I grab a small bar of green soap and an ever-shrinking roll of toilet paper from the TV stand at the end of my bunk and climb down. I aim my feet for a scattered pair of sandals in the hope of preserving my last pair of cleanish socks for one more day.

My bunk is in the last cube at the end of the high-side hallway, which means I start every day nearly forty yards from the bathroom. I tuck the toilet paper under my arm and weave my way through a bustling hive of convicted felons, all maneuvering and jockeying on their own personal missions this morning. With a little footwork, I'm eventually spit out at the opening to the bathroom. The fact that I'm the only one clutching a roll of toilet paper is a good sign.

Prison bathrooms are so much more than places to piss and shit; they're our barbershops, tattoo parlors, and gambling dens; they're where we go to smoke, fight, fuck, jerk off, or anything else that needs to unfold away from the prying eyes of the law. Bathrooms in prison are a lot of things; empty is rarely one of them.

I can't keep my eyes from rushing to the bottom of the stalls in search of shoes. It’s immediately clear god hates me—the pair of tattered mesh Nikes tapping a broken rhythm in the corner stall is undeniable proof. Two stalls down, a pair of state-issued cardboard loafers sit motionless. I remind myself to breathe.

Every housing unit has two bathrooms. And every bathroom has the same set of amenities: eight sinks, four showers, four urinals, and FOUR sit-down-to-shit toilets. You’d think only two pairs of shoes would mean two available stalls, but you’d be wrong. There's a prison custom that says—barring an absolute emergency—you always leave an empty stall between you and a fellow shitter. I know it sounds stupid to only use two of the four available toilets, especially in such an overcrowded environment, but it's our attempt to create a bit of privacy in a world where it otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Every morning it's the same fucking thing: four stalls and two assholes, tapping their toes while I struggle to hold in yesterday's undercooked beans. I exhale my displeasure and step aside to wait for one of the pairs of shoes to finish. I shift my weight from foot to foot in the universal dance-of-the-crowning-turd. My loathing for the obstructive footwear starts at the soles and quickly moves up the laces and over the tongues. In a few moments, it will ascend the socks to the actual owners of the shoes.

My stomach rolls over to remind me why we're here.

A toilet flushes.

I hold my breath.

Two birds.

A head of matted gray hair pops up from the corner stall like a deranged whack-a-mole. Mr. Mesh Nikes. I grab a plastic spray bottle from the nearest sink. It's the only one with enough pink mystery liquid to coat a toilet seat. Mr. Nike steps out of the stall. The door hangs open behind him. I turn sideways to let him pass.

There's a very specific ritual to shitting in prison. Half of it's for hygiene. The other half is for appearance.

I aim the disinfectant at the toilet and pull the trigger. A jet of pink liquid streams across the seat. The nozzles are always set to “stream," when they should be set to “spray.” You get better coverage with spray. It's a nuance that evades most incarcerated savages. I adjust the nozzle and pump a pink mist that quietly settles over the seat. I use the trigger to hang the bottle on the stall next to me while I unravel a spool of toilet paper. I run the fistful of paper under the faucet and enter the stall.

Every stall has a hole in the block wall the exact size and shape of a roll of toilet paper. This is where I place my soggy wad of paper. I balance the tiny bar of green soap on the side panel of the stall so I can unroll another wad of paper to wipe the seat.

Once around, twice around.

Another wad, another wipe.

My intestines rumble.

I lay a single strip, four squares long, on the right side of the seat. I do the same for the left. It takes exactly five individually ripped squares to cover the back of a prison toilet seat.

Toilets in the joint don't have tanks—just a solitary metal pipe that rises from behind the bowl with a flusher handle jutting out. This is where I hang my toilet paper while I take my shirt off. Yet another custom. (When you only get four t-shirts a year, it's worth the effort to keep them as shit free as possible.) I close the door and fasten the latch. This particular stall has a gap on the hinge side of the door wide enough to shake a hand through. Most inmates use strands of loose toilet paper to close the gap. I like to use my shirt.

One stone.

I exhale before finally lowering myself onto the toilet.

Stalls in prison don't provide the same coverage as stalls in the free world. They'll block you from your knees to your nips if you're standing. That's it. Even when you're seated, you're still just a slight turn of the head away from locking eyes with someone on the other side of the stall. But if you lean forward just right, with your head out over your knees, you can find the rarest, most beautiful pocket of privacy in the whole damn prison.

I rest my elbows on my knees and assume the position.

And just like that, the chaotic world around me disappears.

In seventy-six more days, I'll have exactly three years until I'm eligible for parole. By the time I get out, I’ll have spent a quarter of my life behind bars. Almost none of it will have passed in privacy.

I slowly twist my right index finger into my right nostril. A general survey. Few things in life are as universally satisfying as pulling a booger from your nose. It's a freedom you have to lose to truly appreciate. My initial search comes up empty. I reach for the toilet paper and unspool enough to blow my nose. I blow, crumple, and drop the used wad between my legs where it blossoms into a carnation of wet mush. My right foot taps out a rhythm of its own accord.

These rare moments of solitude allow for otherwise useless details of my environment to suddenly emerge. The front panels of these stalls have little legs that extend to the floor where they're bolted in place. Their feet are capped in aluminum sleeves that look like splash guards, but I suspect are meant to cover the bolts.

Anything in prison can be turned into a weapon.

Every leg has one of these sleeves, except the last one up against the wall. They either ran out or it was wrenched free by some industrious inmate.

I said, anything.

Without the protective casing, the leg looks to be about a thousand years old. The brackets and bolts are all rusted out with atrophy—a foot withered gimpy from exposure. One good kick could break the whole thing free. I used to notice little things like this when I first came to prison: the mangled intercom speaker straight out of an Orwell novel; the railing with five layers of exposed paint, worn away by buried hands long crossed over the chests of the inmates who guided them. It was all so abrasive back then. The constant clamoring and unceasing light. Everything registered in those days. Now, I'll hardly turn my head to watch a stabbing or an attractive female C.O. bounce past.

Typically, these stalls are covered in home-grown graffiti—sexual pictograms and clunky insults—reading material for bored or backed-up inmates. Every few weeks, a maintenance guy has to come in to paint the stalls clean. He must've been here recently. The only offering of bathroom poetry, scrawled in shaky pen ink, reads: "Peeing out of my penis feels nice." It's a brief but poignant observation.

On the wall next to me, in the joint between the third and fourth row of cinder blocks, is a deep ashen groove about eight inches long and maybe an inch-and-a-half deep. It's framed by a violent series of smaller slashes. Every end stall I've ever been in has this exact same feature in the exact same spot. It took me years to figure out that they're made by inmates grinding hunks of metal into knives against the porous surface of the block wall. I run my finger along the groove. I'm reminded of a jungle canoe—the ones carved from a single tree with tiny hatchets and braised with flames to render them waterproof.

The most common culprits for makeshift knives are bolts, chain link fencing, typewriter rods, and fan spindles. Of course, everyone has their preference, but if you ask me, typewriter rods make the best bangers. They're long uniformed steel—and they have some heft. Fence pieces are fine for the summer. They're easy to sharpen, easy to conceal, and easily accessible. But this is Michigan. Come January, when everyone's wearing state-issued winter coats and about nine layers of clothes, it'll take something heavier than a piece of chain link fence to make a statement. You see, most people don't understand the nuances of life behind ...

You know what—forget it.

Who gives a damn about the procedural minutiae of taking a shit or crafting a shank in prison.

It's depressing really.

I know every square inch of this place: every protocol, every custom, every monotonous nonsensical routine; I know every organization on the yard, their colors, their symbols, their particular lingo; I know which bunks are the best: the bottom bunk next to a window in the last cube; I know which shower stalls are the best: the ones in the corner; I know the best time to order a secure pack: the second week of the quarter; I know when to turn in laundry, and the rotating schedule of whites, blues, and personal items; I know the going rate for tattoos, individual or full sleeve; I can tell you how to straighten a spring to make a needle, and how to burn the soot to make the ink; ten years in and I know the entire month-long menu: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My brain is chock-full of worthless institutional bullshit. And it terrifies me to think what might've been wiped clean to make room for this nonsense. In three years and seventy-six days, will I discover I've forgotten how to parallel park? Or how to hug someone with both arms?

I can't wait for this shit to be over—only the closer I get to the door, the less it feels like I'll actually make it out. I'm afraid that any minute I'll wake up back in level 4 at the beginning of a twelve-year bid.

This place is changing me. I can feel myself slipping into something—someone—I wouldn't have recognized just a few years ago.

I remember my first day in the joint; there was this guy sitting on a picnic table in front of the maximum-security housing unit. His name was Chip. Chip was a fast-talking convict from the south somewhere—Tennessee, I think. I never did learn how he ended up in a Michigan prison. What struck me most about Chip was how nonchalant he was. It was like he was at a family reunion or something—anywhere but prison. His was a comfort gained by exposure alone. I remember being both disturbed and envious at how relaxed he was in a place like this. But I get it now. I don't know exactly when, but at some point over the last decade, I became some half-Korean version of Chip. I can see it in the eyes of the younger inmates when they pass me in the hall. I can hear it in their voices when they ask me about the weight pit schedule or what's for chow. One day, you're fresh on the yard, all wet behind the ears, taking pointers from the old heads. The next, you're that guy. The one who's at home here. I guess it's better than the alternative. It's just that it's a guy you never thought you'd be.

I exhale a breath that's more than just respiration.

I do my business. My flushes are strategically timed. My wipes are efficient yet thorough. Before I stand up, I slide my index finger into my left nostril. This time I find something. I roll what I find between my fingers until I have a tiny brown pebble. I drop it into the toilet and watch tiny concentric waves ripple towards the porcelain shore between my legs. The pebble sinks to a standstill beneath me.

This is it.

This is all I'll get today.

I reach back and flush, steeling myself for the chaos on the other side of the flimsy stall door. Pants up, shirt on, toilet paper under arm, green soap in hand. I slide the little silver latch aside. The slightly defaced door swings inward. What a terrible design.

I exhale, turn sideways, and squeeze out.

A pair of knockoff Timberland boots grabs a spray bottle from the sink next to me and slides past.

Three years and seventy-six days to go.

Her skin is as white as I hoped it would be, her hair black like Coca-Cola and as shiny as the plastic bottle it comes in. Her lips, framing teeth so white they look unreal, are as red as the apple that poisoned her. From where we stand in line, I look at her dress’s round, puffed sleeves and wonder how they got so round and so puffed. Do all princesses dress like that, I want to ask my mother.

I watch as the next little girl, many families in front of us, goes up for a photo. Snow White bends down towards her, smiling, showing her white, white teeth. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but why is she smiling so much? I want to ask. I look up at my mother, squinting my eyes against the sun, to see if there’s the usual frown on her face, a frown that is too deep and too ingrained for her twenty-six years. I can’t see high enough to see her face, but I imagine that the frown is there. My mother doesn’t smile as much as Snow White, and when she does, her smile is different: one of her front teeth has a silver cap with a star carved into it, so that what you notice most about her rare smiles is that little star, made of exposed bone, shining out.

Why is your smile different, I want to ask, but I keep quiet, letting my questions flow through my head like water. At four years old, I already know that asking too many questions tests my mother’s patience. I keep quiet, keep my questions to myself.

It is the summer of 1999, and we are in Disney World waiting to meet Snow White and Cinderella.

04/06/2023 Interview: Mother

“How did you pay those first months of rent?”

“What rent? I stayed with Veronica.”

“Whatever, the first months’ costs. And for Disney World. Where was that money from?” I am old enough now to ask questions about how she was able to do it all, strong enough to hold their heavy answers.

“Well, to go to Disney World, someone had to give me money for me to travel so far. Like I said, that guy, Sigifredo, that type of person, they’re opportunists.” She pauses to put on a shy, feminine voice, as if speaking to Sigifredo: “’Oh, I’d really like to go to Disney World.’” Then a man’s deep voice: “’Well, if you’re already going over there, I’ll give you some money.’” She looks at me, making sure I understand, and goes back to her feminine voice, more confident this time, “’Órale. Alright.’ After that, I was broke, so maybe I took another job. That’s probably what happened, but I don’t remember.”

Wanting put two and two together twenty-four years later, I explain my reasoning: “That’s what I’ve always wondered about. How it doesn’t make sense that we moved to Alabama totally broke, and that you took us to Disney World. That doesn’t match up with your behavior.”

“We weren’t planning on moving to Alabama. The plan was to go to Disney World. I wanted to take you and your brother. I always bought you Disney movies, so I wanted to take you to Disney World.”

Florida’s sun is shining down on my head where two ponytails poke out. I am wearing tiny pink sunglasses my mother bought me at the souvenir shop. In my left hand, covered in sticky sweat, is the autograph book that she also bought me, two yeses that seemed too good to be true until I saw her paying for my two wishes. When she handed them to me, I struggled to contain my joy.

On my back, a purchase I didn’t request, is a fluffy dog whose legs form two straps around my shoulders. Its tail is a leash that connects me to my mother. I got lost the day before after wandering off in silence to look inside Minnie’s house at her rounded furniture, to listen to her high-pitched giggle that she hid behind a giant gloved hand. When I’d turned around, no one was there, and I stayed put until a security guard asked me if I was lost. A few hours later, my mother found me sitting in the infirmary, quietly waiting. So that I wouldn’t get lost today, I wore the dog with its legs around my shoulders, its tail ending in a Velcro bracelet wrapped around my mother’s wrist.

A few days before Disney World, my grandmother, or Ita, made herself a belt of white, knee-high socks. She bought the socks at a Dollar General near Atlanta, taking them back to the house where we were staying with an uncle and his family. Hiding herself away in the room where she was sleeping, Ita knelt in her nest of blankets on the floor and pulled a sock out of the plastic bag. She held it up to her body longways, measuring out how many socks she’d need to make a belt that she could wear under her clothes to hide the risk she was taking for her daughter, my mother.

It would take two socks, she approximated, so she grabbed two and placed them before her. She picked one up in her left hand and with her right picked up the scissors that lay at her side. She cut the toes off the sock in three swift clips, with the skill of a mother whose made all four of her daughters’ clothes since before they were born. Snip, snip, snip. Having cut the toes off both, she grabbed a spool of thread and a needle, stuck the needle between her teeth, and rolled out a bit of thread. Snip. Forehead creased in concentration, she sewed the socks together, the needle piercing the fabric, back and forth, back and forth. They would go to a park soon, my grandmother and my mother, to pick up $23,000 in cash.

On the day Ita headed back to El Paso without us, she’d sew the circle of cash-stuffed socks around her, an act that would allow her daughter to break a cycle of poverty. This cycle is made up of spiraling, suffocating circumstances, endlessly circling in, entrapping mothers and daughters unless someone can break the circle force, bending it into a straight line that leads to somewhere unknown with the hope that it is somewhere better.

08/11/2022 Interview: Ita

“You were telling told me that the only thing you have in this life are your daughters and your grandchildren, so I wanted to ask you about when your daughters moved to Alabama. Maybe we could start with my mom, Monica?”

“Back then, I had that old house. We’ve always lived pa la chingada, not caring, but always in a natural way, and demasiado, demasiado a gusto. Too comfortable. Monica lived downstairs in that old house. I said, ‘Moni, why are you staying?’ Monica was struggling to settle down because she wasn’t satisfied with working in nude clubs. She wasn’t. She was suffering. But Monica, even to this day, has a safe inside of her where she puts things. She puts them there because later on, they’re going to serve her.”

Ita is a rambler, in her words and in her actions. You can watch and listen to her all you want, and you still won’t know what direction she’s heading: it’s her way of hiding that she’s lost. In this interview, she talked in her rambling way, bringing up my brother’s dad, his family’s rejection of my mother, my mother’s first job at fourteen in the factories in Juarez, at seventeen in the cantinas, how she took her little sister Marcela with her to both.

“Monica in the cantinas was a leader. To this day, she’s still a leader. She was never scared of her father. I was scared of him. She never was. One time, Monica called the police on him when she was nine years old, something I never did, because I would say to myself, if I call the police on him, when he gets out, how are things gonna go for me then? Monica called the police, and she accused him, clearly, to his face. She said, ‘That’s my father.’”

Ita eventually came back to the question at hand. “Moni agarró rumbo para acá, came to Alabama. I’m telling you this story, hija, because your mother was a leader. Yo no podía mocharle las alas a mi hija. I couldn’t chop off my daughter’s wings. I didn’t suffer when Monica left with you. It was as if she was going to a universe that she had already created. She had created a new world even before she got there. That's how your mom was. She had already made her world.”

It's my turn to meet the princesses, and my mother lets go of my hand so I can go forward, the dog’s tail trailing behind me. I look up at her before taking the last steps up to Snow White. Sweat is dripping down my back, marking my Tweetie tank top.

Snow White bends down, shining her bright white smile, and asks, “What’s your name?”

I squint at her, then look down. "Victoria," I mumble.

“Contesta bien,” my mother says. Answer right. State your name with confidence and pride. I look at my mother, then back at Snow White before repeating more clearly, “Victoria.” Not having the English to ask her for an autograph, I reach out my hand to give her my book.

04/06/2023 Interview: Mother

“I don’t remember exactly who it was, the police or what, but it was government something. They were waiting for us at the airport. They already knew who we were, with pictures they knew who we were. Because how would they know what passenger is Monica and what passenger is this guy? You know? As soon as we got off, they were waiting for us. When you get off the plane and you pass the little walkway thing? That’s where they were waiting for us. They asked, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ I said, ‘My sister lives in Alabama, so we’re going to visit her.’”

“Did you already have that answer planned or that’s what you thought of first?”

“It’s what I thought of. That’s the only time I’ve been interrogated that my mouth dried up.”

My mother had a lifetime of experience of being interrogated by government something without her mouth drying up, because she’d grown up living on both sides of the border, between El Paso and Juarez, despite never having documents to enter the US.

“I said that we were going to Veronica’s house in Birmingham. So then he and I rented a car. Ernesto, I think his name was. We had to drive to Birmingham. I was kinda panicking at that point. On top of that, we couldn’t communicate any of this. Once the police is waiting for you, obviously they’re keeping tabs on you.”

“How much did Sigifredo offer to pay?”

“I think it was $1,500. I can’t remember, mami, but $1,500 for me, era un chingo. It was a fucking lot. To this day, I’m not sure what exactly we were taking from Atlanta. I’m almost 100% sure that it was money because drugs don’t come from the US. It was money because we were going to Juarez.”

“Do you know what kind of drugs Sigifredo sold?”

“No.”

“They never talked about that stuff?”

“No.”

