MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT​

Mentor Commentary
Laura Walter

Recipient Reflection
​​Ariél Martinez

On the Corner, Tucked Away

Nonfiction by ​​Ariél Martinez

I think of that apartment as being my first adult home. Once, I told my now ex-girlfriend, C, that she felt like home to me, but I see that I lied—it wasn’t her, it was that space. After she and I broke up, I rearranged my (!) bedroom with a close friend on a Sunday afternoon and was immediately taken with the way sunlight from my window hit the grayish blue of my duvet cover. My friend and I, who I’d known since I was fifteen, crouched on either side of a white couch and dragged it into different corners of the bedroom, seeing where it would fit now. We pulled the bed into a new spot and lay on the mattress together, celebratory. I rolled over and looked at her recently bleached hair splayed out on the pillow case, feeling so goddamn grateful. It seemed appropriate that this particular person was helping me rearrange my space. We’d spent every weekend having sleepovers in the same bed for two years in high school, and here we were, on the same blanket again twelve years later, recalibrating where everything now fit.

That weekend, I bought new sheets to get my ex’s energy off of where I slept. One set was light pink and another was lavender, but not that particular archaic lesbian light purple. An astrologer once told me to sage myself every morning because I’m susceptible to picking up others’ energy when I sleep. She told me this after I mentioned that I frequently dream of people I haven’t met. I didn’t want to dream of my ex so I went to the witch store in Bushwick and bought blue sage, and traced small, smoky circles around the corners of my room and over my bed frame. As I did this, my friend and I listened to Fleetwood Mac and drank mimosas out of wine glasses from the dollar store. We layered gold necklaces on silver nails that we’d hammered into the walls and hung scarves and hats and photographs. For the first time, the space really felt like mine. This quiet, bright, feminine bedroom was my leased haven, just a thirteen-minute walk from the G train.

I broke up with C on the black leather couch that we’d gotten for free from a man who up and left everything with no notice. The landlord of the sex shop that C managed told her that she could have these two couches if she got them out of the restaurant where they’d previously lived. When we took the cushions off, there was glitter and confetti lining the seams under the black leather. With us, their lives were much less eventful. We mostly used them to eat dinner on, sometimes friends would come over and take root in their softness. On them, I would nap, read, sometimes jerk off. I did throw a New Years party one year, but there was no confetti, just seemingly endless bottles of cheap champagne that made me throw up, smearing the glitter I’d carefully dabbed all over my eyelids. I didn’t intend to end my relationship on the particular night that I did. I sat on one end of the couch and she sat on the other. I spoke my desired reality into existence, like a spell. I can’t do this anymore, and so we stopped doing it. If someone walked in the next morning, you wouldn’t know what I’d done.



I was born in Berkeley, under the barely-there shape of a crescent moon in early December, but we’d moved to Texas by the time I was four. When I was twenty, my dad accepted a job offer in Chicago and my parents moved into an old, beach rose colored Victorian house that was right next to a 7-11. At that point, I was in college in the Hudson Valley, wanting to start a life on the East Coast. When I visited them, the bedroom that I slept in had angular walls and I could hear the train going into the city from the guest bed. While in Chicago, my dad got sicker and my mom had to watch her two beloved Great Danes die. When my parents decided to move back to the Bay Area, I was excited for them. To me, it seemed clear that they needed a change of everything.

As they prepared to move, huge packages started arriving on my porch. I would slice the tape open with a box cutter and find gallon-sized Ziploc bags filled with photos of me as a child. I looked at these relics from my youth, seeing smaller versions of my body feeding deer, running up hills, clinging to my mother, wearing my older sister’s white plastic cateye sunglasses, and beaming up at the camera with crooked teeth. I see my mother in her 30s, stylish but practical, posing in front of flowers, animals at the zoo, a lighthouse, a gondola, a street in Berlin. She looks All American in a way that I don’t, her blonde hair grazing her shoulders as she looks at the camera astutely, tipsily, proudly, warily. In these snapshots of my father, I see a man I’ve never known. His hair is almost black, his eyes look almost playful and his smile almost easy. I’m told I look like my mother but have my father’s lips.

In another package, I unwrap a rendition of The Last Supper that was cross-stitched by my mother’s father between 1991 and 1993. He began it the year that I was born. It’s probably about three feet wide from end to end, and lives inside of a gilded frame. When my grandparents passed away, my mother held onto it but kept it under the bed she shared with my father. It lay unceremoniously on the floor for years. I grew up in a very secular household; my parents always told me that if religion was something that I wanted to incorporate into my life later then I could make that decision. I remember lowering myself to the floor, my child belly brushing against the carpet, and staring at this masterpiece created by someone I shared blood with. My grandfather was a Scorpio born on Halloween who liked to make things with his hands. I wear a caramel-colored corduroy coat of his regularly and think of him when I knit. I hung The Last Supper above my couch, where I gazed at it frequently. I don’t know if I believe in God but I believe this piece was meant for me.

In another box was a record player that my parents had originally gotten for my grandparents as a Christmas present in the late 1980’s, accompanied by probably about a hundred of my mother’s records. I wasn’t sure if it still worked, but after a quick Google search and trial and error, "America" by Simon & Garfunkel softly wafted through my living room, curling into the corners like smoke. I always filled that apartment with music. I played albums of my mother’s: Carol King, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Heart. I got my own records, too, mostly all women. I rarely opt to listen to men if I don’t have to. I associate Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent and Linda Ronstadt with that living room. With women, I learned how to fill sonic space.



