MY ONLY EARRINGS

“She strung them together for me—clip-ons, because my ears weren’t pierced. I hardly wore them, afraid they wouldn’t hold.”

She was born Havilah Giannetta, but she went by Hobbs, Hooby, the Lady of Mossgown. My name is Kasia, but she called me Rumply, as in Rumpelstiltskin. We called each other John, after the English peasant poet John Clare, who daydreamed while working in the fields much like we wrote poetry during history lectures. When we first met, in 2003, at an event for admitted Columbia students, I didn’t know what to make of Havilah. Tall and beautiful, she spoke of Jane Austen in a faux British accent over carrots and dip in a dark room pulsing with music. I couldn’t tell where, or when, she was from.

A few months later, we were living in single rooms on the same freshman-dorm floor. Havilah would knock, ask me to come watch her candle while she ran downstairs to move her clothes from the washer to the dryer. She had bought art books at the Strand and cut them up, plastering her room with the reproductions of Italian paintings and sculptures. She called it “working on my walls.”

I’d been raised Catholic by immigrant Poles, but Hobbs was the first person I met who actually talked to God. Visions for the future came to her as easily as poems, while I revised my writing extensively and agonized over life decisions. We were different in other ways too. I dressed practically, owned no make-up. Havilah wore scarves, glitter, bold lipstick, jewelry she’d made. I ran across campus in short sleeves; she was regal in a giant Nanuk coat with a fur-lined hood. Whenever we ate out, waiters brought her extra whipped cream and extra sauce, no charge.

I remember Hobbs dressing for a party, maybe the Winter Formal, in a black Marilyn Monroe number and shimmering gold wrap. I sat on the floor watching her get ready as if I were her kid sister. In fact she was one day younger than me. When we spoke of her birthday or mine, we called it ours.

The day I turned 19, she wrote me “A Kasian Ode”: “Skirted, dove-eyed pole-formed belle, steals any other’s passing quip....” I hung the poem on my door, thrilled. Later she strung together these earrings for me—clip-ons, because my ears weren’t pierced. I hardly wore them, afraid they wouldn’t hold.

After graduation, Hobbs traveled the world. She worked on a farm in Georgia, lived in Australia, in L.A. I got married and put down roots in New York. We wrote our books in parallel. To each other, we wrote sometimes prolifically, sometimes not at all. When one of us was flying somewhere, the other sent “a letter to read while underway.” Havilah sealed hers with wax. We drifted apart, together, apart again, but she never stopped invoking Borges: “I do not know which one of us has written this page.” She’d once leaned across a sticky dining-hall table to ask, “Do you exist? Or did I invent you?” That kind of bond doesn’t just disappear.

Havilah was killed by a hit-and-run driver in November 2024 while walking in rural Illinois. In January, on what would have been her fortieth birthday, I wore these earrings to her celebration of life in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up. They held, and held me. Material proof that I hadn't invented Havilah, or her love.

—Kasia Nikhamina

Havilah in Los Angeles, sometime in the 2010s. She’d moved to L.A. to pursue acting and writing, and found community at the artists’ hub Epiphany Space.

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Kasia Nikhamina writes Divinity School, intimate letters about living and dying. Her essays have been published in Roxane Gay's The Audacity and INTIMA: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. She lives in New Jersey and is working on her first novel.

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