“So you would know they were narcos—”

“But we never talked about it. Which is weird I guess. Ah, but you know what? Once Sigifredo gave me $1,000 to take care of I don’t know how many kilos of marihuana…when we lived behind that old lady’s house. He asked me if I could take care of it for a week. I had them in a closet, a plastic tote, full. All the packets were wrapped in aluminum with some kind of tape. Your Ita, I would tell her everything. I thought she was my best friend. And I told her that Sigifredo had left me in charge of this stuff. $1,000. Oooh! That’s a lot of money! It was in that house where we had a birthday party for you with a horrible piñata that was supposedly Little Riding Hood. Your Ita invited some guy to the party, which I thought was very weird, and when I was walking inside, suddenly I saw your Ita throwing him one of the packets that I had hidden in the closet.”

She shared the rest of the story, her anger bubbling up at her mother’s thoughtless theft. I listened with disappointment. I wasn’t getting clear answers. I wanted the traceable timeline, the cause and effect of what led to our move to Alabama, the place where I started school and had electricity for the first time and running water and a room of my own. I wanted a map with clearly marked lines to be able to say without a doubt, this decision that my mother made was a good decision.

She couldn’t draw the lines I wanted. Her memory was a blur, her success having erased old moments of fear. When I ask, where did the money come from that helped us move away from El Paso, her answers are “maybe so”s and “I don’t remember, but”s. There are no straight lines, but rather blurry answers that give me the colors to fill in the painting of a landscape that somewhere within it held the path to Disney World and to Alabama.

I watch Snow White, kneeled before me, sign my book in neat curving letters. Fidgeting, I look up to the castle on the hill. I wish we could go in and walk through its rooms. I’ve seen those rooms on TV, seen their soft light and spotless floors. I want to ask if we can go in, but I am too shy. Whose castle is it anyways? Snow White’s or Cinderella’s? Where is the second castle and how long would it take us to drive there? We drove two days from El Paso to Georgia, and another two days to here.

Our house in El Paso is big like the castle, but its largeness is scary. Instead of chandeliers, a sense of doom hangs from its ceilings. The house is empty, a gaping shell of a house with no bathroom, kitchen, nor electricity. Unlike the castle, it’s not on a hill and doesn’t have a fence. It sits on flat land, desert dirt dissolving into a barren expanse. In our yard there is a single tree and a trampoline.

I look back at Snow White. What bed does she sleep in now that she is married? I think about the bed I share with my mother and brother, tucked into the corner of the unfinished basement, a huge room with concrete floors and no windows that we navigate using a flashlight.

Snow White, smiling, hands my book back, and I make my way over to Cinderella. It’s her castle, I conclude, and I wonder if you need a white horse to go in.

Cinderella smiles and asks me my name. I am more confident now. “Victoria,” I say, looking at her blond hair, her black necklace. She is wearing what she wore when the prince fell in love with her. I want to ask her what princesses do all day when they’re not out here smiling? In the movies, I don’t see what happens after she moves to the castle, but I assume that whatever she does, it is in an easier, happier place than the one from which we saw her break free.

04/01/2023 Interview: Mother

“When we went to Alabama, I said, I don’t want to go back to El Paso. I mean, how much worse can it be? I spoke to Veronica and Norma. They were cleaning houses, and they said it paid well. I said to myself, I’ll clean houses.”

“Instead of working at the strip club?” She had protected my innocence so well throughout my life that I still hadn’t understood that it was not a strip club but a nude club, where there was nothing left to strip, just bare skin, exposing her bare life. Yet it was her best option with no papers and two children.

“I hated it, mami. I would go the minimum days to make just what I had to make to pay the rent and the electricity and a little bit of extra money, but not much. I was getting food stamps, and I had Medicaid for you guys. I think they also gave me a $92 check from the government. Three days a week I would be at home with you guys, but four days I had to go to work. When I made the money I wanted to make, I would hide in the back until closing time, me hacia pendeja, playing dumb. The manager, Miguel, would tell me, ‘Ándale, sal! C’mon, get out there!’ He was good people, but I was already shut down. I didn’t want to anymore, and that’s why when I went to Alabama, I said, ni madre, hell no, I’m not going back.”

04/06/2023 Interview: Mother

“There was no job?” I asked, insistent.

“I don’t remember if there was a job, but I ended up staying in Alabama. Because ya estaba hasta la chingada. I couldn’t take it anymore. But of course, at first, I struggled a little bit, especially having you, so little. What was I going to do with you? So I did other things, I think, like that trip. Because I’m telling you, your Ita was involved in it. I don’t know how it happened that we all ended up in Tybee Island. I remember your Ita had the money strapped around her waist. I can’t remember how it went. How was the money handed to me? I don’t remember anything.”

As we walk away from the princesses, I look around, and wonder, where are the ones that helped them get here? Snow White had the forest animals and the seven short men. Cinderella had the mice, the dog, the fairy godmother. I wanted to meet the dwarves, to see a real dwarf, especially Grumpy, the one that we all joked was just like my mother.

12/10/2022 Interview: Ita

“You should put it in the book that once Monica told me, ‘Sigifredo wants me to take some money. I don’t want to take it because I have my kids.’ I told her that I would take it. ‘Moni, I’m going to take it, héchalo.’ There was not a single thought in my head of getting something out of it, only that my daughter wasn’t going to take it, but that she could also stay on good terms with this man, this man who respected her, who had let her borrow a car for the trip. I took it. I met up with a young man. He gave me $23,000. I sewed two socks, long white socks, I sewed the end, and I put the money in there, then I sewed them on the front. I took that money, and they gave me $1,000. I split it up among my daughters. With Emilia, Monica, Micaela.”

These were some of my first interviews, back when I planned to interview only my grandmother, trying to bring her closer after a lifetime of pushing her away.

05/07/2023 Interview: Ita

“What are the trips that you remember my mother doing from Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, or Alabama, and that she took back to Juarez or to El Paso with money?”

It’s been a month since my mother’s confessions confirming what Ita stated. I want to hear what Ita remembers, even if her memory is selective, giving answers that paint a life made of clean beginnings with the promising light of a sunrise.

“That was an accident in my life. I didn’t know until the moment it was happening. We had come to Alabama for Veronica’s daughter’s baptism. We came in the van that Sigifredo let us borrow. Well, he let Monica borrow it. Many of the things that happened between Sigifredo and Monica, things related to that, like drugs or money, I didn’t know anything about. She wouldn’t tell me anything.”

The words “ni de puta sirves” rang through my head from a story my mother had often shared now that I was an adult. During our last months in El Paso, there was one day when Ita wanted my mother to call Sigifredo so they could meet and she could get money out of him. When she told Ita she didn’t want to, my Ita yelled at her eldest daughter, enraged, “Ni de puta sirves!” You’re not even good for a whore.

I let Ita continue telling the story how she wished to remember it.

“The money was in Atlanta. That’s what Monica told me.” She paused, sensing my disbelief, and said, “I’m not going to lie to you. If Monica said it with the intention that I would do it for her, I don’t know. I’ve never wanted to think about it.”

“Do you remember if it was the same trip to Disney World, or was it another trip? Or you don’t remember?”

“I remember that we were in Tybee Island. I loved it. I’ve always loved brown seawater. Monica experienced a little bit more things to do with drugs, because she was a good friend, well actually, lover. She was Sigifredo’s lover. He would take her out and come and get her. He treated her súper, really well. Monica had a job in a nightclub in El Paso, and your uncle Hugo had a job there because Sigifredo gave them a job. But in reality, I don’t know anything. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t serve me to remember, because I always told Monica that I was always against that stuff. 100%. Completely against it. Monica told me that she would never, never get involved, do something illegal. I would always tell Monica, I wouldn’t get on to her, I would tell her that if you were to get put in jail, I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore. Lots of things like that I would tell her with sadness, but I never saw that Monica was involved. I never saw anything. Nothing. No. Never. I didn’t see anything. I don’t have memories of money, lots of money, nor of drugs.”

We walk away with my book signed by Snow White and Cinderella, along with Donald Duck and Minnie and Mickey. I look up at my mother and say, “Mami, teno hame.” I can’t speak properly yet, but she knows what I’m saying. Tengo hambre. I’m hungry.

We stop to eat a burger, and she lets me drink Coca-Cola in a plastic cup with Cinderella drawn on the outside. All of my dreams seem to be in the palm of my hand. I sip the Coke with relish. It’s a treat my mother always says no to, a treat I can only get from Ita when my mother isn’t home.

In my joy, I don’t think to ask: Where is the evil queen?

06/30/2023 Interview: Mother

“I thought your Ita was my best friend. I would always talk to her about everything. Then I started growing up, and I realized, wait, this is not the best person for me to be telling everything to. This is not a person that has actually been a good person to me. I didn't realize it until I was older. After I had you guys older.”

“Did something happen?”

“Maybe I had kids, and I realized I would never let my kids do that. I would never put my kids in that situation.” She used the word situation generally, referring to the constant experience of having a mother who’s known only violence from men, who sees men as a source of survival, whose survival doesn’t go beyond today.

“It wasn't that she did something once you were older?”

“Well, she started stealing from us, and also keeping the welfare money that was supposed to be for all of us. Or losing it.” She says “losing it” with air quotes. “When I was a teenager, I believed it. I thought, man, what bad luck, that she would getpickpocketed on the ruta in Juarez. But then I started getting older. I said, wait a minute. How many times does your money get lost? Get stolen? I thought, wait, I think she's lying to us. And it was about the money we got from welfare at that point because she had not started to steal from us. Actually, the money I came home with that I made—I would always give her some. I stopped giving her money when I found out that she was with Jorge and they weren't working. I still didn't know they were using drugs, but I just didn't like that he wasn't working, and she was over here wanting money. I would buy her some groceries, but I didn't give her money.”

The sun is down, and my little body can’t take the walking anymore. I walk with my arms hanging low, as slow as I can, hoping my mother will carry me. I don’t get what I want. Instead, my pulling at the dog leash with my slowness annoys her. “Párale!” she snaps. Stop it. She doesn’t want to hear that I am tired when she is also tired. I sit on the steps of a fountain with my brother to wait. By the next morning, I will be ready to go out and meet the characters from the VHS movies my mother buys us with the tips she has earned.

A few days after Disney World, we drove to Birmingham in a white Crown Victoria with nothing but the clothes in our trunk. We were going because Veronica, Ita’s half-sister, was baptizing her one-year-old daughter Jasmine at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church. Baby Jasmine wore a white dress, long and flowing, unblemished. She looked like an angel as she floated over the holy water. With her parents standing on either side, the priest poured a cupful of water, gently, over her little head.

The baptism marked a new beginning, the stream of water washing away past sins. Reborn, pure, she could now lead a life of goodness, worthy of belonging and of believing.

As the afternoon heat began to descend, everyone walked out into the church’s parking lot and got into their cars, into white work vans and dented pick-ups. They drove away out of the white part of Birmingham and over the mountain to the Section 8 housing in Gate City, fifteen minutes and worlds away. As the sun set, we feasted on pork carnitas and danced to a norteño band. We were all there, my mother, my brother, my cousins, my aunts, each of us dancing and handsome, wearing clothes sewn by Ita.

That night, we slept in bunk beds in Veronica’s two-bedroom Section 8 apartment. We kept the windows open to let out the heat of too many bodies in too small a room. Through the open windows, the pop-pop-pop of gunshots riddled the night as we fell asleep to the sound of cicadas. For weeks we stayed there, until my mother found a trailer in the woods far away from the city.

07/05/2023 Interview: Mother

“I told Micaela, my sister, when I was working in Birmingham already, working, like really working, making money, I told her, ‘Micaela, ponte a trabajar. Se siente bien padre.’ Go work, it feels really good. Se siente bien padre when you can make your own money. Which is so crazy that it wasn’t until that point that I started making my own money. Me sentía muy padre. I’m working! Even though I was breaking my back cleaning houses, I was working to make my own money. Ya no estaba teniendo que aflojarle las nalgas a nadie. I didn’t have to give it up to anyone for them to give me money. I even stopped getting food stamps because I was making $500 a week. I could make it with $100 just fine. Can you believe it? That was just the way things were done.”

A few weeks after Disney World, my mother will begin searching the classifieds for housekeeping jobs. She will respond to each ad and begin making enough money to where, one day, she drives to the welfare office and tells them she doesn’t need food stamps anymore. Put it in writing, they’ll tell her. She will go home to our little home in the woods, find a piece of paper, and write, “My name is Monica Castañeda, and I no longer need food stamps. Thank you.”

07/27/2022 Interview: Ita

“These are the types of human beings that do one good, the ones that have a history. You have a history, because look at who your grandmother is. Look at who your aunts are. Look at them. They’ve walked through mud. They have. But they’re clean.”

Twenty-five years later, I ask questions I didn’t have back then. My mother and I ask them together. I ask Ita, too, but she gives me answers my four-year-old self could hear, only confessing too much when she lets her guard down. Or is it that we are building trust for each other?

I still have many questions that will have many blurry answers, if any. I continue asking, listening to my family’s stories, searching for meaning, because the meaning of it all—of Disney World, motherhood, survival—is made up of the stories we can tell ourselves.

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you,” my mum would recite whenever I was faced with verbal barbs—a mantra as hollow as it was comforting. “Words can be downright lethal, Mum,” I’d retort, half-jokingly, to her well-intentioned platitude.

Had my well-meaning mother been acquainted with the Bard, perhaps she would have reconsidered, as Claudius's insidious whisper into the royal ear offers a more accurate portrayal of the true power of words. It was during these early skirmishes with language that I began to suspect the potent alchemy of words—their constructive and destructive capacities turning them into a double-edged sword capable of inflicting wounds both visible and invisible.

The schoolyard was a verbal battleground, where crude insults held surprisingly little power over me. To my mind, they were the preferred ammunition of the intellectually impoverished. Far more insidious were the veiled assaults, the backhanded compliments: “Wow, are you good at math for a girl?” and “I love how you don’t care what people think.” These subtle linguistic poison darts were aimed straight at the heart of my fluid identity. Gendered exclamations like “Oh boy” or the built-in sexism of using biased nouns like “manpower” were also guaranteed to irritate me. Unsolicited advice—“You should study early childhood education; that’s a decent career path for a woman”—seemed to be the cherry on top of this daily linguistic assault. From a young age, I realized that this world was a linguistic minefield, so I quickly learned that choosing my words wisely was essential for my survival.

But perhaps nothing ignited my ire quite like the audacity of reducing my name, Wilhelmina, to the saccharine diminutive “Minnie.” It felt like a sledgehammer had been taken to my name’s gravitas, transforming “Wilhelmina”—a name of regal resonance, the Dutch, German, and Yiddish form of Wilhelm or William, derived from the Germanic “wil” meaning "will, desire" and “helm” meaning "helmet, protection"—into a twee, infantilized caricature. I'd glare, correct, and even attempt to educate, but to no avail. People seemed to derive a perverse pleasure from this vandalism. It was as if they were daring me to unleash the full fury of a Wilhelmina.

Gradually yet steadily, I developed an obsessive fascination with the architectural power of language. Words became my weapons, my shield, my fortress—but most importantly, the tools with which I attempted to construct, brick by brick, a reality more amenable to that “dumb, stone-deaf, blank, and wholly blind universe” that Charlotte Bronte identified nearly two centuries ago. Desperate to assert some control over my existence and a world that seemed to operate on autopilot, I meticulously selected words that resonated with my inner state. Authenticity became my cornerstone: no filters, no façades. Anger, when unleashed, was a tempest; opinions, when asked, were delivered with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.

However, as the complexities of existence deepened, so too did the challenges of self-expression. The world seemed to grow ever more intricate, while my vocabulary remained stubbornly finite. As I matured, emotions, thoughts, and even physical sensations, once bold and brazen, became layered and elusive. Silence became my refuge when words fell short. I took advantage of these quiet spaces, where thoughts could roam free from the constraints of language, to attempt to decipher the chaos of my inner world. The chasm between thoughts, feelings, and expression widened with each passing year, leaving me stranded on an island of introspection. The older I grew, the less I spoke.

When questioned about my long stints of enigmatic silence, I would evoke the spectral figure of Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, who developed the habit of biting his tongue three times before speaking. If the thought still held true after the third bite, he’d blurt it out. Otherwise, he’d remain silent for weeks or even months. When people stubbornly pressed me for an answer, my pent-up frustration would eventually erupt, finding release in a volcanic outburst.

Naturally, my oscillation between mute enigma and verbal tempest was met with incomprehension at my local public high school. I was always reprimanded for having an “inappropriate attitude.” It was as if my communication style was a spigot—either tightly shut or gushing uncontrollably.

Inappropriateness

Noun [u] /ɪnəˈprəʊpriətnəs/ /ɪn.əˈproʊ.pri.ət.nəs/

The quality or state of being unsuitable, improper, or wrong in a particular situation or context.
Synonyms: impropriety, unsuitability, misconduct, defiance, nonconformity, behavioural discrepancy, social maladjustment, inadmissibility

The label “inappropriate” felt like a scarlet letter branded on me with careless abandon and casual cruelty. I was the poster child of compliance, a prisoner of perfection. I was never late for school; I sacrificed sleep at the altar of midterm tests, national exams, writing competitions, German classes, and homework, acing all my exams with nearly manic fervor. Yet, in the grand tapestry of school expectations, my refusal to fit the mold of perpetual cheerfulness, docile submission, and religious grace was deemed a cardinal sin.

The principal, a man of deep religiosity, was the author of my academic purgatory and the primary target of my profound disdain. Beyond the wry, diminutive “Minnie,” his repertoire included a disturbing penchant for labeling, taming, and diagnosing. A superficial analysis of his flashy watch, pointed leather shoes, and horse-like veneers—so shiny they could induce a seizure—might have yielded a thousand assumptions, but I resisted the temptation. Words, I’d discovered, observing the veins on his forehead throb as he yelled at me, could also be misused as instruments of control and humiliation, rather than tools for understanding.

A tempest raged within me—an explosive chemical compound of despair and frustration. Feeling unsatisfied with the world around me –and the tempest inside of me-I sought a sanctuary in books and music. School felt like a necessary evil, a daytime prison. Nights, however, were a different beast. Sleep was a fleeting visitor, continually eluding me; I tossed and turned, drifting off briefly only to awaken, heaving with anxiety. The bed was too hard, the pillow too soft, and the incessant distant rumble of traffic outside my window was insufferable. My growing bones ached, my skin itched, and the sheets suffocated me. Desperate for an escape from the labyrinth of my mind, I sought an unlikely refuge in substances.