My apartment was frequently messy. I love to deep clean but hate dealing with the everyday nuisance of clutter. There were multiple points in my two and a half years there that I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’d stay horizontal for hours, sleeping in long shifts. I’ve always had a taut relationship to sleep and sometimes would want to spend days in REM cycles after being awake at four AM for weeks. My ex-girlfriend, the one who shared this space with me, tried to confront me about it once. She said, I think you should see a therapist and I said why and she said I think you’re depressed, you’re always in bed. Then and you never want to have sex anymore and I said so I should go to a therapist so that you can fuck me and then I slammed the door. I slammed a lot of doors. I went to a therapist recently and he told me that it sounded like I made a lot of space for other people and asked me if I had people in my life who made space for me and I thought of my apartment and the hours I spent there alone, fondly. After she moved out, I kept that apartment cleaner than it had ever been—dishes were immediately done, I made my bed every morning, I swept and swiffered twice a week. When I told my mother that I was making my bed every morning she said who are you and I said I didn’t know but I did know and I was someone who was present in my home. There was no longer the feeling that if I cleaned someone else would fuck it up, and so I took care in pulling up my sheets, smoothing the blanket down and scrubbing dishes with a dark green sponge with water hot enough to almost burn. When my ex moved her furniture out, she took the curtains, too. Fucker! I said to myself when I walked into the bedroom for the first time and was greeted by naked windows. But then I laughed. My body adjusted to waking up with the light.

In that apartment, my hair went from brown to red to blonde to gray to blonde. My ex and I brought home a puppy one winter and I left with a small, rotund dog two summers later. There was a spare room that so many people stayed in—a few musicians, a lesbian couple who tried to move in with us, a nineteen year old who I had to ask to please blow out the candles when you go to sleep, my best friend who now lives in Cuba, two best friends who now live in Portland, my parents, my ex’s parents, her sister, never mine. In those walls, I rarely cooked but learned how to perfectly flip an egg and made so many cocktails and that must count for something. I covered the walls in women—I had Dolly Parton above my front door, like a saint, a framed photo of Britney Spears and Madonna kissing in my living room, a portrait of Frida Kahlo in a purple wooden frame next to my bookshelf. I bought faux fur pillows that I propped on the couches and for my dog, one shaped like a fluffy pink heart that she used as her bed until she got too long. I tended to a Christmas cactus for two and a half years that I eventually put outside on the street to be re-homed. I realized I wasn’t in love in that apartment. I was in love, but not with the person I was on a lease with. In the summer, I’d sit outside on my slab of concrete that I generously referred to as a porch with a cold beer. At night, when friends were over, I’d smoke cigarettes there, blowing smoke towards the train I took into Manhattan, leaning against the brick of my building, supported. I’d open my door and be greeted with the familiarity of this space I’d made my own.

When I was ready to close the door for the last time, the apartment looked uncharacteristically small. I had to be out by the end of Pride weekend, timing I thought of as homophobic, and while my friends were at Dyke March, I was literally in my closet, deciding what to keep. I slogged bags and bags of stuff to give away to Goodwill, and put so many random objects on the sidewalk in front of my home. When loading four giant duffels into the back of a cab to donate, the driver asked me why do you have so much stuff and I replied so earnestly, I don’t know. I would be packing a box and look at all of the other stuff that needed to get done and start crying. I would realize how hot I was in this stupid apartment that I couldn’t afford on my own and melt an ice cube on my skin over my collarbone. In the last hour that I spent in that space, I sat on my floor and put on glitter eyeliner, waiting for my friend to come over so we could go to the gay section of the beach. I’m not religious, but I do believe in the ocean.

An old friend helped me tremendously in my last forty-eight hours of moving. Together and without fighting, we took apart my bed frame piece by piece with Allen wrenches, and made jokes about this being the gayest way to spend Pride—helping me dismantle the bed that I shared with my ex-girlfriend. I think we split a beer and they asked if I was serious with how I packed, looking at the boxes that I’d put together in disbelief. They kept stuffing soft objects like scarves, T shirts, towels into the empty spaces where I’d carelessly thrown together things that could break. They offered to take care of my Last Supper while I house sat and we brought it to their apartment in a car along with six bottles of unfinished booze and two fans. They had actually helped me move out of a different apartment, shared with a different ex. Both times, they tried on at least one of my wigs. Both times I found comfort in their presence, but this time also in their touch. We’re so different, they would say, as they watched me lie on the floor, overwhelmed to the point of stillness. With me, you’ll never accumulate this much stuff, they say. I smile.

My lease ended in June which is Cancer season, the astrological sign tied to the crab. Things associated with Cancers: nostalgia, the moon, motherhood, sensitivity, intuition, a strong sense of home. Crabs have a hard shell and a soft interior. As I packed up photographs, letters, clothes and books, I thought of a hermit crab scuttling around on the bottom of the ocean trying to find a new shell where it would fit. I thought of the images I’d seen of them taking up residence in pieces of trash they found in the water. A day after I would close my apartment door for the last time, someone new would already be making a home there. I leave my key on the kitchen counter, close the door. I walk out, untethered.

Ariél M. Martinez

Ariél M. Martinez is a queer femme writer from San Antonio, Texas. She has a B.A. from Bard College in social sciences with a minor in gender & sexuality studies. She is currently an MFA candidate at Bennington College, where she is studying creative nonfiction. Ariél lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Frida. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @arielmtnz.