CHAPTERS: Julianna Salguero

Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story.

and

Feb 07, 2025

Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story. What are yours? In Chapters, I ask creative people to reflect on the stories of their lives and respond to any of the below prompts (in whatever way they wish).

In the latest installment, we hear from

Julianna

Salguero—singer/songwriter, social media manager, and creator of

keepsake

—who shares family memories, travel adventures, and personal reflections.

Julianna’s Chapters

I. Slow Story

It’s strange how much of life is spent waiting. Lots of waiting and then lots of rushing. Hardly any time to enjoy your own pace. I’ve always had a bit of a slow one myself. I had all my baby teeth longer than any of my classmates, and I never pushed myself running the mile at the gym. I resisted all the major markers of adolescence. I was the last to get my period, last to get my license, and last to be kissed.

You know when you can tell someone is an old soul? I feel like a middle-aged one. Not brand new and adventurous, but not older and wiser either. Some sort of awkward fumble in the middle where I have all the optimism and hesitation of both. Growing up, this slower pace felt like something out of my control. I would watch people around me perfectly capable of meeting deadlines. I couldn’t identify ambitions I found meaningless. I lurched into a deep depression around this in my teens and crawled the crooked path out of it in my twenties.

The most obnoxious piece of advice I have about it is to be yourself. I know, infuriating, especially when you’re not sure who that even is. Becoming yourself is just discovering the things that make you happy. If you want to move forward in life, your own life, not some made-up idealized life, you have to follow your bliss. I know the trip will take me a while, so instead of telling myself to hurry up like everyone else, I stop and smell the roses along the way.

II. Love Story

I don’t think anyone on earth has been loved the way my grandmother was. She left her family farm in Pennsylvania for business school in Albany, and there she met my grandfather. He had just arrived from Colombia and was immediately smitten with her. He would send her love letters and write her songs in Spanish. Anything to earn her favor and convince her of his very serious intentions.

My favorite story of theirs is after they got married, though, on their honeymoon in Havana. They went to a club to listen to some music, and the band started playing her song. It was the song he said he wrote for her: Muñequita Linda. To this day, it is the most romantic sound I’ve ever heard. I believe, somehow, that song was willed into existence for them only, and by that logic, he really did write it for her. It was only a white lie.

III. Winter Story

On the fifth day of my first trip to Paris, I woke up in the snow. I spent my first few days traveling alone from cafe to bistro, writing every thought and feeling along the way. This was the morning I would get some company. This is when my sister would arrive from New York, and now it was also the day it was snowing in Paris. I texted 'it’s SNOWING’ and started making a pot of coffee.

I warmed yesterday’s pastries in the oven and made two soft-boiled eggs. We hit the streets immediately after breakfast and it went from spotted to stormy, neither of us really caring about how cold and wet it was. In the thickest snowfall, we walked from our Airbnb in Pigalle to the Seine. We stared at the icy grey water, went red from the cold, and turned right back around.

IV. Long Story

The longest book I’ve ever read is American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Like the academy, I was enthralled with the film Oppenheimer, and until Challengers came out it was my most viewed in theaters. My friend and I decided to get the book for some light summer reading. It’s 784 pages and paints an even broader and weirder picture of the father of the atom bomb. It also made me, a woman who couldn’t be farther from STEM, interested in physics.

V. Travel Story

If you’ve never been hospitalized in a foreign country before, I highly recommend Tibet. Immediately upon landing, I felt this deep gravitational pull in my stomach. Foreigners have trouble with the altitude as Lhasa is about 12,000 feet above sea level. I looked at my mom and said, “I don’t feel good,” and she said, “It doesn’t happen that fast,” and then I passed out. I fainted one more time at baggage claim, and then it was decided that I needed to go to the hospital. It was a 45-minute ride on the stretcher, and when I got there, I realized that there were no doors. Stray dogs wandered in and out of the rooms, and I seemed to be the only person under 70 being treated. I sat with an oxygen tank until my heart rate returned to normal and took very slow steps for the rest of the trip. A few days later, when we journeyed on to Laos, I bumped my head exiting a river boat and went to my second foreign hospital for stitches.

VI. Bedtime Story

Growing up, we would visit my great-grandmother, my Nona, in Palm Beach. I have a few key memories of her house. She had a pool, a small orange tree, and a statue of a little girl made out of stone by the back of the house. I was terrified of it because her aide told me she was a human girl who was cursed by a witch.

She had these measuring cups shaped like ducks I would play games with in the kitchen, right by the Cinnamon Toast Crunch, she would stock just for me.

She also had these sparkly gold shoes. I don’t remember how I found them, but once I did I never let them out of my sight. I refused to go to bed unless I was cuddling them like a teddy bear.

VII. Color Story

Purple is for little sisters. I say this as an expert in both subjects. It is the destiny of every second-born daughter to receive a slightly altered version of things, and favorite colors are no different. I don’t remember actively choosing it as my favorite; it was thrust upon me, but I carried around a lilac marker nevertheless, in case someone wanted to know where I stood. Purple is a complicated color, though, and my relationship with it is equally complex.

Pink is the pinnacle of femininity, the clearest and truest sign that you are a girl and you are six years old. How can the murky waters of purple compare? Purple is shapeshifting and secret, as luxurious as it is obnoxious and altogether unknowable. It is amethyst, eggplant, and grape.

When I’m being self-deprecating, and feel like something I own is particularly ‘Julianna,’ I say it’s been consumed by the lilac cloud. Things that look cool online lose all credibility as soon as I buy them. There’s this little sister lavender that attaches itself to everything around me.

Once, I had my aura read, and it came back purple. A purple aura means that you are intuitive and empathetic, creative and truthful. It’s also known to appear in people who have their psychic abilities activated. They didn’t say anything about it being for little sisters, but I trust that the universe agrees.