My Tapestry and Me: Reminders From the Fringes of My Life
On belonging; remembering; coming home
Mural in Santiago, Chile
Credit is due to Richard Wright, author of Native Sons, for inspiration for this article.
Hi, friends! What a day, full of wedding planning, working, and relaxing. I’m grateful for my weekly writing group, which last night sparked(or glimmered, as we’re saying now) an entire newsletter’s worth of a story. Without further ado, here we go!
The prompt: write about an object that sparks joy in your space
I visited Santiago, Chile shortly after one of the greatest love encounters of my life. At the time, I thought the enoughness I was basking in was the afterglow of a brief fling I’d had with one of the sexiest - it has to be said- men I’d ever met. I could write poems, sonnets, short stories, and novels about this man. He understood me in ways I didn’t understand.
Only later would I realize I was basking in the enoughness of me, for perhaps the first time in my very short life.
Sunset over Santiago de Chile
Longing for Home(s)
I had made my way from Bariloche, Argentina - the snowy backdrop of this epic love tale- through Puerto Montt, a drab city in every way possible except in the ways they got you out of there. I couldn’t unlock the gate at the hostel I was staying at and had a real Rapunzel moment, imagining myself beating down the imposing, swinging wooden doors until I was FREE.
Miraculously, they opened right on time for me to catch my Uber. Chile, like Argentina, had outlawed Uber in favor of the notorious taxi unions who wouldn’t tolerate any competition. Haggling was never popular in either country except when it came to being a taxi driver who could haggle the price of a ride up. I was alarmed but rather unsurprised when my Uber driver said he couldn’t take me to the airport and dumped me in the arms of a friend halfway through our trip.
Given that I was trying to catch this flight to Santiago, I was f**ing grateful he left me with options at all - granted, I had to pay more to get there. I arrived in Santiago, a city that held echoes of Europe, but screams of the American Dream in its newer, sleek architecture.
It wasn’t new, but it wasn’t old. It wasn’t truly sleek, but it certainly wasn’t Italian chic. At a hostel called the Chile Lindo, bunking 4 beds tall with Jake from Manchester under me, I enjoyed my sunset viaje in Chile, the last of 5 different trips I had taken throughout South America during a 6 month period living in Buenos Aires.
I could taste the nostalgia on my tongue as I explored the open air markets of Santiago. Home was so palpable in the Dunkin’ Donuts I shed a tear upon finding, yet all too close as the weeks that approached my flight home were rapidly turning into days.
I could feel the version of me who had no job, no school, and only a shitty credit score to worry about slipping away for her older, more responsible sister. While I wasn’t averse to returning to that version of myself, I was still missing one thing.
A garden in Valparaiso, Chile
The Ingredients for a Recipe of Calling the Soul Home
Actually, I was missing a lot of things. I still needed wine to take home, dulce de leche, those earrings I had been eyeing for months, that necklace I had been eyeing for months- everything that would tether me to who I had become -”courageous, more self-assured”, my godfather’s voice had crackled over the phone when I had called home to confess I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come home- once I arrived home. These ingredients I would need to root back down safely into my native soil.
“They may not recognize you at first, “ he had said, “but they’ll learn.”
What he had left out was that although people would learn to recognize the person you had grown into again, the hard part was taking the pieces of you that had grown native to the land you were leaving and planting them in foreign soil.
America shouldn’t be foreign, a part of me would say, while another would squabble, it sure feels foreign to all of these memories and friends and this independence we’ve grown while we’ve been away!
That time in Santiago, though, I was hell-bent on buying one thing: you know those sweaters and tapestries that literally EVERYONE brings home with them from their trip on the Inca Trail or to Peru? Maybe you don’t - it’s just that once I had lived in Buenos Aires for a month, I had seen too many indigenous(“indigenous?”) tablecloths and sweaters with what looked like the same print to me to count.
And like hell, I wanted one. My sweater had been forced on me on my first trip to Chile when I had been caught unaware of the cold temperatures of the desert at night and bought the warmest thing - a handwoven alpaca sweater. Just like everyone else’ handwoven alpaca sweater.
This tapestry, though, I was seeking out. I had dreams for it. It would live in my living room and act as a table centerpiece. It would hang on the wall. People would ask about it, and it would start conversations. It would tether the version of me I couldn’t carry home in one piece to the person I would be in the future.
I didn’t know that’s what I was searching for when I selected a random stall out of all of the vendors in this open-air market, because God help me, many of them sold what I was looking for, and picked out a deep sea green tapestry, woven with an almost indescribable pattern. It starts on the edge with a green yellow purple magenta sawtooth-esque pattern. Then, these intense, thin stripes begin in dark colors and bright alike. It repeats impeccably across the entire thing. It’s so eye-catching to me, and it’s traveled everywhere with me.
San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina
More Than Just a Tapestry
From Buenos Aires to Greensboro, NC, to Philadelphia, to a new apartment in Philadelphia, back home to Greensboro, and to my new house now. It’s seen it all. And no one has ever asked about it. It smells vaguely of being stored, and of sun, and of incense, and of a life well lived. It’s incredibly thin, and incredibly strong, and I like to think in that way we’re alike.
Not that I’m incredibly thin - but that people do tend to underestimate me, and I think they underestimate how much this tapestry isn’t just a tapestry. It’s quite literally a rock-solid anchor to a part of my life that no one understands. I did it alone. With help, yet alone.
As I wrote for a guest post for a friend’s publication the other day, a piece of my heart now belongs to a language which has no place in my life. Just like a piece of my heart belongs to this tapestry which seems to go largely overlooked by everyone who sees it - everyone but me.
Such a beautiful piece, Camille - thank you for a real treat of a read!
Enjoyed reading this, Camille. Chile sounds wonderful (dulce de leche!) Can we see pictures of the tapestry?