Why I Am Who I Am

By Alexis Wiggins

Fall

Jumping in leaves. Bammie's pink apple sauce. Snow days. Sour patch kids. 1986 World Series. Cold January mornings. Loneliness. Our two cats. Mom's jewelry box. Books. A new brother. Golf lessons. Guilt. Shrimp cocktail on holidays. Broken wine glasses. Weekends in Gloucester. Strep throat. The Empire State Building.   Hard pretzels. Boys. Mixed tapes. Jimmy-covered black-raspberry ice cream. Wiggins dorm. Ani DiFranco. Junior year abroad. My grandparents dancing to Frank Sinatra. August thunder storms. Diego. Hong Kong noodle shops. Bullfights in Madrid. My father singing the Beatles. Dried salt on my skin after body surfing. Chinese ivory silk. A cup of brewed tea.

Winter

Christian Dior lipstick, in a blue, plastic tube, that my mom swabbed on her lips before a mirror lined with white light bulbs every time before going out for the night with my step-father. It smelled of fermenting roses, golden delicious apples, fall leaves in sweet decay on the ground, as she leaned in to kiss me goodnight, on the forehead, before leaving. The lipstick smell of my mother when she was still young and beautiful and perfect, the smell of her giddiness and her makeup, mixed with my love for her and hung in the air of my dark bedroom long after she was gone.

Spring

"Grow up."

Summer

The small bump of cartilage, hiding in the middle of your nose, the only indication that you were a Jew. Your face, having now seen three face-lifts in your 79 years, is as WASP-y as you always wanted it to be, so WASPy that even Guypop, your husband, doesn't know you used to be Dorothy Katz, not Dorothy Palmer. But the little bump is there, like a benign tumor, right in the middle of your nose under that smooth, stretched skin; and now it is here in my nose, and I finger it, curious and dreamy, imagining all the things I don't know about you.

Alexis Wiggins is a young American writer who lives in Spain. Her work has been published in Rivet, Dim Sum, poetry.com, Flashquake, and is forthcoming in Brevity. Alexis is currently completing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and is at work on her first novel. She and her husband live in Madrid, where she teaches and works as an editor.