Friday is writing creepy bummers.

The slender fingers of Luisa Ortiz lift the arm of her grandfather’s record player and set the needle gently on the old vinyl. She has done this every day since his funeral three years ago, and will do it again tomorrow. The machine itself is delicate and meticulously cared for. The needle is kept fresh and only ever handled with the tips of her lilac-hued acrylic manicure, sharpened tools with which she deftly plucks at paperclips, portions out slices of fried plantain, creases the folded pages of her notebooks to mark certain thoughts, applies and removes her false eyelashes each day, and, most importantly, carefully handles the precious record player and its tender mechanisms.

Luisa owns one record. Despite being a romantic to her core, a believer in the vital nature of an inflamed passion, she is a deeply contemporary woman with a need for simplicity, practicality, and structure. Her phone is full of various media apps for podcasts, television shows and music. She doesn’t make much money, scraping what she can from waitressing part time and living in a small studio apartment to afford the poetry habit she hopes will someday become a full time career. Luisa owns four precious objects in all the world: her smartphone, her laptop, the record player and the aforementioned vinyl record.

She is so very careful never to bump or scratch the vinyl, never to damage the surface with her skin oils or her very sharp, very strong manicure. She believes the record to be magic, and she is correct. This album holds all the passion and poetry of her grandfather’s young life back in Cuba, before the panic, before the island and the continent declared one another unwanted. This album is the one piece of home that survived his clandestine boat ride to Miami, and when she drops the needle gently into the outer groove it is as though she can hear the stars in his young eyes. This etched slice of plastic holds one thousand touches of calloused musician’s fingers, the intake of breath before a soulful lyric, the tears of a young man missing his home and afraid to be alone in a new country. It is in all these sounds and sensations that she finds her own muse, just as her grandfather intended when he left it to her.

Bass and claves set up the beat. A playful piano and trumpet banter over quiet bongo drums, and a man’s low, rasping voice croons lyrics she’s embarrassed not to understand. Her feet itch to dance barefoot about her apartment, but she never learned how to mambo before the beautiful old man passed away. She regrets not making time to learn more from him. It sits on her shoulders daily and weighs her feet down like lead shoes. Luisa herself may never mambo, but dances with her fingertips. Luisa’s dancing looks like rigid fingernails flying loudly over the keys of her simple, inexpensive computer keyboard as she composes her afternoon poems. Each pointed nail hits precisely where it means to. Luisa is an exquisite typist.

The cheerful jazz music moves Luisa to the tiny kitchen countertop where her laptop is plugged in. A beam of light streams through the window and the aroma of arepas drift up from her downstairs neighbor’s apartment. Sra Perez owns a restaurant downtown and teaches Luisa one recipe per month in exchange for cat sitting during the older woman’s frequent visits to her sister back home in Venezuela. The arepa scent makes Luisa’s mouth water, but her grandfather’s record is playing the rhythmic Cuban jazz of a bygone era and she must complete the ritual to keep her daily writing streak intact.

It is true that Luisa Ortiz is a very talented poet. It is true that the blood of a passionate and expressive musician runs in her veins. It is also true that she is a thirty-seven year old woman living alone in a small apartment in a small city in southern Florida with very little to look forward to in her days other than the satisfaction of quotidien rituals being fulfilled and the hope of her art becoming known. Luisa suffers from severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which has long disrupted her ambitions and held her captive. But you see, since the death of her grandfather, she has learned to dance with herself and her “funny little ways,” as one tía used to put it. This beautiful man was an artist like herself. He a musician and she a poet, and both saw themselves in the other. He never treated Luisa like a funny little thing or a broken girl. She did not feel like a failure around him, despite his beautiful native flow of Spanish and her lack of any real Spanish to speak of. To speak with. Despite his easy way with people and her seeming inability to do anything right or keep from embarrassing the family matriarchs.

With him, she felt brilliant and capable. She did not feel like a failure for being unable to complete college due to the stress causing her to spend hours on end arranging cans of Fanta by color on a dormitory shelf instead of studying or completing her coursework. The fear of failure in the eyes of her immigrant family members led to sleepless nights of highlighter color-coding paperwork for classes and applications for jobs that she rarely managed to actually submit. When her grandfather smiled at her with his eyes, she did not feel like a failure for all the good office jobs she was unable to hold down due to spreadsheet paralysis and fear of quarterly reviews. In his eyes she was exactly who she needed to be. It was clear as day in every wrinkle of his old face.