Alcohol, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favoured advisor, inevitably led to formidable hangovers that left me unable to cope with my everyday reality. The little bottle of Ritalin, procured by a classmate, boosted my school performance but aggravated my sensory issues and triggered a cycle of paranoia. Pallid and sweaty, I often found myself running laps alone around the schoolyard, flailing my arms in the air, or wondering aloud in class whether Leo Tolstoy should be ostracized from the literary canon due to the terrible way he treated his wife, who mothered thirteen of his kids and endured his marital affairs. Pot, on the contrary, proved to be a trustworthy companion, allowing me to function seamlessly while clouding my thoughts just enough to make living less painful. Because living had become painful. I was annoyed by everything: the sensation of my clothes against my skin, the constant din of voices in class, the high-pitched laughter of my classmates, the piercing ring of the school bell, the repugnant smell of my classmates’ armpits, and, most importantly, the words hurled in all directions that constructed a world I no longer wanted to be a part of.

I retreated into a non-verbal phase, my thoughts a tangled mess that refused to be untangled into words. Finally, after a three-week stint of deliberate mutism, I was summoned to the principal’s office to discuss this “delinquency.” I was exasperated.

“What delinquency? Delinquent behavior is characterized by maladaptive, illegal, or age-inappropriate actions. I just didn’t have anything to say,” I complained, feeling the wrath simmering in my bloodstream.

A barrage of suggestions was thrown onto the table: therapy, medication, counseling. My mum, a product of a different generation, dismissed those ideas, as she was suspicious of therapy and feared the potential side effects of medication. Yet, she could see that what she believed to be mere “teenage angst” had started spiraling out of control. Fueled by relentless anxiety about my uncertain future and a pervasive mix of uncontrollable hormones and sensory overload, I found solace in the writings of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, as well as the music of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis—all of whom had committed suicide before reaching middle age. I was torn between changing this disgusting world we lived in and jumping off the cliffs of Cape Sounion like King Aegeus to put myself out of my misery.

So, counseling it was.

On the first day I entered the counselor’s office, I came across a red-cheeked priest who apparently moonlighted as the school counselor. I fidgeted on the scratchy wooden chair as the priest's bloodshot eyes darted around the room, searching for prey, before settling on me with unnerving intensity. My mind turned into radio static.

“Come on, Minnie, what’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” he sneered.

I recalled that phrase from a book I had found in the library. The English Navy used a whip called “Cat-o'-nine-tails” for flogging. The pain was so severe that it silenced the victim for a long time. Another possible origin could be from ancient Egypt, where the tongues of liars and blasphemers were cut out and fed to the cats. I hated that phrase.

His bloodshot eyes burned holes through me. Tears welled up, a tide of nameless fury threatening to spill over. I bit my lips and fought back the tears. He gave me a few prayers to recite every night. I had renounced religion quite early on, as no rational explanation could be given to issues like resurrection and immaculate conception. I simply couldn’t grasp anything that couldn’t be scientifically explained. Was that all counseling had to offer? Would kneeling next to bed and mumbling a few “Hail Marys” suffice? That was probably when I also lost faith in counseling.

It made sense that after graduating, I pursued a degree in Linguistics. I felt that only language held the key to all those unanswered questions that swirled around my troubled mind. I also thought that a change of environment might liberate me, giving me the freedom to forge my own identity—a new version of Wilhelmina, unburdened by the ghosts of her past—in a setting that encouraged free thinking and intellectual fermentation. At least in university I felt like nobody tried to bother me, nobody pulled me out of my hole; I could spend endless days in the university library, studying the intricate ways language reflected our world and shaped it at the same time.

I found an unglamorous job in the library basement, assisting an ancient, half-deaf librarian with mending old books with broken spines and moth-eaten pages. Despite the dust, the mites, and the mold that aggravated my asthma, I was content. I didn’t need to utter a single word unless it was absolutely necessary. Most importantly, nobody called me “Minnie.” I was “Wilhelmina” at last. Or so I thought.

To my utter disappointment, I soon realized that even though I had bid adieu to my bleak adolescence and I was finally an adult—free to shave my head, eat oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or wear sunglasses twenty-four hours a day—I remained the same person. I carried the same baggage, like an albatross around my neck. In a desperate attempt to silence my fears and frustrations, I threw myself into my studies. Yet, the deeper I delved into the study of language, the more terrified I became by the realization that the horrible world I experienced and read about was other people’s narrative.

The backhanded compliments continued to pour in, like a deluge: “You would look so nice if you let your hair grow a bit.” The unsolicited advice that had plagued my school years persisted: “Loosen up a bit! You are young, you are pretty, the world is your oyster.” Oh how I despised that phrase. The world might have been my oyster, but I was allergic to oysters.

Halfway through my senior year, I found myself drowning in a sea of uncertainty about my future, grappling with self-hatred for my self-imposed restrictions and obsessions. A string of nightmarish flashbacks following an ill-advised PCP trip combined with a series of asthma attacks pushed me towards the edge, so I decided to seek help. Unable to afford the services of a real psychologist, I reluctantly turned to the free counseling service offered within the university campus.

I turned a blind eye to the glaring religious iconography evident on all the informative flyers plastered across the notice boards. By the time I realized that the counseling service was not only run by volunteer psychology students with no real-world experience but also funded by a religious institution, it was too late—I was already seated before the so-called psychologist. He was a man only slightly older than me who smiled the way street preachers did. I found myself unable to utter a single word.

He handed me all sorts of leaflets: stories of people who saw Jesus at the bottom of a beer bottle and quit drinking, people who conquered gambling addictions when they saw Jesus smiling at them from what they thought was a random Jack card, pictures of aborted fetuses side-by-side with premature babies. Just looking at these pamphlets filled me with a visceral sense of revulsion, a feeling akin to what Sartre would describe as “nausea.” I stood up abruptly and ran away. Once again, counseling had failed me.

It was around that time that a university professor suggested I might be neurodivergent. Midway through our “Introduction to Pragmatics” course, he enquired about the sunglasses I sported during class. Feeling deeply embarrassed, I explained that although it was a grey, winter morning, the harsh lights of the lecture hall were unbearable for me. After class, he called me into his office and handed me the card of a psychiatrist specializing in autism spectrum disorders.

Back in the early 2000s, the term “neurodivergent” was scarcely used outside the fields of psychiatry and special education. Intrigued, I immediately began researching the term at the university library.

Neurodivergent

/ˌnʊrəʊdaɪˈvɜːrgənt/ :

A person whose neurology (mind) differs from dominant societal norms. Neurodivergent is a broad term, accounting for cognitive differences that are either innate or acquired.

Instead of feeling relieved by this explanation for my incongruity and cognitive dissonance, I was consumed by a renewed sense of anger. My paranoid, drug-fueled mind interpreted the label as yet another attempt at control and manipulation, fitting seamlessly into my existing narrative.

Driven by unwavering determination, I decided to center my master’s thesis on the linguistic practice of infantilizing women. By the time I completed the dissertation, I had transformed into what Emily Dickinson described as “[volcanoes] that swallowed whole villages and appalling men.” My anger was palpable.

Presenting my thesis before a male-dominated panel, I displayed an aggressive and passionate energy. I was rewarded with a triumphant A+. As I walked out of the examination hall, I smirked with glee, imagining that my fiery storm might have intimidated my examiners.

A few months after graduation, I found myself confronting a startling, almost otherworldly reality: I was pregnant. The sensation was like having an unidentified stranger invade my body and stake their claim. I was in complete denial, taking the first pregnancy test towards the end of my first trimester. Doubt still lingered so I took another one. And then another. Still uncertain, I underwent some blood work, which confirmed that I was almost eleven weeks pregnant. Despite all evidence, I remained skeptical, so I asked my obstetrician to perform an ultrasound.

There, lying on the examination bed, chilled by the cold medical gel and feeling totally disconnected from my new reality, I heard a rapid heartbeat and saw a cluster of shapes on the monitor. It was undeniably real. I was, indeed, pregnant. I wrote the word “pregnant” in red marker on a white sheet of paper, stuck it to the fridge, and stared at it until my eyes blurred.

Pregnant

/ˈprɛɡnənt/ adjective

1. (Of a woman or female animal) having a child or young developing in the uterus.

2. Full of meaning; significant or suggestive.

I was pregnant. Preggo. Preggers. Expectant. Carrying a child. Expecting a happy event. Knocked up. With a bun in the oven. With a joey in the pouch. With one in the hanger. Broad in the hips. Wearing the hatching jacket. Banged up. Jacked up. In a delicate condition. In an interesting condition. Storked. Every word and phrase sounded ridiculous, filled with domestic undertones or derogatory sex jokes, and laced with dehumanizing and demeaning attitudes towards women, towards me.

As my pregnancy progressed, I felt like I was experiencing what Derrida called a rupture. My center had shifted. The fact that a “young” was developing within me, a simple random event that had occurred countless times throughout human history, somehow made me significant. I was gravid, a state that had brought with it a newfound status but also an unwanted visibility. Strangers suddenly felt entitled to ask about my marital status or even lay a hand on my belly. Society had imposed another label on me. I was neither Wilhelmina nor Minnie. Ι was jacked up. Caught. Up the duff. In the pudding club.

This pregnancy fundamentally reshaped me, even changing the way I spoke. I absorbed the jargon of pregnancy, learning words I had never encountered before: perineum, Braxton Hicks contractions, breech, meconium, spina bifida. I diligently compiled a glossary of all the new words, researching their etymology and pronunciation, hoping that this intellectual exercise would somehow solidify my new reality.

Yet, I felt like I was descending into an abyss. I started fading away, slipping away, leaving behind a shadow of who I used to be. Despite the constant sense of detachment, I found myself looking forward to the ultrasound of the month—two minutes of a loud, rhythmic heartbeat and blurry images of the fetus, a tadpole swimming inside of me.

Fetus

/ˈfiːtəs/ noun

An offspring of a human or other mammal in the stages of prenatal development that follow the embryo stage (in humans taken as beginning eight weeks after conception).

Similar: embryo, unborn baby

The baby. I couldn’t even utter the word. Whenever I had to refer to the being growing inside of me, I used the impersonal pronoun “it.” I could feel it kicking and swirling inside of me, but I could not get attached to it, terrified that if I loved it, I would lose it the next moment. I felt deeply disoriented, unable to distinguish where I ended and it began. I didn’t want to know its sex. I didn’t want to see the high-tech 3D ultrasound. I hadn’t chosen its name. I hadn’t bought its clothes. I hadn’t even prepared a nursery. “It” felt real and unreal at the same time.

The hospital environment filled me with repulsion. I reverted to being “Minnie” again—belittled, ordered around, constantly poked and prodded. My sensory difficulties ballooned. The nurses called me “sweetheart” and “darling,” words associated with mothers: sweet, giving, loving, maternal. I didn’t react. Fear and frustration kept me captive.

When the long-awaited time to give birth finally came, I was surrounded by a swarm of nurses and a dozen medical students, all checking on the progress of my cervical effacement and dilation. I wasn’t even “Minnie” anymore; I was simply a vessel. Trapped in a fight or flight frenzy, I lay pinned to a hospital bed, unable to move. The overwhelming stimuli magnified the discomfort. I could hear people rushing and shouting; I could smell blood and disinfectant; I could feel needles being poked in my veins, fingers inserted inside me, masks pressed on my face, hands pushing on my bulging belly.

I finally surrendered. In that moment of surrender, the magic happened. My daughter was born, and she changed everything, forging a new identity for me: mother.

“You are a mother now!” a nurse exclaimed as she placed the baby—my baby—on my bare chest.

Mother

[noun] /ˈmʌðər/, /ˈmʌðə/

A woman who has given birth to or adopted a child (also used as a term of address to your mother).

Synonyms: mom, mama, momma, mamma, mommy, ma, mammy, mummy, mommy, mater, matron, old lady, matriarch

For the first year of my daughter’s life, I drifted through a haze. While I cared for her tirelessly, attending to her every need and playing Brahms all day long to stimulate her brain development, I felt like I was sleepwalking through my own life. I was detached, alienated, a stranger to myself.

The words failed me once again: something deep inside felt fundamentally wrong but I lacked the tools to express it. Nobody could determine what was amiss because none of the classic “alarming signs” were present. I didn’t weep. I didn’t neglect her or myself. I didn’t sound suicidal. I was desperately trying to convince everyone—including myself—that I was still me. I faked it so convincingly that, at times, I almost believed it.

I talked, sang, and cooed incessantly, my throat sore every night from all the strain. I forced wide smiles in the playground and struggled to make friends with other mothers. I created a façade to mask my frustration. Language was no longer shaping my world; language had become my mask.

While grappling with this uncanny sense of Otherness in my own body, I felt like I was reliving my adolescence. Words were unable to convey what I was experiencing, and sleep continually eluded me. However, this time, my ancient coping mechanisms—a bottle of rum, a joint—were off-limits. There was no way to numb myself.

Amid this turmoil, everyone started bombarding me with unsolicited advice: “Rest while the baby sleeps,” “Use cabbage leaves to prevent mastitis.” I was “Wilhelmina” in the sense that I was now “a mother” which granted me some strange new status. At the same time, I was “Minnie,” with everyone quick to point out my mistakes.

Feeling desperate, I decided to consult a psychiatrist. My financial constraints limited my choices, leading me to the only doctor my insurance could cover. He looked bored as he asked the usual three questions: “Are you suicidal?” “Do you want to harm your baby or anyone else?” and “Are you functional?” I replied no, no, and yes. “What’s the matter, then?” he inquired, looking rather irritated, as if I was wasting his time. I found myself engulfed by a sinister sense of déjà vu. I was sixteen again, sitting on the edge of my seat before the high school principal, unable to utter a single word.

“You know, you young girls have it all, but you’re never satisfied,” he scoffed. “My grandmother gave birth under a tree, then tied my newborn mother to her back and went back to picking olives. If you can’t sleep, drink some chamomile tea and stop whining about nonexistent problems, you silly girl.” I wasn’t sure what hurt me the most: his general indifference or the way he said “girl,” a punctuation mark that stripped me of my adult status, rendering me immature, frivolous, naïve—someone clearly unfit for the responsibilities of adulthood and motherhood. I felt myself slowly descending into the world of “Minnie,” his dismissive “girl” gradually penetrating my fragile exoskeleton, eroding my perception of myself.

What was genuinely peculiar was that I truly wasn’t contemplating suicide, possibly for the first time ever. As a hopelessly melancholic goth with a penchant for poetry, I had romanticized the idea of suicide for years. While I had never attempted it, fleeting contemplations had wandered into my mind during moments of despair or overwhelming joy. As a teenager, every window seemed to beckon me to jump, every pill bottle whispered to be emptied. In university, sitting on the rooftop of a campus building at sunset, smoking pot and listening to Jane’s Addiction, a thought flitted through my mind: “What if I leapt?” A few years later, on a scorching August day, I floated on my back in the sea, beneath the ruins of the ancient temple of Poseidon, when the idea suddenly popped. “What if I surrendered to the currents?”

Despite these passing musings and the general self-destructive spirit of my early youth, I had never come close to self-harm. I treated my body with respect and reverence. And while the postpartum experience was profoundly challenging, suicide never crossed my mind. In fact, I felt like I had signed an unspoken contract—to stay alive, at least for the next couple of years, to nurture this fragile new person who fully depended on me. Then I recalled the word I had heard a few years ago: “neurodivergent.”

Seeking a diagnosis was extremely difficult as only a few specialists address neurodiversity in adults, especially in postpartum women. However, when my daughter turned six, I found myself walking out of a psychiatric facility, clutching an envelope that confirmed what the university professor had dared utter, a notion I had dismissed just because he was a man. I was neurodivergent, specifically ASD level 1. I was not suffering from some obscure case of somatoparaphrenia or asomatognosia—I just experienced severe sensory difficulties. I wasn’t aloof; I had trouble deciphering social cues. My prolonged silences and deadpan face were manifestations of alexithymia, a difficulty identifying and expressing emotions. I had what people previously called “Asperger syndrome,” but we were not supposed to use that term anymore and posthumously honor Dr. Asperger who was a notorious Nazi sympathizer.

Did a diagnosis in my thirties change anything? Not substantially. I still was the same person with the same responsibilities. I still had to wake up, put one foot in front of the other, do the school run, go to work, prepare lunchboxes, run baths, read books, braid hair, help with the multiplication table, and generally “fake it so real I was beyond fake.” I somehow felt lighter, though. The diagnosis provided clarity—it explained why simple things like chatting with the mums outside the school gates or touching raw meat felt like Herculean tasks. It shed light on my obsession with words, my clumsiness, my gut-wrenching anxiety, my expressionless face, and my fight-or-flight tendency.

Most importantly, it opened a door to intervention. My final specialist consultation proved to be a turning point. The specialist was a woman in her early sixties, with a strict yet gentle demeanour that reminded me of my own mother. As I briefly wondered if I had subconsciously stumbled upon yet another Freudian complex, her steady voice brought me back. She acknowledged that although I had consistently masked my condition for years in order to fit in as seamlessly as possible, there were still some approaches in our arsenal that would help me manage the manifestations of my condition, from cognitive behavioural therapy to interoception therapy and from applied behaviour analysis to expressive art therapy and sensory diets. These terms were totally unfamiliar. Normally, a barrage of unfamiliar words would have triggered anxiety, but this time, I felt something different: a sense of liberation.

Researching these approaches wouldn’t be a part of feeding my insatiable compulsion to categorize everything neatly; it would be a figurative step towards freedom, a turning point towards reclaiming control. Upon hearing all those strange words, my daughter stirred from her seat, her curious eyes glancing up at me. I ran my fingers through her hair and smiled at the doctor.

Returning my smile, she said, “It’s a good thing you insisted, Wilhelmina."

We needed to catch up. My husband and I were both behind on sleep, on life, on quality time with one another—all things that describe what it’s like to be a new parent. We asked my mother to watch our daughter for the weekend. From our porch we waved, repeating “Bye bye, bye bye,” an imitation of the baby, until the car was out of view. The postpartum anxiety in my chest swelled. Was her car seat secure? Would my mom rush her at bedtime? Was my daughter going to forget who I was and how I smelled and that she loved me? Was she going to come back?

On the living room floor, we old millennials sat among our daughter’s stacking rings and piggy bank to do our taxes after opening a bottle of wine, our self-given silver lining to adulting. We dug through files; recovered old, dusty passwords; and read numbers and questions to one another for hours. Do we have dependents? Yes, one. She has my mouth, my husband’s toes, and hair that is entirely her own. We chose the name Evelyn because of its nickname potential. Did Jeremy and Chelsea divorce this year? Did either Chelsea or Jeremy die this year? No and no, thank god.

I glanced up from my laptop, burning in the cradle of my legs, and caught a phantom whiff of Evie’s scent. My oxytocin spiked as it does every morning and after every nap when I open the door to her room, the air thick with her sweet breath, sweat, and soap.

“I miss her,” I said to my husband, an exaggerated frown on my face, eyebrows straining to match the pout, leaning into the absurdity of what I was saying. There was nothing more baffling to me than how I wanted little more than a break from my kid only to spend said break pining to be with her again.

