Guardian Wreath

My grandmother on my mother’s side was Afro-Esmeraldeña; my grandfather on my father’s was Kichwa from the highlands above Otavalo. I grew up in two houses that spoke about protection in two different languages — the marimba songs that called the saints in from the coast, and the danzantes that came down from the páramo with carved masks and bells. I wanted to carry both, and I wanted it on my chest, where I breathe. I came to Jess with a folder of festival photographs and a single sentence: I don’t want a souvenir; I want a guardian. She spent the first session not drawing. She asked me which masks had ever frightened me, and which ones I’d grown to love, and she listened to the difference. What she drew is not a copy of any single mask — it is the one I would have carved if I knew how to carve. The horns are banded the way my grandfather’s are in the only photograph I have of him in costume; the geometry on the brow is the stepped cross my mother stitches into the corners of every cloth she gives away. The passionflower is for the courtyard in Quito where I learned to read. Jess fit the whole thing into the narrow space along my sternum so it sits with me, not on me — a long quiet column down the centerline, widest at the top where I can feel it when I take a breath in, tapering to a point I can rest my hand over when I need to. Every time I catch it in a mirror I feel met, not watched.

Amara — Esmeraldas, Ecuador