Andra Emilia Fenton

What You Make

non-fiction

You miss the stars so much. You used to paint them. You used to read about women who drew visions whispered to them by gods. You miss geometry and the mathematical perfection of the nautilus shell. You miss the microscopic, which you studied like an amateur, with your whole heart. You stopped measuring the size of your world in galaxies, ignored the way roots talk to one another, forgot about the patterned wings of insects. You stopped paying attention; you fell in love.

It may not matter where you found him, a Mexico City museum considered to be the birthplace of muralism, or why you were there (love of art). He was there too.

He was not a painter but had wanted to be an architect. Months later, he mailed you a set of drawings, each one on a separate white cardboard coaster. They were architectural snapshots of the museum, each angle captured in blue ink. Aerial views, views from the courtyard, a view from the top of the stone stairs looking down. In most of the drawings, you did not appear. When you did, it was as a ball of red, ink scratches—a tiny fire. How seductive to be seen as something powerful and undefined, to be a flame inside a palace of rock. 

Each time he returned, a kiss at an airport after a long separation (love of romance).

You were sick for ten years, but maybe you were addicted to the idea of being loved even before then. You wanted a ticket to permanence or a distraction from death, a way to see yourself as more solid, through the eyes of someone else. To be remembered. Cameras on wands, multi-colored pills, a failing organ removed, a belly ravine filled with plastic mesh. You remember so little of those years. And yet you still recognize the familiar smell of a sterile room and latex gloves, the arctic temperature inside the time capsule of an MRI machine, the sound of its clicking metal heart.

There are so many forms of love. Knowing that what you make says more about you than what you’ve lost (love of self). Praying (love of god).

One Swedish artist you were fascinated by, Hilma af Klint, had started creating abstract paintings in 1906 and was part of a group known as The Five. The Five regularly participated in seances where they attempted to make contact with what they called “The High Masters.” They kept notebooks and recorded messages from them such as, You have to feel with certainty that even the smallest effort to grow in goodness leaves a clear trace inside you. And: The midpoint of the universe is innocence. And although you didn’t know what these words meant, when you fell in love, you stopped trying to decipher them.

Once, your sister bathed you, swollen, full of stitches, as you cried in a hospital shower. After the shower, she slept beside you on a tiny plastic blue couch (sisterly love).

You miss tracing the symbols you found in af Klint’s books and in the books of other abstract painters. To you, their lines were codes. You recreated them, tried to see what they saw. You miss learning about space, following the trajectories of meteors, the rings of planets, having a life that is larger than your feelings.

In time, the man you loved would tell you that you were the most beautiful woman and also that he didn’t know if he could be faithful long term. You were supposed to think about whether you could be with someone who hurt you through a warning instead of an action. And whether you would be happy living under the warning’s weight. Instead of thinking about these things though, you went back to studying the antenna of the narwhal’s horn, the invisible power of radio waves, the small part of the spectrum of light that can be seen by the naked eye.

Andra Emilia Fenton was born in Mexico City. She's published nonfiction, poetry, and short stories in Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S. She completed a one-year Fiction Fellowship at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. In 2021, Dancing Girl Press published her first chapbook, BIRD IN A RIB CAGE. Her essay “Tectonics” is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.