Jeremy pulled his face into a matching expression. “Me too.”

Without discussion, we abandoned our taxes, picked up our wine glasses, and began wandering our house, smelling for her like bloodhounds.

Our noses led us first to our baby’s room, the place my chemistry and experience told me we’d smell her. My husband and I sat on Evie’s bedroom floor in the dim moonlight filtering through the window—curtains open at this time of night because she wasn’t there—and I emptied her dirty clothes basket on the floor between us. We sifted through it, lifting tiny pairs of pants, miniature shirts, socks she sometimes dons like gloves, and lived-in pajamas to our noses, sniffing. We passed them back and forth.

“I think this one might have something.”

“What about this one?”

“This is close but missing . . . her sweat, I think.”

Clothes strewn, we were dissatisfied.

“We should have her wear some things twice before she leaves so we have something that smells like her,” Jeremy said, “so this doesn’t happen again.”

I nodded in earnest agreement.

“What now?” he asked.

When I was six or so, a friend and I would press playdough onto the walls and doors of our childhood homes to see their relief. We’d eat boxes of popsicles snuck from our parents’ freezers before sharpening the sticks against the rough sidewalk. Hiding in the closet under her basement stairs, we’d move our Barbies through the motions of everyday life: dressing them, undressing them, getting them to work. On the beach, our parents would sculpt our feet and legs into sandy mermaid fins, then we’d wait for the waves to rush in and carry it all away, a childhood mandala.

I moved away and lost track of her in the social media-absent nineties, but recently found out she led a life shockingly similar to my own. We grew up, went to the same university, married, earned advanced degrees, taught in higher ed, and started our own families.

I found all of this out because I read about it in her obituary.

Hours after giving birth to her third child, she had died of an amniotic fluid embolism.

Her friends had set up a GoFundMe page to support the family she was survived by. Pictured at the top of the webpage: her husband, in the hospital, a child on either side and one in his arms, all of them grinning, not knowing that would soon be the whole of their family. I cycled through the other pictures and saw my friend in her hospital bed, the swell in her face, common in late-stage pregnancy, resembling the round childhood face I knew. She beamed in her last moments, holding her new, small, swollen child.

Her obituary made clear one way in which we were different: she remained a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though my religious mother tongue is Mormonism, I had recently forged a painful and difficult path out of the church and found myself as a new, middle-aged atheist. By her belief, she and her family will all still be together in heaven someday. Her husband, her family, and the commenters all felt comforted by this “truth.” I felt again the draw of the promise I’d walked away from. Felt again the wild desperation to link myself to my loved ones—and also the weight of the promise’s impossibility.

I could feel my body tense, my teeth grit. It was a familiar feeling, one which awoke me at night in E’s first days of life. A feeling that ultimately landed me in the ER, certain I was having a stroke, some errant clot lodging itself where it didn’t belong. My mom drove an hour to watch the baby. I called my cousin, who had delivered her first child the same day I found out I was pregnant: “Will you breastfeed E if I can’t do it?” I asked. Confused but supportive, she said yes. I left my home that night terrified I’d never come back.

My final diagnosis after thousands of dollars’ worth of tests? “You’re not breathing,” said a bored-looking ER doctor. “Breathe deeply.” It took months more to find a root cause of the shallow breathing which should have been self-evident and should have been explained to me: panic attacks.

Facing the pictures of my friend’s obituary on my screen, I texted Jeremy and he rushed down to my office to talk me through this particular attack.

He helped me regulate my breathing, held my hand until I calmed. We knelt across one another over a footstool in my home office, our makeshift altar, while the white noise-hum of our sleeping baby’s monitor buzzed in the background.

Jeremy had arrived at the hard reality of the mortality that religion couldn’t save him from at least half a year before me and had had to wade through it on his own. He spoke to me with omniscience, compassion. He sounded how I used to imagine a god I no longer believed in would sound when I saw him in the afterlife: “I’ve been wondering when you’d get here.”

“We can’t have any more children,” I said. “I can’t leave you. I can’t leave you alone.”

“I worried about that every day you were pregnant.” He squeezed my hand, a tether between us, grounding me to him. “Every day.”

I stood up off Evie’s floor and from the rocking chair in the corner, picked up one of the two handkerchief-sized blankets sewn to a plush elephant bust that my daughter sleeps with next to her face, catching the scent of her breath. I inhaled with it pressed to my nose to no avail. Though it spends the night clutched in her fist, the scent had worn off.

“Her sheets?” I asked. Jeremy shrugged.

I heaved myself into her crib to see if her sheets would be what we were looking for. I distributed my weight like someone on thin ice so as to not break a bed built for a toddler a quarter my size, but then curled up in the fetal position in order to fit. Then turned my nose to the mattress and inhaled deeply. Nothing. I pawed at it like a scratch-and-sniff sticker, hoping.

Nothing.

The baby was not here, and it smelled as if she never had been.

Faithful Mormons are promised not only access to eternal life, but also eternal marriage and “forever families” by attending the temple and being sealed for eternity to one’s spouse and children. This belief is established early. At five, I learned songs whose lyrics prompted me to “promise to obey” and to “cov’nant with my Father” in the temple someday. I sat on the rough, industrial carpet of LDS church classrooms and used my chair as a table to color pages of happy nuclear families standing in front of temples with crayons that smelled like 1,000 other children’s fingers. When I was twelve, I was encouraged by my lay leaders to choose the temple I’d get married in. I chose the Salt Lake City temple, of course. One of my vows to my husband at our wedding, which did not end up being in the temple, was that “Someday soon, when we’re both ready, I’ll marry you again, in another place, this time forever.” I meant the Salt Lake City temple, of course. All this to say, I was sold on the idea of forever, too. There was nothing in doctrine I cared about more.

Trying to make good on my vow to my husband to be sealed to him in the temple, I sat on stiff metal chairs in many different cold church classrooms, our phantom future children always in the back of my mind. In the middle of one of these temple prep classes (I was taking it again, having failed, I suppose, by still not attending the temple), my husband and I, the only participants, sat across from our instructors, a couple in their 50s. I admired this couple and thought it fitting that they should teach temple prep. They seemed to have never left the honeymoon phase, just like me and mine.

The wife of the couple crocheted through church. Hook, pull. Hook, pull. She would pause the crochet only when talking, setting her hook and knotted yarn in her lap. She could tell how much I adored my husband, in large part because I made no effort to rein in my adoration around them.

“Look at him,” she said to me after talking about the promise of a temple sealing. “Look at your husband.”

I did. I stared, not shy about long, lingering glances. After first meeting Jeremy years ago, my roommate and I referred to him as Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome.

I heard our instructor’s voice, quiet but firm. “Is this one life with him enough?” She let the question hang in the cold air. My eyes welled with tears, but I did not speak. What sort of answer was I supposed to give? Of course it isn’t enough. Of course not.

When I didn’t speak, she eventually did: “I don’t think it is. Don’t you want to be with him forever? Wouldn’t you do anything to make that happen?” I heard her as a movie mobster: It’s a real nice partner you got here. It’d be a damn shame if somethin’ happened to him. The thing that had always felt like a warm comfort, a promise of eternal connection, now felt like a threat—a threat that god would be willing to keep him from me forever.

Christians, especially Mormons, tend to frame belief as an act of will, of “letting” Christ into your heart. You choose to believe or you don’t; it’s in your control. In a chapter of The Book of Mormon I always identified as my favorite, Alma writes, “Even if ye can no more than desire to believe,” again, exerting your will, “let this desire work in you.” But desire was never my problem. Desire was all I had, and I had it in spades.

Out of this desire to believe, I volunteered time I didn’t have to teaching classes, preparing sermons, baking cakes. I strained, listening for hours and hours to people in my various congregations bearing witness, telling everyone else how they knew that “the church was true,” willing myself to channel what they “knew” into my own body. I sought out the counsel of leaders, formal and informal, old and new, online and in person, trying to make it all fit together in a way I could accept. I went to new temple open houses, a way to be inside without being “worthy” and making commitments. I spent sunny Saturdays at parks or church grounds or temple grounds, alone and later with Jeremy, reading scripture and lesson manuals for classes I didn’t have the time to take at church because I was taking others, or they weren’t offered. I went to extended camps and retreats and conferences. I bought, read, and reread copy after copy of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, filling them with pained annotations. I read countless other books from both sanctioned and rogue sources, scribbling in the margins, filling companion notebooks with my growing questions and frustrations and anger. If I externalized those thoughts, I reasoned, I could examine and resolve them.

As I got closer to getting married, closer to having a child—as I got closer to having things I couldn’t bear to lose—I became desperate to make it work. I prayed with the intensity and sincerity of Alma himself. When the church started to feel like an unreconcilably bad fit, I fended off the anxiety I knew was coming by asking my then-fiancé to fuck me up against the front door before we rode his motorcycle to our meeting house in the sunshine, holding the endorphins and rebellion in my body where no one could see them—but I could feel them. I tried to ignore the fact that all the people who thought like me were getting excommunicated from the church or leaving on their own before they could be excommunicated. “If they knew,” I once told Jeremy on the way home from church, “if they knew how I felt, I’d be excommunicated, too.”

When I tired of my own justifications and flimsy tactics, I returned to the simplicity of song. I pled with God as I sang, often crying through the hymns: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, / prone to leave the God I love; / here’s my heart; O take and seal it; / seal it for thy courts above.”

When even song had failed me, I found myself drunkenly collapsed in the hallway leading to my bedroom, yelling at God about how angry I was with him. I was so loud that also-drunk Jeremy worried our neighbors could hear me, so he shushed me and stroked my hair like a dysregulated baby who refused to sleep, comforting and quieting me.

From the singing to the screaming—for thirty years—I spent hours a day working and willing myself to believe in the religion of my ancestors, believe in the religion of my living family, believe in the religion of my community and friends, believe in the religion that promised me there wasn’t a loved-one-less void one enters into after death.

But I couldn’t find god in the actions so many said he led them to do. I saw myself substituting the problematic things said by religious leaders for something more palatable. I couldn’t see Joseph Smith as much more than a salesman so charming he got caught up in his own fervor, who saw religion as the best way to make some money. I saw too many similarities in the way that Mormonism operates and the way that cults do. And once the scales had fallen from my eyes, I was left without belief in any religion or god—even the esoteric beliefs in the universe or energy or popular notions of karma or hope that my contemporaries had found.

Ultimately, I failed to believe, and I let down all the people who’d had a stake in my belief: everyone from my ancestors to my descendants, including all those living loved ones. Including my husband, to whom I broke a vow.

The philosopher Richard Swinburne suggests that beliefs are “involuntary responses to experiences of one's world or apparent truths of reason, or to evidence in the form of other propositions that seem to make the belief probable.” We don’t choose what to believe. We collect experiences, truths, and evidences like charms on a bracelet that result in our worldview.

While my bracelet charms no longer allow me to believe eternity is mine to own or occupy, I lived more than a third of my expected life hoping it was, planning for it, and I cannot help but grieve the time I’ve lost. Once, I had Jeremy and Evelyn forever, and now I don’t. Eternity is a lot of fucking time to lose. And that’s the grief that holds all the others.

I have the time I have, and then it will end; one of us will die leaving the others behind to say bye bye.

Leaving our glasses behind, we headed to Eve’s bathroom. Jeremy and I proceeded to smell her towels, another pair of pants, the bathmat, her baby wash, her changing table, and a stray sock. No smell. Nothing.

I motioned to the trash can, a few dirty diapers lining the bottom. Jeremy shook his head. I lowered mine and sniffed timidly.

“Not what we’re looking for,” I said. I took Jeremy’s hand.

We headed back into Viv’s room where, if we couldn’t smell her, we could at least stare at her clothes hung in the closet on their tiny hangers; her books, stacked on her bookshelf; her blocks, small towers and rubble scattered around the floor.

The light in the house was all shadows, gradient dim and dark. Jeremy sat on the floor after sweeping some books aside with his foot. I lay my head in his lap and stared at her lidless wooden toy box, in it, toys she’d already outgrown: the wrist and foot rattles, the teething mitt, the array of colorful animals designed to hang from a play gym or car seat handle that chime when kicked or hit by a little hand or foot.

Jeremy stroked my hair. “I miss her,” he said, an echo of me earlier. His new iteration was sincere and deeply felt.

“Me too,” I said snuggling into him. “She belongs at home. Why is she not home?”

I think often of the poem “Michiko Dead” by Jack Gilbert, his metaphor for grief a too-heavy box, perpetually shifted in the speaker’s arms. I am already carrying the too-heavy box, though no one has required it of me. Come, my daughter says when she spins in a circle like the little tornado she is. Set that down so we can play.

But I can’t set it down. I didn’t pick it up; it showed up in my arms after I heard my daughter’s heart beat for the first time. After I poured over my husband’s grin in our first shower together, his bad eyes searching, searching, searching for me.

Every time someone leaves the house, I’m afraid it will be for the last time. When I fixate on Evelyn and Jeremy dying when they’re just headed for the park swings, I cannot help but imagine my body after their deaths as a hollow effigy and memorial; I would spend the rest of my own life igniting bits of myself to keep the memories of them burning. I would spend the rest of my finite life haunting my own house, gliding down the hallways, crawling into their beds, lying in the fetal position, and searching for traces of them I would never again manage to find. This is not the grim belief I’d pick. But that’s not how truth works.

Even when I’m the one to leave, I’m terrorized with anachronistic grief. For me, the other side of love’s coin is the loss I know I’d feel were I to lose it, but also the ache of responsibility I carry to not burden the people who love me with my death. “Goodbye,” I say to Evelyn as I walk out the door. I wave, imitating her wave, elbow elevated, hand swinging from the wrist like a hinge. “Bye bye,” I say, and something inside me catches. When she is older, she’ll run down the sidewalk as the car drives away. I love you twenty million million! she’ll shout, impressed at the magnitude of this measurement she’s only just discovered. When she is older, after I’ve read her bedtime stories and sung her lullaby(e), she’ll ask me the same question every night: Can you stay?

Yes, I assure her. I can stay. I will be here. I compartmentalize the real answer to the question she’s not yet asking and instead, retreat into this refuge. I touch her baby-soft skin, smell the cocktail of her scent, listen to her slight wheeze, and I try to breathe. Then breathe again. Then again. It’s all I can do for her. It’s all I can do for anyone.

Okay make it a travel log thing. The highway view. Like sunken barns, those outhouse looking buildings, a bad done rest stops, a car hidden by scrub on a road that dies at the shoulder. Oh yeah that peeling billboard for a bill Engvall show from 2014 use that. Far way silos moving past each other like pieces on a game board at table level or that weird optical effect of objects at different distances creating ha ha what’s that called? Shit Chicago 210 miles. I remember as a kid on this stretch. My good ear against the windshield in the backseat of the Chevy in parlor. My bad ear to the family, mom dad brother sister, half deaf to their noise, just the rumble in my skull, letting the wildflowers and grasses become a blur solidifying into a band oh wait mention those grass is I learned in school what were they? Blue stem Prairie drop seed something like that return return come on fuck return.

I felt like an arrow without a point back then no direction, but that was okay that was childhood and now I make the same trip at least five times a year like treads on an old tire, barely gripping the road it’s so familiar it’s like hover crafting. Include how every time I go mom and dad remember less and I have to do all this little necessary shit like keep their sippy cups filled cause their poor mouths are all dry from Meds plus all the tripping hazards like underwear mounds and buckling bath mats and TV tray legs those things. Uninventable details. How about when I was there last time and mom told dad to put the shampoo on his head not his balls? I don’t know is that too personal sad whatever?

Maybe instead I should right about all the drives back-and-forth in the 70s the air that I breathe on the radio, the wonder to be had for a small kid just waiting for the next hoe Joe’s for a grilled cheese and one of those chocolate crispy bars or an orange sure bet cooler oh my god. When I tell mom and dad what I remember they’re always surprised and phlegm ox. They think we knew the reasons for the trips, their fights the hurried bundling into the car in the early morning, mom like I’m going to my mother’s no return date, no making up, driving all math, like 90 miles an hour three kids no seat belts. I tell them we were oblivious the whole 800 mile journey fuck find some other word besides Journey, just us three with our mad Libs and wacky packages. Our own break off capsule back there the loose umbilicus of their gravity was enough only because we were sure of their bond. So maybe it was good and right that we didn’t know particulars had no clue they’d been farting.

Note to self next time don’t forget to stop at Dutch pantry exit for taffy and that salad dressing mom loves. Don’t prettify things too much don’t be all oh look at the Careworn beauty of flyover land la la. What does dad love? I don’t think he knows anymore. Just breaks me the way he sits on the couch lately right at the edge of the cushion with his knees touching, looking like a tiny perched bird on a window ledge or a cliff. The way he pulls his billfold from his pocket like every five minutes checking his license to see who he is. That billfold so soft worn all the years of touch. I’m keeping it when he’s gone I don’t care it’s mine.

OK take breaths. Maybe lean more into the idea of movement, the warped perspective, the way the moon follows you as earth lungs flyby in the foreground, you can get a little Sciency here. Maybe it’s now as an adult you don’t see the vistas in the same way blah blah all you see are those a bad done and derelict things and what the hell the lane just ends hey dude give me a chance to get the fuck over asshole Jesus.

More roadside shit, the rusted long wheely thing that Waters fields. Truck trailers on cinderblocks tire jacks. Fireworks strip club lawyer salvation billboards falling apart a trump sign on a harvester. I feel like the rumble strips are shaming me into the cash only lane Jesus sue me for not filling my easy pass. Ok, what else oh yeah when I was a kid I counted the silos fat and skinny and squat and tall so many, just a crêpe tone of them so storybook and homey. All I wanted was to live on a farm that had one to watch over me where the fuck is my wallet cat dammit who spilled gross sticky shit down there oh mom dad this is so hard I know I know when will it be over? Oh there’s a quarter crap my shoulder I’m too old for this please please.

Seriously are Indiana rest stops all Hardees now question mark question mark fuck

TINY ROOMS

I like tiny spaces. Attic abodes with their slanted roofs and the landings of stairs. My favorite work space I have ever had was a walk-in closet in the hallway of my first apartment at graduate school: it was just big enough to lie down in, and I often did, in the dark, which defied the point of its smallness. But even not seeing the boundaries, I could feel the safety of enclosure. I outfitted it with a light bulb, a cardboard box, a slab of wood for a desk, with plans to Work Without Distractions. But mostly I laid in the dark.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Despite having forgotten the plots of countless classic novels and films, I still remember a long-ago TV episode of Full House in which the older sister, in defiance of sharing a room with her younger sister, appropriated a bathroom for her bedroom instead. The bathtub became her water bed, a pink shower curtain her princess canopy. She was considering rendering the toilet an armchair before, sitcom-style, the sisters made up. But for years I dreamed of sleeping inside a tub or a walk-in closet, mayhaps windowless but utterly mine.

