellow. I see my hands as I carry this marvelous object, and they look yellow—bright yellow. This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen, never has yellow been this yellow, never have I lost my breath on an infinite smile like this one. I am mesmerized—or rather stupefied—by this object. It is the most beautiful and exciting gift you've ever received, that much you know, when you’re no longer 4 but 27.
Who the gifter is, I don’t remember… Maybe a friend of my mom’s, maybe one of my friends from daycare. Perhaps it was a gift among many gifts from one of my lavish birthday parties, or perhaps one of my aunts brought it for me after a trip. About the gifter, I care more now than I did back then, probably because once I opened the box and broke through the tissue paper, there was nothing else in the world but me and that sensational piece, a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit. I imagine my mother had to instruct me to say thank you to this ever-anonymous gifter, and I imagine that, like so many times, I said thank you without even raising my face or looking away from my new treasure.
I see myself running across a beach with my little blue hat and my little yellow one-piece swimsuit, and I hear my lunatic laughter as I see Camila—my little sister—chasing me, and I run, and run, and run, and I fall in the sand, quietly look if somebody saw me—this is when I decide whether to cry or not—and if nobody did, I quietly stand and keep running, and keep laughing-always-like a lunatic.
For me—thankfully—the love for the sea embedded itself in the word childhood. It still provides for me, all these years later, a sense of happiness, comfort, holding, and safety, that sends me the message that I have the “right” base to be a functional adult. Perhaps all I need is a material reminder, and I should get for myself—although as pale as I look after a winter in Boston, it will probably look less than great—a one-piece yellow swimsuit, and once again, laugh like a lunatic.
Note to the reader: because I couldn’t choose a memory from my childhood, I asked a friend, and she simply said: a yellow one-piece swimsuit. So I built this piece from that line, and added some details I constructed based on my knowledge of her as an adult (never knew her as a kid). Her little sister is also called Camila, such a convenient coincidence.