A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

by Sandra Cisneros

“Goodbye, goodbye.” As lazily and luxuriously as if we were in control of our own destinies.

Rodoreda writes about feelings, about characters so numbed or overwhelmed by events they have only their emotions as a language.

I can write a truth only if I get out of the way and disappear.

Mary Cassatt quote, “I can live alone and I love to work,”

my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.

Coatlicue, a bare-breasted creative/destructive force dressed in a serpent skirt and a lei of human skulls, hearts, and hands.

the sky is the true facade of a house. I moved here from the Midwest, yet felt I’d come home. Light, the transparent light of Mexico. Clouds so white it hurts to look at them, like linen puffed and drying on a clothesline.

At twilight, with the clouds aflame and the sun setting behind it, my house sizzles and sparkles, looks absolutely gorgeous. To me.

If someone says hello, do I have to grin like a geisha? I like the military chin-flick of the men.

Aloneness is a luxury, like grief. Something society tries to kill.

“I like being alone, but I don’t like being lonely.” A hazard of the trade. I have come to understand even loneliness can be whittled into something useful. A poem. A paragraph. A page if I’m lucky.

Arranging and rearranging the little objects of every day until there is a beauty that heals.

Because it matters a great deal if when you look up you see something that pleases the eye and delights the heart, even if that something is only a teapot next to a sugar bowl. My house is an homage to this sensitivity and respect for things of the spirit.

I couldn’t take my eyes off that other miracle, a certain triangle of stained glass that made me shiver,

How come nobody told me an aria, a piece of stained glass, a painting, a sunset can be God too?

There is stored in my father’s Spanish, the way a spider might be sealed in amber, a time and place frozen just out of reach, but that I can hold up to my eye to make the world more golden.

the inevitable gain. How when you lose a loved one, you suddenly have a spirit ally, an energy on the other side that is with you always,

“Urraca,” for example, instead of “grackle.” Two ways of looking at a black bird. One sings, the other cackles. Or “tocayo/a,” your name twin, and, therefore, your friend. Or the beautiful “estrenar,” which means to wear something for the first time. There is no word in English for the thrill and pride of wearing something new.

People like to talk to you because you like to listen. You are a writer, you are a witness.

No es infinito pero es infinito en cuanto dura. It’s not infinite, but it’s infinite while it lasts.”

This is what she told me: “When you get back to your room tonight, find a quiet space. I want you to close your eyes and imagine a white flower. Any kind will do, but it must be white. Imagine it as a bud. Now see it opening-opening-opening-opening. Imagine it in full bloom, as full and heavy as can be. Now blow all its petals away, so that nothing’s left but the stem.

I have always been a daydreamer, and that’s a lucky thing for a writer. Because what is a daydreamer if not another word for thinker, visionary, intuitive—all wonderful words synonymous with “girl.”

Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad, are mine.

I need to be able to feel things deeply, good or bad, and wade through an emotion to the other shore, toward a rebirth, of sorts, a return to the living.

I wish somebody had told me then that death allows you the chance to experience the world soulfully, that the heart is open like the aperture of a camera, taking in everything, painful as well as joyous, sensitive as the skin of water.

And I wonder if all storytelling isn’t a list, conscious or not, of the ten thousand things tucked inside the special drawers of the brain,

The fear I always live with, gone. A sense of remembered well-being. As if I’m no longer in my woman’s body and am pure spirit.

I felt this same joy, as if I was connected to everything in the universe. A sense of belonging, unity, peace.

Is home something you move toward instead of going back? Homesickness, then, would be a malaise not for a place left behind in memory, but one remembered in the future.

I lay down at the shallow lip of water and land where the sand, ridged and soft and firm at the same time, settled into the contours of my back and neck. The water, warm as a body, lapped at my earlobes, and the trees set a dappled light waving the sunlight gently over me as if giving me a cleansing. The waves, slow and calming, murmured things I didn’t need to understand for now. I shut my eyes.

And I felt something that has come and gone in my life at odd times without my asking. A sense of detaching from myself, of sliding out of myself and connecting with everything in the universe. Of being empty so I could fill up with everything.

This was only for a moment, maybe a few seconds, a few minutes at most. I was living in dreamtime, like when you’re in love. There’s no such thing as time, just being, unhitched from a body, that tractor trailer. I was fearless finally. Infinite happiness.

But it belonged to me, it had been given to me.

Do all major truths have to be learned and relearned like a spiral?

Is the transformation of pain into light the alchemy that creates soul?

Virginia Woolf: “As a woman I have no country, as a woman, my country is the whole world.”