My parents gave me the master bedroom of our two-bedroom, one-bathroom rental. Except it never felt mine: the closets filled with the hoard of their survival-mode souls. They have never bought a house in America but are always preparing for the purchase, wrapping all their precious belongings in newspaper and air for a move that doesn’t come. This means that whatever does see the unwrapped light of day has been specifically deemed unworthy.

The bed, sofa, desk—mismatched sidewalk jetsam. The shelf and dresser bought for cheap with perpetually sticky drawers since no one ever thought they were meant to last, despite the fact that they have lived in the same rental now for almost three decades. Anything that wouldn’t fit in the other rooms entered mine. I slept in a slipshod warehouse, surrounded by bubble-cloaked porcelain tea sets alongside the good slippers that would not deign to grace the floors of this house. In the winter my north-facing bedroom was the coldest room in the apartment so it would be storage for overflow white radishes, potatoes, and other rooted perishables.

How I wished for a space that was mine, wholly mine, if only a small one: a cave, a tiny cabin, a Harry Potter trunk or even a broom closet underneath the stairs with all its attendant spiders.

THE ROOM IN MY HEAD

At four years old, I was convinced the world would end when I closed my eyes. Since it did, for me. My first memory a grey indoors blur, some late autumn dusk just before the lights flared, adult torsos moving around me like characters in a play. I didn’t know what characters or plays were then, but that’s what it felt like: everybody else was acting, but I was real. I was the narrator of the universe.

As a child, I lived in the universe inside my head. I visited other worlds occasionally, if they had dragons and magic and ever-white snow.

I don’t even remember now when the universe became world-sized, then country-sized, town-sized, room-sized.

Until the room in my head became just head-sized.

Until I stopped being the narrator and became just another actor, pretending to be someone else. When did I become comfortable being so small?

THE COCOON, or

THE PLEASURES OF LIMITATION

I adore the last day of travel, when you are down to your penultimate pounds, euros, yen and don’t want to or can’t afford to exchange any more—how perfectly you work out your limits then: what you can hope for and what you cannot. Your choices become proportionally simpler with the borders of your wallet-sized world.

How satisfying then to buy coffee and a crumpet with the last of your change and feel generous leaving a few pence in the charity box. If you also can happen to purchase that pashmina elephant/earl grey bath soap, it is mere sweetness and not expectation.

You don’t even look at the leather bags or whiskey at the airport and, handed half a brown bread sandwich with cheese on a flight from Frankfurt, you pretend you are someone for whom Emmental is infinitely precious.

It is not poverty I am talking about. Poverty is not at all romantic. I am speaking instead of that state of Enoughness: not enoughness taken to an extreme in the cult of minimalism (I enjoy my non-capsule wardrobe, thank you very much) but the enoughness of being fulfilled despite having still things you hanker for. The state of potential.

The difference between the spirit and the soul: the spirit is lofty and ambitious, and the soul is down-to-earth. The spirit wants the title of Dr. Minimalist; the soul treasures the useless, ugly scrap of sentimentality that nevertheless holds meaning in its weave. That is to say, the soul is interested in tiny things. While the spirit likes diets and other ambitious regimens, the soul is an idler, roots deep in earth waiting for rain.

For the humble soul, this moment is enough; not so for the grand spirit.

These sentiments are theoretically wacky, but instinctually true.

We all know some limits are good for us, but we perpetually want more freedom anyway—even freedom that won’t make us happy. Like the difference between the vows of a Mahayana Buddhist monk or nun: the monk is allowed to revoke his vows and return to the world and back to monkhood three times. The nuns keep or forsake their vows forever. Whatever sexism this may be, the nuns without the freedom to go back on their decision are oft happier.

Like Wordsworth’s nuns of a different religion who “fret not in their convent’s narrow room” (a poem arguing for the freedom of limitation): choiceless, cloistered in their tiny nun cells, they have no other option but to surrender their smallness to God, the biggest thing they can imagine.

TINY CONSOLATIONS

As a child, I loved best survival games played by myself. In my cold bedroom where even artificial heat couldn’t quite reach in December, surrounded by my parents’ vegetables, I would pretend they were all I had ’til spring. I would take morsels of meals from the kitchen and cache them in my room, chew slowly to enjoy my dwindling resources. I would sit on the floor cross-legged with a steaming mug of water in the crook of my legs, warming myself with this portable campfire.

I felt small and insignificant and powerful at the same time.

At those moments I felt like I had just enough, that survival alone was sufficient. Not grades, not friends, not that coveted preteen popularity but the simple warmth of my hands wrapped about the mug, the simple act of getting through the hours and days ahead and not perishing.

What I learned was in fact what my parents have been telling me all my life: what matters is your own survival and beyond survival, prosperity. Treat every moment as if winter were coming. Don’t pay any attention to the bigger world beyond your existence. Put your nose to the grindstone. Stay small and make your smallness comfortable. Above all, don’t stand out. After all—

In America:

the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

In China:

the poppy that stands out in the field gets cut down.

THE BIG HOUSE

My parents used to live in a spacious, three-floored house in the heart of Shanghai. My parents used to have jobs they enjoyed in a country they liked. My parents used to take risks.

The biggest risk they took—moving away from everything they had ever known—was the biggest mistake they ever made. Life was not better for them in America: the immigrant dream had failed them. Out of pride, they could not turn back. They turned inward.

They shriveled, like dreams deferred.

IN THE CAVE

Sometimes I dream of living with the one I love on a mountain with chickens and books, an easy life, small and isolated. Self-reliance in the vein of the Transcendentalists, though supposedly Thoreau dined with Emerson all the time and also snacked on his mother’s weekly delivery of doughnuts. Mostly what I want is not to be held responsible for days and days. The life of an ancient Chinese poet in exile, painting mists and making moonshine.

Once I heard a spiritual teacher say that if you needed a lot of alone time, it meant you were lying. You were hiding some essential truth about yourself around others, and that’s why you felt relieved when you were alone. If the top need of humans as a species is connection, how could it be that you want isolation? After all, it was sleepovers every night with the cavepeople.

The spiritual teacher said she was relaxed anywhere, with anybody, of course.

THE YEAR OF NO TOUCH

The year I was two, I was left in a crib with no interaction with the outside world for eight months. My parents had left for a new world, and I was in the old. My grandparents were feuding, so my care was left to an elderly nanny. She was not wicked by any means, just living in her own world. She would watch television with the volume on loud as I cried and cried upstairs. She would feed and change me—she did not neglect my basic needs—but she did not love me. She did not take me out. She was not paid to play. She wanted peace and quiet and stories to lose herself in on screen. The best employers are those too young or dumb to know better. During that year of no touch, my world grew smaller and smaller as my voice grew quieter, I having stopped believing it could be used to influence reality.

They say I used to be a boisterous child.

They say I used to terrorize the local alleyway with my boldness: claiming another toddler’s toy fire engine as my own. How easily I had conquered that small world.

After:

They say my IQ at age three dropped by an equivalent of six months.

They say I became intensely shy, afraid of my own grandparents, not to mention other children and of course, my parents when I saw them again.

They say I grew docile.

They say it like it was not a bad thing.

These are not accusations; these are facts.

Neither are they excuses for my introversion. The thing is, my parents always mean well. That is, they want for me the things they want for themselves: the bigger room, the steamed flounder’s head, the secure if boring job as money-counter or teeth-fixer.

Even as I wonder who I would have been without that year of no touch, they say they moved to America for a better life for me. Because this is true, because their lives have been worse as a result, I feel these words as an accusation.

THE MOVEMENT TOWARDS THE MOTHER

In one longitudinal study of introversion, writes Susan Cain in Quiet, the researchers popped balloons in the faces of babes.

A balloon, an infant, a needle, a baby trauma.

Guess who cried the loudest?

The ones who became introverts later on.

But aren’t introverts supposed to be quieter, you ask.

Yes, but this is because the big world overwhelms them so they retreat inside.

The pop of the balloon affects them more, so they cry.

Too much sensitivity is not sadness so much as sensation, the feeling of too much aliveness, as in Nina Cassian’s poem, Ordeal:

I promise to make you more alive than you’ve ever been.

For the first time you’ll see your pores opening

like the gills of a fish and you’ll hear

the noise of blood in galleries

and feel light gliding on your corneas

like the dragging of a dress across the floor.

Sensitivity means a good thing in the bedroom and on the page and continual onslaught anywhere else. It’s a big world out there. I am in the tiny room of my head, whispering to myself while I type.

I promise to make you so alive that

the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you.

I try to imagine a life insensitive to dust, to loud noise, to rejection.

I try to imagine the person the bold babe I was might have become.

When the movement towards the mother is interrupted, says every psychology text ever, the infant is forever seeking a way back to that unconditional warmth. When the movement to the mother is interrupted, it is like being frozen in a lake of want. The shore thaws and thaws, but the heart of the lake is a block of ice.

Because you are not safe, because you were never safe, you want to return to that primal safety, that primal warmth. To soothe yourself, you live in a fantasy world in your head, a world in which everything broken is whole again or things were never broken in the first place. Fantasy is the balm for your loss and longing. Forget coming out into the real world. Your instinct is to cocoon.

SAMSARA, or

THE MONK IN HIS CELL

Anyone living alone can be a saint, it is said. Deep in meditation, in silence, what comes up to irk you?

There are two traditional tests for a tantric monk in India:

1. Spend a week living in the red light district of New Delhi and not be tempted.

2. Naked, take a wet towel out into the frozen wilderness and with the heat of your body, make it dry.

But there was also a third test that very few even attempted, which was simply:

Live in the world.

Live in the world of samsara—suffering—and still keep your vows. Be kind. Watch the others eat meat. Be a Buddha, even in business.

The life of the householder monk is harder. There are more temptations, more comparisons. The world is bigger than a tiny alcove, longer than a string of 108 beads and more complex than the most head-spinning mandala you can memorize.

Your task is to not let the world overwhelm you.

Your task is to meditate with your eyes at least half open.

In Buddhism, there is a distinction between absolute reality and relative reality. In absolute reality, or the world of ultimate spiritual truth, everything in the physical world is empty of inherent meaning; that is to say, nothing matters. But in relative reality, which is the reality of day-to-day worldly living, we ascribe meaning to things because we are human; so everything matters. The monk in his cell lives in absolute reality, which is up in the air—the lofty spirit—not down on the ground, body and soul. The monk in his cell is not to be venerated. But the monk in the world—exalted.

PERSEPHONE

The Basque bury their dead curled in the fetal position. So they come, so they return. Or to save graveyard space. But one notion is more romantic so we perpetuate it.

Jane Hirshfield:

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,

are triumphs

for only the very young,

the very old.

In the long between, the world wants much from us. The world wants us to be bright. It wants us to move ever forward, ever upward, populating space.

The world needs its winters (for one thing: fewer mosquitoes) as well as its harvest seasons. The threat of imminent death makes you root for life.

In a huge tome on depression, Andrew Solomon begins, “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”

Yet the evolutionary basis of depression, he writes, is not love; it is survival. Not everyone can actively fight in the front lines. There must be some who stay behind, some who through staying behind in safety survive.

Who but a predator disturbs the caterpillar when he hangs in his tiny hammock to sleep?

TINY NEWS

At a Family Workshop Near Paris, the ‘Drowned Mona Lisa’ Lives On

“The most famous person to have died in the Seine River has no identity at all. She is ‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’—the Unknown Woman of the Seine.”

This unknown woman in the 1880s drowned, probably suicide, possibly a spurned love, a woman so beautiful the guy at the morgue decided to make a death mask of her, a death mask that grew famous such that her face in waxy repose inspired the likes of Camus, Rilke, and Nabokov and even today graces the walls of high-society manses. This was a woman no older than 16 who they believe killed herself amidst the restrictions and injunctions against self-harm of the dominant religion of her day, who could not very well face herself in the mirror each morning but lent her face to all—it was her very mystery that intrigued, like the Mona Lisa herself, whose popularity derives from her not being able to say who she is and why she smiles.

I think of these mute women whose lips curl just so holding the world in thrall in the curves of their visages. They did not ask for fame, yet everybody knows their face. One girl did nothing worthy but killing herself in a river one morning or evening yet did not achieve notoriety, only the preservation of her youthful charm. The other sat for a portrait.

We are strivers in the hands of a whimsical God.

Who is to say what will live on of what we do or don’t do when very death lingers a face in perpetuity?

Brazilian mechanic creates light bulb using water, bleach, and a bottle

The mechanic has a name you’ve never hear of—Alfredo Moser—with tools you’ve seen a thousand times: clear two-liter Coke bottles.

Who knows what he does with the Coke, but he fills the bottles with water and a bit of bleach to prevent mold, then inserts them into tin shanty rooftops. The resultant plastic light bulb has the equivalent of 40 to 60 watts of power—lighting the oft-windowless shacks of the impoverished for free.

“It’s a divine light. God gave the sun to everyone, and light is for everyone. Whoever wants it saves money. You can’t get an electric shock from it, and it doesn’t cost a penny.”

Dating, North Korean style

“When I lived in Pyongyang we couldn’t travel around the country and didn’t have any freedom of speech. But although the government succeeded in getting rid of these basic human rights, it couldn’t prevent its people from falling in love.”

Somewhere in North Korea, in the hushed hours of the night, a couple is pillow-whispering. No one, not even Big Brother, knows what they say.

Confession: I was a newspaper journalist.

But I never remember big news about big people.

I like tiny news, news that isn’t ever head-liner material. News is about change. But I’m more interested in what never changes.

PEOPLE ARE GRAND AND SMALL, NOT BIG AND PETTY

That’s all.

THE SECRETS THAT GIVE US MEANING

When J asked, “What is something good you’ve done that nobody knows about?,” I thought and thought and thought in the Jeep on the way to Maine, for miles of country road.

I don’t have much secret goodness. But also not much secret evil. I don’t do very much yet, in the world. I stay small, feeling more substance than form. I don’t know what shape I need to take right now, and it’s not always better to be out of the closet than in.

Inside the closet, one can be simply oneself. Outside, one needs to conform to some kind of community standard, act a certain X and live up to a certain Z. Xenophobia is a protection against loss.

An If, Then statement:

If I go out in the world, then I must needs prove my worth.

Why not then hide

Why not delay or procrastinate

Why not be a perfectionist waiting for [insert perfect word here]—

like those flowers that bloom once a year and everybody crowds to take pictures.

Why not be antisocial

Why be so afraid of being alone

Why not be soft and unassuming,

a woman who cannot tell her story but still with a mysterious smile,

a poppy who saves herself blending with the short-stemmed crowd—

the useless tree that does not get cut down.

THE GREATEST RISK

Towards the poet Jack Gilbert’s last days, before the post-death Pulitzer, before the blitz of news columnists bemoaning his death because death is news and they were allowed to write about it, he lived in a senior home in Berkeley, California with blank furrows in his brain where verses once grooved.

Jack Gilbert was one who escaped the world of society for the world of living; after winning a major poetry prize at age 36, he disappeared from the New York literary scene. He lived on an island in Greece and ate what he fished. He agreed to one big-publication interview ever, published a book every two decades. He lived in Japan with a wife who was a sculptress and taught when he needed to, being clear it was for the money. His was not a blind rejection of the establishment. He knew what he was missing and still he chose to leave. He wrote,

So I come on this birthday at last

here in the house of strangers.

With a broken pair of shoes,

no profession, and a few poems.

After all that promise.

Not by addiction or play, by choices.

By concern for whales and love,

for elephants and Alcibiades.

“All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench,” his wife of six years said of him.

Yet in his last years, he was no different from anyone else, with no loftier concerns. All the choices we make and risks we take lead still to the same nothingness—for ourselves. But not perhaps for the rest of the world. Jack Gilbert’s poetry is praised for its clarity, its pure still voice.

Could he have written so if he had stayed in the world? His greatest risk was leaving it. Perhaps his greatest payoff. But who knows. Maybe it was only what he was compelled to do. It is the most natural thing in the world for a daisy to bloom; it needs no courage, no fete in its honor or date for debut. It is just one more tiny beautiful thing in the world.

One of the volunteers at the hospital, finding out he was the famous poet only after she had met the man with Alzheimer's, would read his own poems back to him in his state of unreality. He didn’t respond. She hoped he wasn’t trapped in his body sick of his own voice. It was easier to think he wasn’t thinking at all.

Once, for St. Patrick’s Day, she dressed him up in a leprechaun suit. Imagine if you will: an 87-year-old man, in a wheelchair, green costume where his literary dignity once was. But his dignity was just that: being alive. It is all we have in the end.

Of his career, Wikipedia says: “A self-imposed isolation.”

Of his death: “Gilbert died on November 13, 2012 in Berkeley, California.” It does not say in what fashion. It has no mention of leprechaun suits.

I only know the Irish secret because a friend of mine was the volunteer.

The world is so small.

And the world is so big.

We never know if anything we do will pay off until the end—and maybe not even then. The secret is to live in such a way that everything matters, and yet nothing does. Fitzgerald, van Gogh, Gilbert, and innumerable nameless inevitable others died barely solvent and only somewhat known, in tiny rooms before being burnt or buried in large openesses. We were never meant to stay in tiny rooms, but often it is not until someone dies that we notice the space they leave behind. The secret to love is to see people’s hidden bigness while they are still alive.

Somewhere in Brazil, or India, or the Philippines, a boy does homework in the light of homemade Coke bottle lights, and in Paris hundreds of years ago a mortician falls in love with a drowned woman from the river, and in North Korea tonight the couples are telling each other things in bed even the government is not privy to, and all of them are not together the singular pearl of the oyster of the world but its mother the nacre and not one tiny thing, not one spark or death or whisper, can be missing.

I have a small mouth.

I don’t mean this in any way except the most literal way.

If you’ve heard me speak, you know I am otherwise bigmouthed: loud, a gossip, Southern, opinionated, as succinct as a pastor sweating out the fires of hell.

I have a small mouth, which is a type of thing people sometimes say when they mean something rich and perverse.

But I need you to take this literally, to understand that a small-mouthed person who has spent her life grinding her teeth now has a clicking jaw that’s sore when overextended. And when you have hours and hours of dental work, that small mouth grows tired. It forgets how to speak. When it speaks, it says things like, “Put it on my SkyMiles card.” The mouth laughs nervously. It knows not itself anymore, becomes as charged and expansive as a balloon–before it deflates.

The mouth is full of teeth, except where it’s not. For instance, four missing teeth where no adult teeth ever grew. The parentified baby teeth were pulled one day when I was in college. They had to put me under because the teeth had become impacted, blazing and mean. “I would say abscessed, but baby teeth have no root,” the dentist explained. Without a root, there is no abscess, only pain.

