21 Things I Did in 2021
Slept on a mattress in a spare room of my mother’s house. At night, the dark was unbelievable.
Turned twenty-two in my mother’s house as a great freeze took hold of Texas. My brothers and I sat in my brother’s car with the heat turned all the way up. Eating chocolates in quick succession. Holding our dog in my lap. Wearing a coat to fall asleep.
Wrote a novella about the year of my sister’s life when all she knew was cold vents and sore spots, when she glittered beneath the mean forever light of God’s disco ball.
Lived with my cousins for three months as a result of a strange, timely circumstance. Drank beer out of green bottles with them on the beach. Ate the best pizza of my life from a shitty little place in Coney Island and laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Learned that family is a constant practice of humility and the simple act of fun.
Listened to my neighbor’s window shatter from the ferocity of a fire running through her apartment at three in the morning. After the fire was put out and the water was cleaned from the hallways and the floors were dried, I took a swig from a wine bottle we had in our cabinet. I had been manic for two weeks at that point and nothing made sense. We spent the night in a hotel and that night, I fell asleep watching the walls pulse into shapes of men, listening to music nobody else could hear.
Cried in front of my mother the weekend after I graduated college. My last piece of writing for my undergraduate degree was an analysis of Courtney Love’s Instagram.
Quit vaping during a family trip to Six Flags. I spent the weekend agitated and devoid of anything that could have been perceived as light. I pulled my hair out in a public restroom, laughing in between sobs. Felt the tight air gloat around me as a storm brewed above us. Thunder trapped in the corner of a cloud like a deep cavity. I ran out into the rain with my brother the night before we left, lightning bolts touching ground only a mile away.
Dyed my hair red after two years of having dead, bleached hair. I originally bleached my hair in the aftermath of my sister’s death, insistent on catharsis. I have accepted that nothing works because you want it to. My hair is now the color of rust.
Began weaving! I spent fifteen hours working on a piece as though I were finally answering a question I’ve been asking for my entire life. I thought such beautiful nothing. The next day my fingers were swollen and red. I have since been unable to work like that again.
Jumped into the stream of an opened fire hydrant at the end of the summer as my friend and I searched for an ice cream shop as Brooklyn dared all around us in sweeps of happy, happy green.
Felt God in Crown Fried Chicken as nighttime pressed herself against the windows and a beautiful, exhausted woman sat on the floor to charge her phone.
Became enamored of thunderstorms and frequented weather radars online. Those translucent sprays of colored pixels weaving across the screen make disaster look so flagrant, so easy. The patterns are somehow both predictable and spontaneous at once. Weather continues to evade us.
Got published in two magazines I used to read as an awful teenager. Back when I would mine for freckles of hope.
Landed a position at a preschool in the city. I spend my days teaching children how to share colors with one another.
Spent two weeks living with my aunt while my father visited his family in Mexico. I didn’t want to be alone. I slept in a bed of cat hair and woke up to walk against the background of early morning towards the train. My aunt smoked in the bathroom and thought the vent would get rid of the smell. A television on mute. A drawer full of Librium.
Cried so hard on my lunch break that the man at the deli gave me a bag of chips for free before I could reach into my bag. He told me I looked tired. He told me to rest.
Survived November and bought myself a gimmick tee in consolation. I LOVE NEW YORK. Spent money at a bookstore across from the hospital I walked into two waters ago, diluted and carrying a bottle of pills in my pocket.
Thrifted on Sundays after taking half a Valium. Thought hard about the mathematics of patterns and spoke in a small voice.
Spent Christmas with my family back home in Texas. I asked for lottery tickets and won forty dollars. Drove past a series of huge crosses on the side of the road. Found beauty in a stop sign. Laughed so hard I thought my mouth would break.
Held the end of a firework, the street full of a smoke that appeared to be mythical, forward thinking. I wanted to run into it. I watched the sparklers seize and then leap into an empty space above us, fading off into a great sear of white.
Accepted, again and again and again, that I am going to have to live.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is set to appear in places like Borderlands, Vice, Rattle and [PANK] among others. Her work was also nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She was recently awarded a fellowship with Brooklyn Poets.