Now his record plays in the home her mother is ashamed to visit for its tiny size. The record with all his favorite songs, grooves like the loving crinkling around his black-brown eyes, plays rich layers of Afro-Cuban jazz by the heroes of his early career. She pretends it is him playing upright bass on the tracks. In passing, he left this album to her, and in doing so he gave her his love and faith to keep every day in the tiny heart of her home. And so now she builds her rituals around an old source made new and it helps make the rest of her world easier to handle. The writing ritual of her late afternoons is a feast for her disorder as well as for her soul.

She opens her laptop and makes a cafecito while it boots up, stirring three times clockwise and then three times counterclockwise. Once the computer is awake and her coffee is brewed and mixed just so, she writes a poem. One every day until an opportunity presents itself and she is known. She will eventually submit for publication, but for now the ritual has amassed Luisa a collection of nearly one thousand and one hundred poems.

After the day’s poem is written, she closes the computer and cleans her coffee supplies. The poems are of course backed up in three places. One copy saved to her desktop in a folder labeled with the current date range. Folders are sorted initially by quarter, then further by month. The file is saved as well in an identically labeled system of folders on a small flash drive shaped like a frog. It’s cute, picked up from the corner market on a whim. She needed one anyway, why shouldn’t it be a frog? The third copy is printed on the weekend and set into a three ring binder under the bed, though here the folders are labeled by quarter and sub-sorted into months by plain manila dividers.

A body of work grows one poem at a time. That is a good place to start. Her grandfather would be very proud of her. Luisa has held one job down for nearly three years. Her Tía has stopped making pointed comments about her loudly at family dinners. Her mother still asks about her love life, but has ceased entirely complaining about never becoming a grandmother. Her personal recipe book, written by hand in purple pen that matches her usual nail color, grows quietly each month and she is now quite adept with a knife, a plantain and a pan of hot oil. There is a lot to love about her life, as small and formulaic and simple as it is. There is a lot to fear as well.

When she begins to feel a panic rise that her works will never be published, she closes her eyes and listens to the music. The claves and the lyrics she pretends to understand make her feel like she is a part of something structured and inventive all at once. Both regulated and organic. His music becomes her poetry and she fills books and books. Here and there she lifts the skirt of her twin bed to look at the nest of notebooks full of poems printed out at the library on weekends. Each notebook is tidily labeled with a date range and poems are color-coded by hand on each page for the themes explored. They are orderly. They are beautiful.

Sometimes it’s just about learning how to befriend your difficulties and get them on your team. And so now she has. And so now she writes. Luisa is happier than she ever has been, though she is still figuring out day after day what “happy” looks like. Since receiving the record player and the record, it finally feels like a possibility, and she is tentatively exploring a new routine. A new program. To Luisa, the death of her grandfather was not the end of the world. He was such a one-of-a-kind spirit, you see, that in passing he managed to give his favorite granddaughter a precious gift.

He has given her the gift of a framework to grow love for herself. A totem. A charm. A fixation point and a joy touchstone all at once. Luisa was never invisible to her grandfather. Her “funny little ways” to him were a clear system of systems. A series of mechanisms with rules that could find anything to latch onto when stability was needed. To her grandfather, Luisa was jazz. She was a groove in need of a band to read her inspiration and build a frame around her. A supporting group. A backup set. And grandfather was nothing if not a professional in the rhythm section. The skilled bassist laid down a life beat from beyond the veil to keep his granddaughter’s jazzing brain in the flow. Posthumous framework can only be facilitated by an old pro.

The ritual is like this, as you and I have now witnessed: the slender fingers of Luisa Ortiz lift the arm of her grandfather’s record player and set the needle gently on the old vinyl. Luisa owns one record. She is so very careful never to bump or scratch the vinyl, never to damage the surface with her skin oils or her very sharp, very strong manicure. Bass and claves set up the beat. The cheerful jazz music moves Luisa to the tiny kitchen countertop where her laptop is plugged in. It is true that Luisa Ortiz is a very talented poet. With him, she felt brilliant and capable. Now his record plays in the home her mother is ashamed to visit for its tiny size. She opens her laptop and makes a cafecito while it boots up, stirring three times clockwise and then three times counterclockwise. After the day’s poem is written, she closes the computer and cleans her coffee supplies. A body of work grows one poem at a time. When she begins to feel a panic rise that her works will never be published, she closes her eyes and listens to the music. Sometimes it’s just about learning how to befriend your difficulties and get them on your team. He has given her the gift of a framework to grow love for herself.