I would be my dental surgeon’s most complex teeth removal yet. Still, she was better than another dentist who thought he’d have to pull the teeth next to them to cut them out.

At the time, my sister, who had notoriously bad teeth, said, “You can’t go to that dentist. You need to see mine.”

I liked the idea of us sharing something, besides genetics. So I went to her dentist, a man who was far too handsome to be a dentist, which no one had warned me was even possible. I was 21 and unsure that dentists were allowed to be hot. I hadn’t even heard of transference yet, and if I had, I would have only applied it to some mythic Freudian therapist I would likely never meet.

The hot dentist said, “Nah, we would never pull a tooth to get to another tooth.”

I was relieved. This small mouth was from Alabama, and didn’t want to be a toothless Alabaman. I was already poor and had a slight overbite and front teeth that seemed to recline backwards, making my smile funky and tight-lipped. I didn’t want to be someone’s made-for-tv story, something a politician uses as a prop for a place he can’t speak for – there she is, Ms. Small Mouth Alabama. Don’t you wanna weep?

My sister’s hot dentist would not be performing the surgery, but the younger dental surgeon would, her blonde ponytail buoyant under fluorescent light, waving like a peace flag. She did great, removing only what was required and leaving behind a Greek chorus of other teeth, who simply bore witness. I woke up from my anesthesia, refused the Darvocet, and went shopping at the grocery store with my mother for pudding.

The gaps in my mouth were fleshy and soft. The stitches would dissolve on their own.

If we were from the kind of family that had this kind of money, we probably should have done orthodontia. I should have been one of those kids with bright pink rubber bands around the metal in her mouth, cutting her lip and angry, waiting for the day she could reveal her smile on the first day of fifth, sixth, or seventh grade–whenever it would have been decided that the structural and cosmetic corrections to my teeth would be unveiled to the world. Show pony teeth. I would smile brightly for photos. I would not be a child model, but I would be the kind of kid people would say, “She could be a child model.” Except, of course, they never said that about chubby girls. But say I had been a thinner child. With nice straight white teeth. I already had the perfect bangs; what else would be needed?

That didn’t happen. As a kid I only sometimes had health insurance depending on whether my mom was working as a nurse (health insurance!) or a waitress burnt out from nursing (no health insurance! or cable TV! or new clothes!). So, I did not expect braces. Braces may as well have been horseback lessons, summer camp, or a sudden and expensive interest in skiing.

As an adult living on my own for the first time in my early 30s, I took out a payment plan for Invisalign and at least straightened some wayward teeth, improving a smile and providing some structural integrity so that if I were suddenly to learn how to sprout money from seed, I could perchance afford four implants (10k a pop) for the adult teeth that never grew in.

You can curse genetics all you like, but if my great-grandmother Jewel had this strange deformity to her teeth, I should be lucky to be like her–a psychic, a shape-note singer, and a good baker. The kind of woman who could pick out a juicy plum to share with a great-granddaughter. A plum so ripe and soft you could gum it to death.

Teeth aren’t everything.

Except when they are.

In the years before my sister died she had to have a rotten tooth pulled, leaving a void in her mouth that winked when she smiled. The death of her body is not related to the death of her tooth. Except in the sense that all things are related, all deaths are part of the same cosmic death. Her teeth issues, too, were born of genetics and poverty, a lifetime spent with inconsistent access to the dentist.

One time my sister was complaining about a series of dental work she needed, and my mother, depressed by her own genetics, said, “Yeah? I have teeth too.”

For years after, my sister and I whispered this back to each other, a broken mantra.

My mother, mercifully, laughs about it now.

After my sister died from a furious cancer, I didn’t know who to say it to.

This summer I was walking along the beach at night on Coney Island with my friends syd and Andy. syd and Andy are married, a powerhouse of art, performance, music, and a deep and abiding spirituality. It is nice to have friends who embody that kind of love, who make it easy to tell stories to, like the story of my mom having teeth, too, damn it.

“I miss telling my sister I have teeth too,” I said. “I don’t have anyone I can say that to.”

“You can say it to us,” syd said.

Then we cheerfully rode the Cyclone together, a wooden roller coaster that opened in Luna Park in 1927. That anything so old could be safe to ride is a miracle, one I was eager to participate in. And it worked, the miracle spreading through me like warm tea. My brain had reset from being lovelorn, sick with anxiety, my small mouth tight with pain and anger, my clicking jaw – all of me unclicking across the rattling wooden rails. I felt loose and free, for the first time in months.

Afterwards, we grabbed gelato and ate with the roar of the ocean behind us.

Dulce de leche.

Of course I didn’t need my teeth. Are you kidding me? It’s ice cream.

I love my dentist. It’s not transference if you really love Dr. C, and if you met her, you’d love her too. One time I accidentally bit her, gently, almost the way cats do, and she said, “It’s a good thing you’re so cute.” Tell me another dentist who would get away with saying that.

Tell me another dentist who would be so forgiving.

She’s been trying to make my teeth better, more sound, for years. But when the pandemic hit, she was stuck in Taiwan, where she’s from. And then something happened–visa issues, perhaps, something catastrophically clerical–and she was away three years, coming by occasionally to visit her practice while she worked to make a final full return to the US. A string of substitute dentists came through, and I didn’t come in as much as I should. I had shooting pain in one part of my jaw, which I attributed to TMJ. After all, whose stressed-out bodies didn’t completely break down after the pandemic? The dentist–some man whose name doesn’t matter because he wasn’t Dr. C–told me if I was having pain, it probably was just the TMJ. He scheduled me to return for a nightguard to de-stress my jaw in sleep and a little cavity that needed filling, then sent me on my way.

But Dr. C made her triumphant return and knew immediately something was wrong when I came in for my filling. She angled the X-Rays a little differently and caught a half-rotten wisdom tooth. She also caught cracked teeth in need of crowns. She caught, basically, 10k worth of dental work.

Put it on my SkyMiles.

“Don’t worry, I’m good at pulling teeth,” she said.

“Aren’t all dentists supposed to be?” I asked.

“Not all are good at everything,” she replied, and within minutes had relieved me of the wisdom tooth that had been the source of deep, unrelenting pain.

It’s funny how just paying extra attention is the difference between a good doctor and a mediocre one. Excited by her particular skill set, Dr. C showed me my wisdom tooth, which had cracked in half when pulled out–the rot had so bloomed. I wanted to touch its dark insides, wanted to feel the space of rot, wanted to slum inside of it. I wanted to keep it.

You may be tempted to give me advice on how to prevent rot.

There is no prevention of rot.

You are walking, living, and dying proof of this.

But I want to talk about space in the little mouth, how the little mouth was cramped at the back, where even with brushing and flossing, a wisdom tooth decayed into a hot bomb. And the rest of the little mouth has spaces where no adult teeth grew in; this creates gum recession, more pockets where germs get in. Now it’s time to stress about gum health, to get an occasional deep cleaning, which will be paid for out of pocket because it’s possible and easy to max out your dental benefits before the year is over. The genetics, the poverty tells a story years later: you’re negotiating with your teeth, paying giant sums of money, begging them to stay put.

And you think it’s easy to talk about preventing rot when a world of people exists who have no access to dental care, when there’s a world where even those who do will find themselves paying 10k out of pocket with limited payment plans. You’ll think you know how to talk about rot without looking at the source of the disease.

Your grandmother used to pull out her partial dentures to better taste her food, cover them with a Kleenex or a napkin, and then slip them back again after. One aunt had all her teeth pulled, replaced them with dentures, and now smiles like a lighthouse. Now your mother is facing this same story, testing new teeth in her mouth that did not come built-in, that require some learning how to be inside her smile. She is less sure, but time will make her sure of it. You remain supportive, on the sidelines, counting your remaining teeth.

You, you, you, you are me, but you are also the you who has teeth, too.

Here’s how crowns happen: an awful long time is spent with your mouth open while temporary crowns are affixed. I will not describe the process because it is not your business until it is your business. You’re numb through it, as numb as can be, but the discomfort is there. You must practice melting into the reclined seat. You must practice not being present the way you’d like to be. Maybe you meditate and practice mindfulness, but it has no home here. On the ceiling there’s a TV to distract patients, and you will choose something comforting, familiar, perhaps to the point of unfunny. The goal is not to be a real person who laughs or cries, but a brain free-floating in space.

Once they affix the temporary crowns to your teeth with glue, you have a few weeks or more until your permanent crowns come in, which will be more time spent with your mouth open. Remember, the more crowns you have, the longer it takes with your mouth hanging wide open. Maybe two hours, maybe three.

If you only have one, you’re lucky. If you have none, you’re luckiest.

When I went home, I flossed and popped one of my temporary crowns off. And panicked. The exposed nerve was angry with every cool suck of air, with anything too hot or cold. I spent days eating on only one side of my face, drinking on only one side of my face.The risk here is nerve exposure could mean infection, so I cleaned thoroughly and delicately and cried sometimes after. I made it through the weekend to Dr. C., who reattached the temporary crown–only for it to pop off again that evening. It must have been a funky tooth, or I was careless with floss or my mouth, or I don’t know. By that point I tried to attach it myself with glue from the pharmacy, and it worked for nearly a week. Then it popped off again and would not reattach.

By that point I had ascended to Dentist.

I had become your post-apocalyptic dentist. I wouldn't be your first choice; your first choice dentist is always a real dentist. But in a pinch with limited resources, I could glue your teeth back in, hold your hand, and probably diagnose the difference between TMJ and a rotten wisdom tooth. I could comfort you that it’s not your fault your teeth are bad; the intersection of genetics and growing up poor is enough to make a crumbling landscape of your small mouth. Do you feel bad? Do your teeth stain yellow? Do people look at your teeth and know your net worth? Here I am, the Dentist, and I tell you, do not fear. We are all falling apart. The world is over. I am here now.

When my stubborn baby teeth had to be pulled in college, my sister paid for it. My mom couldn’t afford it, and I couldn’t afford it. My grandfather had offered to help, but then pulled back, saying I was using him for his money. This is just the kind of thing he did. I think it made him feel important to offer help and then take it away, to treat his family transactionally, and then resent us for it. Well, he’s dead now, too, but his teeth probably still linger.

But my sister had gone to some made-up war in Afghanistan with the army, and could afford to pay for my teeth, so she did from afar. I do not thank George W. Bush for this, though maybe I should. It’s the ultimate trolley problem: if a young adult needs her older sister’s help to pay for her dental surgery, does the military machine take tens of thousands of lives for each tooth extracted? What is fair recompense? Do not say that fair recompense for the government to wholly provide because it did not then and barely does now.

Anyway, when my sister was in Afghanistan, she, like many veterans, was exposed to burn pits, which were giant pits where medical and other hazardous waste was burned. They are exactly as they sound; what’s missing is the billowing smoke, toxic to the body, enveloping the army in a quiet squeeze. And it turns out that if you breathe through that enough, you may return home with cancer festering in you. At first, the VA only listed a few specific cancers caused by burn pit exposure, and then the VA recently expanded that list of related cancers to include even the reproductive cancer that undid my sister in the end.

Another trolley problem.

That sad digression about my sister is not really a digression but an answer to a question: how do you prevent rot?

For starters, you do your best not to pollute the planet, or the bodies around it. You take care of each other. You give aid where you can. If someone needs you to, you’ll cut up their food so small they can eat it. You’ll look the other way when they pop their teeth out, or if they prefer, you look at them. You don’t blink.

Sometimes, you just can’t prevent the rot. If you’re my sister, you use the last of your dwindling strength to peel a cold Cara Cara orange, whose rind is not so tough that a cancer patient can’t handle it. The reward is a glitter of jewels, the color of some Alabama sunsets if you’ve been lucky enough to catch them in the insect-buzzy, humid-thick summers. You pop a wedge into your mouth. The a/c hums its battle cry. The juice runs, sticky and cool.

You hardly need your teeth.

I almost rejected my Manhattan apartment when I saw my mirrored face in the bathroom. My reflection only works under Hollywood lighting. Then I think, Hello, fine, more or less handsome still. In poorly lit mirrors, the gaunt lined visage, folds starkly visible from cheek to chin, frightens and depresses me. My thoughts sag. Who wants that face? The day is ruined, a bag of heavy coal dragged around till bedtime.

When I lived with my ex in Brooklyn, I’d designed the perfect mirror over the perfect vanity. You can do better if you want, it would tell me. You still have options. A bit goady, that mirror, but it gave me hope. Unlike gazing into my partner’s eyes, where I often saw a sad facsimile of my own isolation. When he eventually moved out, I needed that mirror’s quick solace each night. Imagine, choosing to end a relationship after twenty years. There must be a reward for such courage.

For a while, there was. Within months I knew every local face on the apps. Every man cruising in South Brooklyn. Several came through, some twice. I needed one nice one to stay. Instead, my aloneness shapeshifted, from a porcupine to a red-eyed creature that padded across the apartment all night. Even friends fell away during Covid, from screens to silence. Stories about my situation began calcifying in my head. Stories that ended with me unable to rise from bed on too many days: Daddy’s fuckable but tired. Desperate.

Despite its chancy mirror, I took the place in Manhattan. A fresh start was vital in my mid-fifties, or I’d grow grey with immobility. I thought, I can make a different story here. In which I host new friends in my high apartment full of light. We’d go to bars and bistros in this neighborhood of students and teachers, of noisy abuelas playing dominoes on corners, of merengue on Sunday streets. I’d redo the whole bathroom, lights, fixtures, everything. I’d lather and shave under a warm glow and be pleased by what the razor revealed. Look. I’m vital yet.

I paid a contractor a solid advance. He promised deliverance on a schedule. Then he blew me off, days stretching to weeks. I began to dread morning ablutions. A medicine cabinet hung crookedly in a corner. A row of square face-sized mirrors filled another wall. The bare ceiling bulb accentuated my flaws, spots and shadows mocking me. I felt the familiar pull of self-loathing paralysis, of grinding year by year towards decrepitude.

The mirrors wouldn’t hush: Changing us won’t change anything. This is who you are now.

The contractor had to come. Quick.

Almost two decades ago, I first noticed V-shaped brow lines that wouldn’t relax. I believed I had some sort of immunity from wrinkles. I remember touching the furrows and thinking: Is this what years and years of strain does?

Over TV dinner, my partner glanced sideways at me. Was he struck by the telltale lines too? I was counting on his politeness and reserve. But he said: Your skin is greying, dear. On the side of your cheeks. In the same tone as one might say: Your haircut looks nice, dear. You missed a button on your shirt, dear.

You leaving me for some fresh-faced twink? I cried. He rolled his eyes. Still, I was deeply rattled, about this new reality and that he’d named it. Happens with age, he said. No big deal.

But it was. It was a big deal. I wanted to hide until I could fix myself. My partner didn’t know how long I’d been fantasizing about leaving him. We were so very green when we met: We thought bonding over childhood neglect was glue enough to keep us together. For years we’d been doubling down, building our lives on the wet sand of passionless expediency. Our incompatibilities almost amusing: parts of him off-limits because contact made him break out, and me stir-crazy for touch anytime everywhere.

Cracks were showing not only around my eyes. A part of me wanted the walls to fall, and I was also terrified. I’d be out in the fracas, the free marketplace of faces.

I tried telling him, month after month, but couldn’t, despite the roiling inside. I marched, instead, to a dermatologist’s office, broke through at least that hesitation.

I told her I came to have my moles and sunspots examined. They were proliferating on my torso but hidden beneath my shirt. I’d seen plenty on my mother as she aged. As the doctor checked, I made small talk. Is sunblock necessary when it’s cloudy? How much SPF for daily use? Then I slipped in my other concerns. Didn’t realize I was vain, ha, ha, I said, not quite meeting her eyes. Shouldn’t have smoked those cigarettes in college. The dermatologist, a white lady of indeterminate age, didn’t frown or smile, just nodded in an I-hear-you sort of way. She brought her face, translucent as mother of pearl, close to mine, and surveyed the map of my hide. Then she leaned back and made some notes. I thought I’d get a grade, but instead she handed me a list of products: non-soap facial cleanser, Vitamin C serum, nighttime retinol treatment, eye cream. Together, these would prevent fine lines, possibly even redact them, and clarify and brighten my tone. She mentioned the plumping power of hyaluronic acid. My spirit leapt, an unbridled steed.

The items were on sale at the dermy’s office. We recommend people start these in their mid 20s, she said. But it’s not too late to stop further damage. And please don’t smoke.

I used the products diligently. I kept smoking down to a secret cigarette while walking the dog, searching nightly for the kernels of love that had fallen from my heart, or the courage to admit they were lost forever. My partner and I were miserably addicted to the accruals that come with staying entangled; the security of someone to come home to in a tough town. Every morning, watching him dress, I picked a card from my mental stack: stay because I’m aging, leave because I’m aging, work on my inner demons first, fuck the demons and just work on my cheeks.

The lines around my eyes did diminish over time, as did the awful bags starting to take hold. My partner never mentioned my dulling face again. By then we spoke of so little of significance. In addition to money on products, I paid to have our bathroom renovated, so every day I’d get a boost under three downward facing sconces. The strange assurance of a pleasant illusion.

I learned to be cautious around random mirrors in hotels and people’s houses. To always check the lighting. If disheartened at first glance, step back or turn slightly. And strictly avoid irredeemable situations, such as the wicked witch’s portal on a cupboard at my parents’ that showed me the shape of things to come.

In this regard I could not be more different than my mother. When I visited her in Delhi, I noticed how she always sat with such ease at her dressing table, gazing gently at her reflection as she cleaned and moisturized, as though silently communing with her best friend. The only light she needed a stark reading lamp clamped to the table’s edge. How did she find that comfort with herself even as the years gathered into decades on her face? She was regal and beautiful until the day she died.

As I passed my mid-forties, my ex and I were still enmeshed. I acted superficially serene, so no one saw how despondent I was inside, the way you are with one foot out. People started telling me I looked “distinguished.” I felt more like a ravaged battlefield—heavy artillery had sagged and folded the terrain. I tried to tilt my head just the right way for photos and be mindful of the shadows. I’d smile more when talking to people, though even there one must be careful. Too wide and everything cracks.

Fortunately, I developed a growth on my shoulder and had to revisit the dermatologist. A different one, a South Asian man. He told me not to worry, they’d excise it right away under anesthesia, stitch the wound closed, good as new. They’d test the fatty growth, and most likely it wasn’t malignant. I wasn’t worried. After the procedure I said, Embarrassed to ask, but what are options for deep creases? This dermatologist was a bit plump, which added a healthy sheen and volume to his face. I half-expected some cultural message: Those options are not for men. I hoped for some validation: Nothing to worry about yet. Instead, he told me about the difference between Botox, peels, abrasions, and dermal fillers, which procedures they could perform in the clinic and which were more appropriate to a spa. Starting now can delay the need for a facelift.

