Inside Voice is a new column by Cameron Jones, highlighting the eccentric decor choices of Yalies and the even more eccentric personalities behind them.
Steam rises from a kettle on the stove. I sit in the corner, at a hand-me-down wooden table with a rosy glass of cherry liqueur. Maya Sestan, JE ’26, buzzes around the room, apt for an entomologist. She radiates the same giddy energy as when I first met her (she approached me, grinning with a big white box in hand, and asked, “Wanna see my bugs?”) Every insect has a story. And everything in the apartment has a story: the blanket draped on the couch is from an old German lady, the Studio Ghibli posters were stolen from her siblings, the ceramic lamps and bowls were found in her mother’s hometown in Croatia. The bouquet was a gift from her mom.
Maya cares for her items with the minute attention a worker bee pays his hive. Her plants flourish from frequent care. She’s painted every ready-made piece of Ikea furniture with marching beetles and weaving butterflies. Even a humble tissue box is plastered with paper mache scenes from Castle in the Sky. “That’s my first memory,” Maya tells me, “watching that movie with my brother.”
Her bedroom marks the rhythms of her frantic present. A towering white bookshelf groans under the weight of entomology textbooks. At its side, a net and a blue bug-catching hat; at its base, a thicket of yarn and thread Maya pulls from to make her cross-stitch creations. “Come here,” Maya says from the door, “Look at this mirror. See, you have to bend over!” Next to the door frame, she’s hung a small mirror at exactly five feet and four inches off the ground. It’s the last look she gets at herself before rushing out the door and into her day.
Like a dried riverbed speckled with fossils in amber, Maya’s bedroom enshrines her family’s past. An icon of St. Anna, who shares her name with Maya’s “baka,” or grandmother, guards one corner of the room. Letters and drawings from old friends paper the wall. Perfume from her mother and wine bottles from her father collect on the vanity. Old pictures cloud the edges of a standing mirror. A Parisian lady depicted in a grand Impressionist poster, a gift from Maya’s sister, stares through the veil of time into her new Edenic home. I think she likes the origami butterflies that flutter up the wall and the cross stitch cats that linger above the door frame.
As the tour winds down, Maya alights on overlooked items, nonetheless essential to her. She presents a white rock she collected with her dad on a walk along the beach. Sharpied on is the enigmatic inscription, “boner :).” She points to a nametag where, for the first time in the US, her last name was written in the proper Croatian way: Šestan. It would be easy to think Maya’s lovely decor is all a part of a brand. But, no, she bares all, down to dick jokes and diacritics. When I compliment her golden, crane-shaped knitting scissors, she says, “Want to see something cooler?” before rifling through the drawers of her stately dresser. She brandishes a gleaming combat knife with a rosewood handle. The long blade curves into a threatening tip. “It’s my favorite gift,” she says, “Very violent. Banned in the UK. It’s for self defense.” I keep my eyes off the blade and glance around the room. As I sit in her cozy knitting chair, the scent of grapefruit and sage incense drifting around me, it’s hard not to feel as if I were in some cozy naturalist’s lodge deep in the hills. I understand the knife: a home like this is worth defending.
