WRITER: Kiana Marsan
MODE OF WRITING: Creative nonfiction
WORD COUNT: 417
CONDITIONS: Bench outside Evans Chapel, sunny afternoon, no music or people nearby, starting at 2:10pm and ended at 2:36 pm.
Over winter break, I’ll get the chance to go back to my home away from home. My family has had a condo in Miami, Florida since I was a kid, and we revisit it as often as we can. It was my grandmother’s home away from home first, the place my parents convinced her to buy for when winters got too cold in Delaware. She grew to love the small community in that building, though, because the friends she made there were able to support her after her husband died in ways our family couldn’t and didn’t know how to.
She made memories in that condo that defined it as her own, so it became ours too. In the kitchen, it always smelled like carrots because none of us ever had the heart to tell her we hated carrot cake. In her closet, where the washer and dryer were supposed to go, she installed her own mini-bar of tequila. I’d open those creaky doors during games with my brother, expecting to find the perfect hiding spot for hide and seek, only to see my grandmother’s stash of liquor instead. In the living room, she would chase me around with a towel in hand because after showers, my curly hair was always dripping on her carpet. On the balcony, she’d sit with her two friends, the Bobs—one lived next door and one lived a floor below her—and people-watch the parking lot for vandals and thieves and whomever else would prey on a building for those 50 and older. They’d gossip while they waited for the world to materialize in front of them. Dylan and I would go out sometimes and say hello to our favorite Bob, the one that had remembered my brother hated eggs and bought him an ice cream cake for his seventh birthday. Or we would go down to our private pool, which was really the building’s but was always empty and ready for our taking. Dad taught us both how to swim there, and we learned in denial of the fact that we had done so because we loved staying in dead man’s float.
She stayed in that condo until the day she died, and then our family bought it and took her place. It’s sadder to be there without her in it, but her memory is reignited every time we go to visit. So, this break, what I’m really doing? I’m going to say hello to my grandma and visit her once again.
I learned a lot about my writing style through the process of screen-recording myself. I already knew that I was a writer that edited while I was drafting, but I don’t think I realized the extent of this. Lots of my process involved reading over what I had just written and tinkering with it. In my recording, I saw that I went back to almost every single sentence and reconstructed it. I was often trying to rephrase a thought in a way that sounded and flowed better, but its content largely remained the same.
The beginning and the ending seemed hardest for me to write, and I could tell from how I flipped back and forth that this was because I was trying to connect the two and make the piece cohesive. Writing came the easiest when I was in the midst of a narrative, as the sentences that brought my memories to life and came directly from my consciousness were the ones I worked with less. I’ve been gravitating to nonfiction rather than fiction as of late, and this helped me realize why. I’m a naturally slow writer because of how intertwined my drafting and editing process is, so I’ve turned to nonfiction because it requires less editing when I’m writing a memory I’ve already given shape to in my mind.
And, I also learned that I make typos and use the autocorrect feature a lot more than I think I do.