I did not know I was headed for a facelift.

The dermal filler sounded appealing, a safe injection of fatty acid to increase volume and pad grooves. Outpatient, some mild swelling, fast recovery. The doc handed me shiny literature, with before and after photographs. I hid the brochure from my partner, because to my mind it was a clue about our possible future. If I went ahead, I’d have to find some way to explain what had happened while he was away for Thanksgiving. My cheeks ate too much, ha ha. Or: I found this new cream. I’m so shallow. But amazing, right? I wondered what I’d tell my family, unabashed as they are in naming every facial development. Don’t frown like your father, Ma had said to me many times, pointing to my brow lines. And yet she’d be stunned if she knew I had work done.

My enthusiasm for the filler dissolved when I realized the procedure had to be repeated every six months. Or sooner. Hundreds of dollars each time. The longest lasting version wasn’t even approved in America then. It was a financial and logistical commitment for life, impossible to hide from one’s intimates. A friend with HIV lipoatrophy traveled to Brazil regularly to get his cheeks plumped. He had all the information. I wished I could learn something else from him: his consistent self-regard, like my mother’s. Plump or gaunt, he was always radiant, beloved by friends, and had at least two lovers.

I opted instead for inversions and facial yoga. And the highest nightly dose of retinol that my skin would tolerate.

When I turned fifty, I put an end to the cigarettes, really truly, except under extreme stress, like when I finally told my partner we were done. We’d tried every remedy to fill the gaps and grooves between us: couple’s counseling, trips together and alone, time apart. I tapped into an unknown well of determination to move forward as he thrashed and howled to stay in the past or make a sad life as roommates if we couldn’t be lovers.

Back in the dating market, I doubled down on day and night creams, a plant-based diet, almost daily gym. All this must, I told myself, amount to some upward force against gravity.

Earlier this year, at my mother’s memorial in Delhi, I saw faces that I hadn’t for years. How remarkable, I thought, the way people change. I spoke to a cousin with espresso cup craters under her eyes. I greeted an uncle with jowls as weighty as jackfruit. Even on my nephews and nieces, time had left its mark. A first forehead line. A cheek that used to be filled now flattened, waiting to be hollowed. In the past few years, I’d seen my parents lose their fat and muscle to surgeries and illness and Covid. I’d witnessed their life force wane.

I’d struggled silently alongside to prevent my own spirit from fading. To keep faith that my loneliness was not a congenital condition. After my breakup, I’d had a late sexual blooming, inexplicable, inconsistent, especially in my travels to care for my parents, with men who seemed unfazed by my flaws but quickly disappeared when I said I loved them. I cannot seem to let go my boneheaded hope of finding the one who doesn’t leave, whose adoring gaze I wake up to each morning. Not because I’m objectively deserving of such a gift, but because I want it so much.

How powerful these longings; when filled with them I believe myself unlined again, desirable again. That only the tincture of time is needed to cure what ails me.

Weeks have become months, and the contractor hasn’t arrived to work on my bathroom. I wonder why I don’t forgo the deposit and hunt for someone else, as painful as every search is in this town. Perhaps part of me is preparing for some radical acceptance of how I look. The problem is, how I look keeps changing, ever more rapidly, so that acceptance must play constant, exhausting catch-up with reality. Every day my bathroom mirrors remind me that time might cure but also steals. I fear I am nearing the downward slopes now, the tumbles after which the friendliest mirror won’t be able to lie. What magic will I need then to be tender with my reflection?

For now, small adjustments and denials get me through the day. Stark white sideways lighting is to be avoided at all costs. I’ve jerry-rigged a warm bulb on top of the medicine cabinet.

Cyberspace is full of postings that say being alone too long causes deep somatic stress, damaging your very DNA. The impact visible, like smoking, grief mapped in creases. If only the fix was easy: an effort of will, a smile in a bar, a rightward swipe, a cream. When I think another solitary night might break me, I remind myself of my two abject decades in a mismatched relationship. Those trapped years aged me in ways I can only see now.

Besides hope and patience, I cultivate a few men who reliably arrive in my new home, for an hour, an evening, a night. I’ve stopped the dance of making them tell me I’m attractive. If they do, I thank them, then move on to ravaging them. For now, their eyes are better mirrors than my own. A gift of my solitude is that it’s taught me to be deeply present for pleasure when it knocks on my door. I shut everything else out for those moments, knowing a hundred torments will have their space soon enough. I hold back from saying I love you too quickly. One guy who tenderly traced the lines on my neck will never be invited again.

The sun burns over us, and in its gaze we stumble through the groove of our existence. We gather gashes and wounds on our skin, from storms and journeys and losses. Every year we do not die gets written on our faces, like tree lines, except ours are more crisscross, unruly.

I might forget the contractor and put the money towards a third dermatologist visit. It might be time to face the knives, to get ready for real change, the nip and tuck. Every year there are fewer people to hide from or explain myself to. If that sharp intervention brings me a decade of rise-and-shine brightness, I’ll take the miraculous days.

I look at myself under the jerry-rigged light and practice-lift the sides of my mouth. A small smile.

More or less handsome still.

The claws reach up from our beds like a beckoning, a reckoning. The smell of muddied waters and rotting flesh, salted brine and blood.

Sixth grade science camp is an awakening. Our cabin of girls is new to middle school, new to womanhood, some of us hiding new blood or breasts. We are new to a world of desire, the boys pinching at our backsides and clawing at our bra straps, though the desire never seems ours.

At camp, we are divided by gender, the boys’ cabins far-flung in the wilderness, while the girls’ cabins clot together for protection. We are not to go out at night without an adult chaperone or during the day for that matter. We are not to travel alone to the bathroom or back to our bunks for sunscreen. There is no real wildlife here, so the threat must come from within. Perhaps the boys will do what they’ve begun to threaten, grabbing our wrists to hold us still for a kiss or laughing while they push us to our knees. Or are we the danger, destined to get lost in the woods, to wade foolish into murky waters?

At science camp we learn to flinch, because the boys think it is funny to hide behind trees during hikes and then jump out to frighten us, or to untie our bathing suit straps and then feign disgust. Girls cry and go home. Girls skip meals or shave too close to the bone. Girls cluster together for protection in the night, then even in the daylight, afraid of the unwanted hands that reach out to grab them.

On the last night, we retreat to the safety of our cabin. We brush our teeth and turn out the lights and climb into our bunk beds. And then, one by one, we scream.

There, under each of our pillows is a hand reaching out for us. A crawdad arm stabbed into every mattress, claws facing up, pointed and sharp.

Crustaceans are for men. In elementary school, I go out for dinner with my parents on special occasions and watch my father order shrimp while my mother finds whatever is cheapest on the menu. The shrimp frighten me, curled on themselves like a question or an infant. The pink translucent flesh is a vulnerability I cannot stand, exposed and raw.

Sometimes, like on family holidays, the men crack claws and feast on flesh, using their fingertips to pull apart bodies with ease, flinging shells on the floor. The women watch from their place in the kitchen, where they eat scraps or nothing at all, sometimes split empty bones in half to suck out the sweet marrow. When one grandfather is alive, he reaches his hands into the women’s plates to claim their crabs for himself and then leaves them with the litter of shells. When another grandfather dies, the family takes his urn out for a lavish steak and seafood dinner, heaping shrimp symbolically in front of the vessel before asking waiters to take it away, while back home his widow waits, eating her frozen meal from the microwave.

Once, I ask my father for a taste.

“You wouldn’t like it, sweetie,” he says, dipping the creature into cocktail sauce. When I protest, he says crab is for grown-ups, though I already know this means men. He frightens me away by tapping his fingernails on his teeth like scuttling feet, telling me that I would not like the taste of crushing such creatures with my smile.

I do not like Sebastian, no matter how much the adults say I should. I do not like Ariel either, a silly girl who gives up her voice for a boring pair of legs, but the crab bothers me most, always scuttling sideways and cracking his claws, always bossing the girl around with his deep baritone, correcting her even when he is wrong or has simply misunderstood because he was not listening well enough.

I do not like how Sebastian tells Ariel where to go, how he insists she is too foolish to understand danger, when the threats to crustaceans and mermaids are not the same. I do not like him speaking over her underwater song, singing for her when she has fallen silent on land, telling some boring man to kiss her without consent.

My mother or my aunts or my grandmother send me to the living room to watch The Little Mermaid while they secretly cry, while they balance the checkbook or ask their husbands where the money has gone, while they talk to each other about their fears or the bad men at work or in politics. I do not like when they are sad, do not understand why women in movies are always singing but the ones in real life sob.

I hide in the bathroom when my elementary school friend’s parents fight. The bathroom is decorated like an ocean, all blue and seashells, aquatic creatures swimming along the shower curtain. There is a bowl of sand dollars collected from the local shore, the star design growing stronger the more the creature fades into death. There is a poster of a dolphin jumping out of the water as if trying to escape.

Outside, my friend’s father shouts while his mother flinches. He is mad about something she said or didn’t say to him or to someone else. He is mad about what she is wearing or eating or watching on television. He is mad about his work or his haircut, which is apparently her fault. When he shouts, which is often, she goes into the kitchen to cook and my friend cries and hides in his room and I find an excuse to go to the bathroom.

I stare at the sea creatures and spend long minutes washing my hands, moving them like flippered creatures underneath water. My favorite part of the bathroom is the tank of sea monkeys on the sink. They are brine shrimp, no more than a speck, but I’m amazed at how they can survive being freeze-dried and still grow strong enough to swim. I’m amazed by their ability to float despite the tank being moved, shaken, despite their world being tilted upside down.

I press my face against the plastic and watch a world underwater, my mouth pinched shut as the man screams outside.

“Look what you’ve done,” scolds the teacher when I shriek. “Shame on you.”

In seventh grade science we learn about the ocean. We build wave machines to learn about the force it takes to wear a body down. We slice fish belly to bowel and watch the insides splay out. As a treat, our teacher cooks us calamari, using his strong hands to slice the delicate creature into rings to fry in fragrant oil. We crush the sea beneath our strong white teeth.

The boys take turns making fun of our wave machines, sabotaging the class contest. They sidle up to our backsides with their scalpels and hold us hostage for kiss. They place the deep-fried rings on our fingers like diamonds before calling us sluts or saying we are too ugly to love.

We learn about the sea as boys claws at our bodies, circle like sharks around our vulnerabilities. We begin to move like a school of fish, all the girls clustered together to avoid danger, though it is inevitable someone will have her bra unhooked, another’s tampons stolen, another’s body dissected for being too big or too small or too cold for a teenage boy’s desire. As the school year wears on, we harden shells around ourselves for protection.

One day a boy puts his cold hands around my neck. A few days later he puts his wet hands down the back of my shirt. Soon he is following me around class, trying to act cool by the Bunsen burners, caressing my hair by the textbooks, whispering filth when the teacher is lecturing. When we take a class field trip to the local estuary, a safe haven where the stream meets the sea, he strokes me with a sea cucumber. After he has tossed it cruelly away, I watch the creature throb in the tidepool.

Eventually, he uses his scalpel to slice a creature into pieces and dumps the salted slick down my shirt. I scream. He laughs and laughs, turns to bow in front of his audience of male classmates.

“Shame on you,” the teacher scolds me. A classroom is no place for screaming.

I hate to visit the teacher’s house by the ocean. It is cold and foggy, and the shore smells of rotting kelp and crabs, creatures so desperate for a home they will claim any discarded husk.

In high school, my friend dates the middle school band teacher. It is hardly a secret, though I wonder why no one seems to mind that this grown man lusts after a child. Each time I see them together, a part of me hardens, a part of me retreats into my shell. I hate that I have been implicated in their tryst because my friend has a big mouth and the teacher has a big ego. He never talks to me about what I know, quizzes me instead on key signatures and fingering techniques while she sits on his lap, as though I am a child but she is not.

She is always taking us to the ocean so she can see him. They talk about music, but also sex, and I smell it on them sometimes, I think, though that could be the long shore where I walk alone to escape being close to their affair.

On the beach, rotting kelp tangles at my ankles, and the rising tide threatens to pull me into the depths if I am not careful. I watch my own footprints disappear into the sand. I come across stars with missing limbs, trying to regrow what has been severed. I gather discarded claws, creamy pink and white, sharp as a knife. I put them in my pocket for later like little weapons.

I feel half dead at the aquarium. I am hungry and hollow from so many months of not eating, though my college boyfriend says how pretty I am the smaller I get, likes to wrap his fingers like an octopus around my waist holding me in place. He says it is cute when I am out of breath from walking up some stairs or when my pants slip off because they are no longer held up by my hips. He likes to be the man, he says. He likes me to need him. But I feel like the jellyfish in its ruffled skirt—billowing and bursting over an empty hole.

My boyfriend likes me small like he likes me quiet. He teaches me to smile and nod when he tells me things I already know. He teaches me to say thank you as he counts my calories and checks my phone and makes me come home from college every weekend so he can make sure I am not going out to parties. He teaches me that asking questions or for things like second helpings or shared pleasure is selfish.

But when I am good—helping with his homework or asking him about his day or watching terrible anime where women are choked by tentacles—he rewards me. Sometimes I get a piece of chocolate. Sometimes he lets me pick the movie. Sometimes, on anniversaries like six months, one year, two years, so many years, we celebrate at places like the aquarium.

Today I wore the wrong thing and talked too much and did not laugh a joke that was not funny but he says he still loves. He is the only boy to ever say he loves me, and I think about this while the dead-eyed shark circles the tank, while the eel darts back to hide in its cave, while the urchins rest on the floor with open wailing mouths.

All night, I watch the man crush claws in his hands and stuff moist flesh in his mouth. We are celebrating my childhood friend’s engagement by the ocean, where we grew up as girls, cried about cruel college men, and hardened against our many hurts until we became distant from each other and even ourselves.

Now, she says she is happy with this man who has left his wife and children for her, just as he will leave her one day, just as I say I am happy with whatever man I am dating after my first boyfriend has left me for another girl. We smile and smile for pictures. Her ring. My brittle body. A table heaped with corn and boiled potatoes and the stilled legs of many crabs.

My friend does not pay her fiancé enough attention, and he says this is a weakness. I do not eat meat, and her fiancé says this is a weakness. Another friend does not drink, and her fiancé says this is a weakness. A man talks too much to the women, and her fiancé says this is a weakness. Her fiancé will not talk to the women, and he insists on calling us girls.

Instead he cracks shells and flicks the shards across the table. They scatter red over the white paper. He pulls flesh from the shell with his fingers, dips it in golden butter, swallows it whole.

The man who stalks me after college is a deep-sea fisher. He sails to where the ocean is so deep it appears black and empty. The waters are choppy, frothing at the lip of the boat. The vessel is strong, the men standing with sharp spears in their hands, ready to harpoon whatever is foolish enough to surface.

He is relentless. He arrives at places where he knows I will be, circling uninvited around me. He calls and texts from a dozen numbers not his own. He emails me from as many addresses. He makes fake social media accounts to contact me. When this does not work, he contacts those close to me. He does this for years, for nearly a decade after I last see him. He sends surprise messages that say, “I know you don’t want to hear from me, but I thought I’d give you a little anxiety one more time.”

When we met in college, I was lonely and desperate for a warm body. We went to the beach and shivered in the coastal fog, and I wondered when the warmth was supposed to start. He talked about beer and trying to figure himself out and the mother he blamed for most of his problems, and I collected sea glass, fingering the places where it had been worn away, cloudy with the memory of what it had once been. Once I found a hermit crab that had grown too big for its shell. Trapped, it died inside the home it was trying to escape, claws reaching out across the sand.

I felt that way, bored, broken, unable to leave no matter how hard I scurried. When I tried to leave, the man trapped me in an ocean cave, blocking the entrance as the tide began to rise, laughing as I panicked. Later, he abandoned me at the beach, driving away as I waved my arms like I was drowning, shouting that there was no cell phone reception to call anyone else for a ride. Eventually, he began to threaten to kill himself if I tried to cut off contact. He sent me pictures of his bloodied arms, of a noose, of his sobbing face or bruises where he’d punched himself.

Once, he explained the art of deep-sea fishing, the way he poured chum into the water, pulpy flesh and blood, the floating dead and half alive. He didn’t have to do much, he’d said, just dismember the bodies and wait for bigger fish to arrive. He could drink a beer or take a nap. He could have a cigarette and watch the smoke spiral into the sky. And once a creature surfaced, thinking itself lucky for the feast, he could scoop it up with a net, but he preferred a rusted hook or a harpoon flung into the pale flesh. After, he and the men took pictures with their prey. Then they left the spoils to rot.

For years, until I move across the country, to another coast, another ocean, I feel like a fish poured onto a stinking dock, gasping to be gutted, body heaving and hoping the men will stop watching my suffering long enough for me to escape.

How many times have I watched lobster trapped in a restaurant tank, their bodies pressed against the glass, desperate for escape? How many times have I seen the creatures try to dart from hands reaching into grab them, a spiraling frenzy going nowhere?

As a girl, I used to press my face to the aquariums and stare into the jet eyes trying to understand what they must be thinking, what it must feel like to know your entire life exists in a glass box. I used to wonder if the creatures even knew they were trapped, wonder how long it took them to accept their lives. I used to try to shield the tanks with my body, hoping to dissuade anyone from selecting their meal.

Eventually, like the lobsters who swam circles around the cage because there was nothing else to do, I simply learned to look away.

The men take me to a seafood restaurant for my final job interview. After months of trying to distinguish myself from the other professor candidates, I am one of their final picks, but not memorable enough to have my vegetarian request accommodated.

“We come here for the lobster,” they say, ordering another round of drinks. “Might as well get a decent meal on the university’s dime.”

Because I don’t eat meat, there is nothing for me to order except a side salad and some fries off the children’s menu. All night, the men laugh as my meal, suggesting it looks like something a child would eat. They forget my name and to ask questions about my work, though I learn about their wives at home with their children, about the few women on their syllabi. There are no women at the table, and I do not hear about any of their female colleagues.

Mostly I sit silent, desperate to escape the stinking meal. Claws and carcasses piled high, oily butter glistening on their fingers as they reach for their wine glasses. Later in the night, one of the men pats my shoulder and calls me “sweetheart.” A few days later, I see another at a national conference, and he wraps his arm around my waist like a giant squid and pulls me closer so he can whisper in my ear that, “No matter what happens, I voted for you.”

His words pierce, but I am not surprised. When I arrived at the restaurant, I knew I would not get the job. It was never a meal for me.

“This is none of your business,” my friend’s husband says.

