This is a special post going out to my dear friend, Mercedes. I write as a magic spell when someone I love needs a little something extra.
My friend Mercedes is a jewelry artist and a musician. She once told me, “it’s kinda like like jewelry is my major and music is my minor.” As an artist who often finds it hard to answer the popular (and kind of annoying) question,‘What do you do?,’ I appreciated Mercedes’s definition of herself. I’m kinda like a poetry major with minors in, I don’t know, paper and music?
Mercedes is from North Carolina, but she’s lived in the MidWest (Minnesota, like me) and obviously here in the Northeast. She’s road tripped across the Southwest (like me) and she’s fallen in love with Germany too. Our lives have had so many commonalities. We were wild as teenagers, and now we feel a constant restlessness, an intense need for quiet and space. The biggest thing we have in common is, well, Mercedes and I don’t really know where home is.
To her, North Carolina is one home and New York is the other, but the Southwest holds a planetary feeling for her too. It’s there that she feels like she can reach out her arms, know that there’s nothing but space for miles, and she can breathe. For me, it’s a toss up between Florida and Wisconsin, with heavy leanings towards central Europe. On that continent, I can disappear into languages I don’t understand and everything sounds like music.
Out of love for our families, she and I migrate. Currently, out of love for family, Mercedes has her feet and her heart in two places.
The only thing I can think to tell her is that the day will come when she will ground herself in her own music and her own craft. Her hands will be on beads and strings again. Her art supplies and her guitar will have a home in one house. I don’t know where that somewhere is yet, but I am willing Mercedes to find it… willing her to find it…
