20 // CAMPUS | MEMOIR
FELIZ NAVIDAD AUTHOR // Lulu Alvarez-Mon
I got dumped the day before Christmas Eve. There’s a blue Siamese fighting fish called Edwin shimmering around in a five litre glass jar to my right, and he keeps looking at me. Fuck off, Edwin. I have a void where my culture should be. It’s a hole roughly the size and shape of Edwin’s vessel, and it’s weighing emptily in my stomach. If you were Edwin and you swam down into my void you would see that its walls are lined with objects. There is a TV screen, American sitcoms flickering through it. There are thousands of books, their pages softly waving in the water. Blank pages and pencils and old laptops. Screens bared, open to various Tumblr pages from 2014. Tattered school books, plane tickets, luggage tags, metro cards, and stubs from before. Packets of mi goreng noodles, holographic posters of Hindu idols, incense, Buddha figurines, art history books in French, archaeology books in German, books on anthropology, books on linguistics, hiking boots, yoga mats. The tiny things that people I love have given me. A small ceramic dog from Japan. A rusted tin with a pink elephant on it. A lace ribbon. Heartshaped post-it notes scrawled with messages. A voice reverberates into the depths of the void from far beyond the surface: “Don’t wait for me,” it wobbles. “Being in ________ has made me think about how much my culture and my family mean to me.”
I knew what they were going to say before they said it, but the words still punched me right there in the empty place. I had known what was coming, because I had spent envy-filled hours imagining what it would feel like to be them. I imagined having a home and a culture and ‘getting in touch with your roots’. These hours led me to the conclusion that they would be unable to reconcile having both their culture and me. I was, unfortunately, by some stroke of intuition and paranoia, correct. How is it that someone else having something only makes you more aware of your not having it? I’ve never experienced it, but I imagine it so vividly that I can feel it. Going Home For Christmas. I imagine them surrounded by their family in a country that means something to them, where they were born and where their culture comes from, where the land feels like theirs and people look like them. To me the fact that any of those qualities intersect seems magnificent. I hear what is implied: “You are not part of my culture. You are not part of my family.” And of course, it’s true. And then I hear my stupid, panicking heart: “You have no culture. You have no family. Not like that.” I look around frantically for ways to prove that I do (to win this competition), but there’s nothing for me to grab hold of. My family does not have traditions. It is Christmas Day. My mother has the flu, so all socialising (not with family, only with friends) has been cancelled, and gifts were exchanged two weeks prior with an explicit agreement: “Would you like this as your Christmas present?” and a transaction. I had walked out of the shop wearing a new necklace. Mama watched me