His new wife, an old college friend, has surprised me by flying across the country from her coast to mine. Here the shore is rocky and cold, lighthouses signaling danger.

Her visit is unplanned, unexpected, and then she tells me so is her pregnancy. I imagine the little fetus swimming inside as she sobs salty tears and tells me she does not want to have a child, or at least not now, but her husband insists, and this is the course he has charted.

She cannot eat because the briny smell of the ocean makes her sick, so we wander in and out of seaside souvenir shops where she picks up a baby onesie decorated with a lobster. She puts it down, says she doesn’t want to purchase anything that will make it real, and leaves the shop crying.

I follow her into a jewelry store where she fingers creamy pearl rings and necklaces. The jeweler tells us the pearls are local, reminds us they are the result of holding something painful inside a closed shell for a long time.

My friend smiles and snaps a photo to send to her husband back near the other ocean where she left him. She says maybe he will buy it for her when she becomes a mother.

Then he calls and tells her the child is a gift. He says will get nothing for doing her job as a wife. He tells me I must have put her up to this. He tells me I have no business interfering. He tells me to just be quiet.

After, my friend and I honor his request, too stunned, too shamed to speak. We stand on the shore, trying to see our way through the fog, careful to obey the signs that warn us not to get too close to the edge. The lighthouse sends its beacon through the mist, and we watch as gulls rise into the sky and drop crabs from great heights to crush on the rocks below.

We pack the claws when we leave middle school science camp. No one knows why we do it, just as we don’t know why the boys put them there in the first place, though perhaps they hope to inspire danger even in our dreams. One by one, each girl pulls the tiny arm from beneath her pillow and cradles it in her hand. And one by one, each girl clutches the claws, slashing at the air in front of her, before placing it in her suitcase.

We are no strangers to collecting shells, growing up by the beach with the puka shells of the dead hung around our necks and live hermit crabs whose shells are painted in bright colors or bejeweled with plastic gems wandering tanks in our rooms or even loose under our beds.

But these are different. We take these claws home to teach us how to harden. We take them home for protection, using them to stab at the boys on the bus, to rub sharp against our arms and sometimes leave a mark, to hold for comfort when we are lonely or scared.

We put them somewhere secret in our rooms, ragged and sharp, where they rot in the dark.

My grandma and I have the same hair texture—damp curls that easily coil in the heat. She pointed this out to me one morning as she was helping me get ready for the last day of third grade. I wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t mentioned it. She wore her hair loose, while mine was always in tight cornrows. One of my braids was loose that morning and it was in fixing it for me that she had the realization.

“You’s just like me bay-beh,” she said. “Face, hair, and all. Feel this loose braid, see how curly it is, like my hair?”

“Yes Grandma,” I replied as I moved my finger across the braid. “How did that happen? Aren’t I supposed to have hair like my parents?”

She laughed and squeezed me close to her. “Not necessarily. Sometimes God makes genes skip.”

I gave her a puzzled look. “Skip?”

“That just means that sometimes we get a little bit of what our parents look like, and a little bit of what our grandparents and even great-grandparents look like.”

I rested my head on her knee after she repaired the braid, my hands folded together in my lap. It meant a lot to me for grandma to point out our similarities. She was my favorite person. We were close, even though we only saw each other once a year, and sometimes once every other year (or more). Our bond was ironclad thanks to a consistent flow of phone calls, cards, and pictures. Some of the cards and pictures she’d sent in recent months were sitting on the bookshelf across from where we sat on my bed. In one of them she was seated at the piano in her North Carolina home, boasting a dazzling smile that could light the darkest cave. When I was a toddler she used to hold me tight with one arm while using the other to play me lullabies and hymns. Of course I didn’t remember any of that, but she’d always tell me how I’d give her an affirming look whenever she played. I believed her. She said I’d given her the same look when she first held me as a newborn.

“You locked eyes with me and gave me the once-over,” I recalled her saying. “It was like you knew exactly who I was and would’ve said something to me right then if you had been able to.”

Grandma’s visits were always a balm for my soul. Her aura was that of fierce tranquility, something that I just wasn’t used to. Before my parents split and mom left for her childhood home in Mississippi weeks prior, there was always a lot of tension between us. This had been happening as far back as my memory could reach. Mom was harsh on me about things that didn’t warrant it. I couldn’t discern sometimes whether she truly disliked me, if she was just using me as an outlet for her frustrations, or both. Whether it be calling me a “stupid dyke” or “lesbo” because of my masculine clothing choices (and disinterest in makeup) or hitting me for forgetting to include “ma’am” after my yeses and nos, there was always something to be on guard about around her. I figured being selectively mute in her presence would at least cut down some of the antagonism, but really it only made things worse.

“Are you ignoring me?!” she’d exclaim. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

“No ma’am,” I’d murmur. “I was just thinking.”

“Well then wipe that stupid look off your face.”

But there was no “look.” I argued my point in my mind.

I didn’t question why mom didn’t instead move to somewhere else in Pennsylvania. I felt that the long distance was necessary. She needed to heal from years of disagreements and otherwise disconnectedness from dad, and vice versa. I needed to heal, or at least try to heal, from mom’s behavior towards me.

Grandma didn’t question my hairstyle or clothing choices. There were no strange looks nor insulting remarks, nor was there any change in her body language.

I lifted my head for a moment to ask, “Grandma, why can’t you just stay here all the time? I don’t want you to leave.”

She chuckled. “I wish I could bay-beh. But Grandma has to make sure she takes care of her house, too.”

“You could take care of both. I’ll help you!”

That made her laugh even more.

“Oh, my sweet baby. Don’t ever change that sweet heart of yours, you hear me?”

“Yes grandma.” She kissed my forehead. “But—” I started.

Grandma raised her eyebrows. “But what?”

I sighed. “Life is just so much nicer when you’re here. What if mom comes back? She’s not very nice to me sometimes, and I don’t know what I did to make her be that way.”

Her countenance turned serious, and she brushed her hand across my cheek. For a few moments, she looked towards the ceiling as if waiting for a message to come down. I’d seen her do this plenty of times before. Mainly she’d do it when she was frustrated at something and needed to give herself a moment of pause in order to discern the best way to respond. I hoped I hadn’t upset her.

Grandma turned her gaze towards me again. “None of this is your fault bay-beh. You didn’t do anything.”

She drew another deep breath.

“Your mother … well, she just has a lot of things she has to work out. People, sometimes even her own family, weren’t always so nice to her when she was your age, and she still hasn’t healed from that.”

“Why is it taking her so long to heal? That was a long time ago, and I wasn’t even alive when that happened.” My innocent mind was still not fully picking up what grandma was putting down.

“Some people always carry pain with them even after a lot of time has passed. Your mama’s told me that some of her folks were very mean to her for being a little dark-skinned girl in the South. A damn shame really. Sometimes our own folks can cause us the deepest wounds, yet it’s also some of our own folks that have the power to pull us out of them. I know it all too well, chile. I got my fair share of the same nonsense growing up in the 1930s.”

My mind went back to what grandma said about genes sometimes skipping a generation. Why couldn’t mom’s trauma skip over me, too? There were many times where she completely showered me in love, and I pondered why her heart didn’t reside there always. To some extent, I’d say that it was all about power. Maybe she wanted to cut me down a size as an initiation of sorts—if she couldn’t have a completely carefree childhood, then I shouldn’t either. My masculinity made me an easy target. I suspected that even if I wasn’t, it simply would’ve been my dark brown skin that got negative attention from her instead.

“How did you handle it?” I asked. “Do you think you healed from it?”

She brushed her hand across my cheek again, this time with some laughter.

“With a lot of sass,” she chuckled. “I was very feisty. I knew what the consequences were for talking the way I did, but I did it anyway. Someone had to put them in check! One time I was on the bus headed into town and a white man put his leg in the middle of the aisle to keep me from walking any further. He told me that darkies weren’t allowed. I told him that if he had any intention on getting back home that day, he better move his leg before I give him hell!”

“You said all that to a white man?!”

“I sure did! I don’t think he expected me to say it either. Chile, he was shook up! He went dead silent. I went right ahead and walked over his leg and sat comfortably the whole ride.”

“Wow!”

“I’ve got stories for days. When I was pursuing my sorority the first time around, they refused me because my skin wasn’t light enough for them. That was one of my lowest points. I couldn’t believe our skinfolk were treating me that way. But let me tell ya, I did take some time away to regroup, but then I tried again. And I got in!”

I then paused to think about my own experiences in the world outside of my family. My school was predominantly white, and there were certainly feelings of isolation because of that, but no one had yet directly pointed out my skin color. That wouldn’t happen until the middle school years when some of my peers became more emboldened in their colorism, including some of the black students. None of them had yet picked apart my masculinity either—they categorized me as a “tomboy” along with some other students like me, but at the time it was merely an observation and not a pronouncement of hate.

“I really believe that it was my confidence that helped me heal,” Grandma continued. “I had to build up the willpower to not let people’s meanness get too close to me.”

I sat next to grandma and wrapped my arms around her. “Will you help me heal? Can you help mom heal too?”

“I can do the best that I can. Healing is not an easy task. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re doing really well, and then there’ll be tough days that’ll have you feeling like you haven’t made any progress at all. You just have to pray and trust that trouble don’t last always. You gots to remember that as long as you truly want the healing and you give it your best efforts, everything else will fall into place as it should. Your mama knows that too, baby. I’ve given her words of encouragement many times over. She just has to keep on believing.”

Grandma left the room briefly to retrieve another framed picture from one of her suitcases. Depicted in it was a long row of flowers I’d never seen before, against the backdrop of a clear, blue sky.

“Have you ever seen this flower before?” she asked. “They’re called azaleas.”

“Nope. Did you take this picture? It’s pretty.”

“I sure did! This was at the Azalea Festival in Wilmington this year. They’re my favorite flower. They represent such beauty, strength, and resilience. That’s what the three of us are, ya hear? And as we heal together, we’ll be just like this fresh garden of azaleas—blooming, healthy, and thriving.”

“That’s amazing, grandma. Hopefully one day. I believe you.”

Grandma held me close to her again in a big bear hug. Just above us, a gentle wind meandered into the bedroom from where one of the windows was open just slightly. She lifted her head towards the ceiling again, this time with her eyes closed, grinning and more at ease.

I loved shooting. I loved the way the gun felt like an extension of my arm, heavy and weighty, powerful. I loved the sense of focus, control: aim for the center. I loved that I seemed to naturally be a good shot, when I was not a natural at most things. Most of all, I loved that my dad loved shooting.

In the dry heat of the Plains, a few months shy of eleven years old, I felt at home. Although this place was new, a cornfield in the middle of nowhere, I’d been shooting with my dad before at shooting ranges. I reveled when my dad showed me how to shoot a particular gun so it fired like a semiautomatic. Even better, my skin pinched in the trigger and left a little scar—a souvenir to show my friends when I got back. I would tell everyone, Guess what I did. Look what I did. I prayed for a scar that would stay with me, so that when future lovers asked its origin, I could bring them back to this place, where I had come from.

My sister Hope spent most of the day in a camp chair a ways back from the shooting. My father had gifted me a love of adrenaline and had gifted her terrible eyesight. Two years older than I, she was less interested in impressing our father, less interested in sweating under the hot Kansas sun, less willing to be sweet because someone else expected it of her. I bounced between her and my dad, torn between wanting to impress one with apathy and the other with eagerness.

When my sister finally stood from her chair, I saw the bloom of blood where she’d been sitting. We tried to pour water on the spot, quietly bonded in the understanding that periods were shameful. Vocalizing the ways in which we were growing up, the ways in which we were different from him, was something we were never quite able to do.

Before we went to shooting ranges, we had cap guns. We’d load up the fake revolvers with the plastic ammunition and delight when we pulled the trigger and got a bang. The question of where these guns came from never occurred to me as a child, much less the question, Why guns as toys? My dad was a firearm hobbyist, but also a divorcee trying to build a relationship with his children. Two years after the divorce, my mother moved us to a suburb of Milwaukee, and my father tried to develop a shared passion and language to keep us close. For us, that language was the Wild West—cowboys and cowgirls.

Our games were largely based on the plot of the 1953 Warner Brothers musical Calamity Jane. My father grew up in Kansas in the ’50s and ’60s, so this movie was a gift from his own childhood. He grew up within the container that the land we were born on—the land stewarded by the Wichita, the Osage, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, and the Gáuigú (Kiowa)—was rightfully his and his ancestors’. He grew up believing the myth of the Wild West, the myth that cowboys and cowgirls were heroes, not colonizers, and he passed that belief on to his children.

In our games, I would be Calamity, the loud-mouthed, foolhardy heroine. My father would be her partner in arms and eventual husband, Wild Bill Hickok. And my sister was Katie Brown, the strong-willed but feminine actress who is Calamity’s best friend and teaches her how to be girly enough to fit in. Usually the couch was the stagecoach.

I felt a pull toward Calamity that I didn’t with most other female leads. She’s blonde and rosy-cheeked but can shoot a glass out of someone’s hand. She swings deftly up and off stagecoaches, dangles from balconies without batting an eye. Before Katie enters the picture, Calamity ignores pleas to be more ladylike, to wear dresses and tidy herself. She is not the damsel—she saves the men she pines for.

Calamity uses her gun a lot, but it’s mostly for show. She expects that when she walks into a room, people will follow her movements and her stories. For the most part, the crowds of Deadwood oblige—and when they don’t, she gives them a gentle nudge with a shot in the air.

Outside of our games of make-believe, I wasn’t showy the way Calamity was. I didn’t ask for attention. At recess, I would stand shyly at the edge of the playground, unsure if I was welcome. Sometimes, I just read by myself on the school steps, away from other kids. Eventually, I learned that standing in lines for games or the tire swing was sometimes the easiest diversion—I didn’t have to be friends with the other kids, I just had to wait my turn.

My sister, true to the role model she’d chosen for herself in Katie Brown, looked out for me. Hope was more aware of herself than I was and painfully more aware of me than I was. When I thought the phrase artistic license meant an actual license to be an artist, she rolled her eyes and said, I’m pretty sure that’s just an expression. When I came home from school confused about why I was one of only two kids in my class to vote for Bush in our mock election, Hope argued the side of Gore, shifting my allegiance. When I didn’t understand why it felt like no one could hear me, she’d say, Stop mumbling!

In the solitude of my bedroom, though, I climbed up the side pipes of my bunk bed, never using the ladder. I always preferred the leap and plunge required to get from the top mattress to the ground without it. I still wanted to swing like Calamity.

My father was not just Wild Bill Hickok—he was the Wild West. He smelled like guns. And every now and again, sweat and body odor. But mostly that sharp metallic scent blended with the sweet oil he used to clean the pieces with rags. He’d stack magazines and boxes of bullets around the house, little skyscrapers of gun parts. Sometimes, he would take us to gun shows. Big warehouses filled with stalls, like the Saturday morning garage sales my grandmother took us to, but for people interested in guns, military paraphernalia, and collectible coins. I would flit from table to table looking for anything worthwhile to catch my attention—meaning, anything that wasn’t militaristic, and preferably something shiny. I liked the coins, but I didn’t know what they meant or what was a good deal. My dad also collected coins, but it wasn’t an interest he tried very hard to pass down. Guns, on the other hand, he wanted to make sure we had.

I spent much of my childhood wanting to be closer to my father. I often begged my mother to let me live with him in Kansas instead. I craved the limitless imagination presented by a four-hundred-square-foot backyard, the freedom to cuddle up with a litter of puppies or crack open whole coconuts with a hammer on the patio. I craved our adventures together, too, when we would pop out the middle seats of the minivan so that my sister and I could lounge across the flat bottom of the car and head west, dotting the map with stops to national parks and motels. In Wisconsin, we were adventurous only in our imaginations; we rarely ventured beyond the 1.5-square-mile boundaries of our suburban town, rarely felt the thrill of the unknown beyond watching Dateline. Our road trips with our father were a feast for the senses, the wonders of petrified forests and salt lakes and gas station pork rinds. Most of the time, we did not stay for long in any one place; we’d drive from viewpoint to viewpoint, take slow hikes down easy trailheads, roll into dusk and cruise through the night to the next stop.

We pulled into a vista once, at the Grand Canyon, as the sky was boiling over with gray clouds. There were signs lining the parking area telling visitors not to walk out onto the cliffs in thunderstorms. Hope hovered by the car, but our dad and I journeyed down the rocky path to the vista. I stood next to him, the tallest thing in sight at over six feet, and the sky cracked open with lightning. We watched in awe as the drizzle started, the only two people at the viewpoint, just us and the sky and the cavern below.

My dad’s mom had a stroke the summer before I turned thirteen. When we visited him that year, he had moved out of our childhood home and back into his, setting up his gun magazines in towers around her single-story ranch. We spent most of the summer caring for her, confined to the house during the day so there was always someone to look after her. She moved into the study, the only room her new hospital bed could fit in, while we shuffled around the other bedrooms in the house.

To give us some semblance of a summer vacation, our dad took us to visit his sister at her house at the Lake of the Ozarks. She took us grocery shopping, and as we browsed the air-conditioned produce aisle, Hope and I stared blankly back at her when she asked us to pick out ears of corn.

“You’re just like those girls on The Simple Life!” she exclaimed.

No one else has ever compared me to Nicole Richie or Paris Hilton. And, in any other way, my aunt probably wouldn’t have either. But she wasn’t saying we were actually like them; she was saying we were city folk. We didn’t understand corn.

What I did understand, somewhere in the crawling of my skin and my inability to follow conversations and my alarm with how casually my younger cousin used a BB gun to hunt squirrels off the porch, was that I was beginning to not fit in this place I loved so much.

One afternoon later that summer, back in Wichita, our dad got upset with us for watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show. He said, more or less, that he didn’t approve of her lifestyle. We were outraged. At some point, trying to prove a point, one of us must have said: What if we were gay?

He chuckled at our indignation and pulled us both into a hug. I’m sure if one of you turns out to be a lesbian, it will be okay.

His chuckle sat with me. It is the same chuckle Bill gives Calamity when she’s gotten herself into a pickle and he thinks it will be amusing to watch her extract herself. Bill and Calamity are sharpshooters, brought together because they’re the only match for the other with a gun. But Calamity is no match for Bill physically: when she gets in his way or does something he doesn’t like, something worth more than a chuckle, he picks her up like a sack of flour, tosses her to the side. There is an overriding sense of condescension, in part because he is just physically larger than her, and in part because he is a man.

As I grew into a teenager in my mom’s liberal Milwaukee suburb, my queerness felt normal, at least to my friends. The first time I came out in any way, I was in middle school—I had just read a book with a bisexual character and said to a friend, This makes sense, right? When the movie Rent came out a couple years later, my friend goaded me, You’re such a Maureen, a foil to the more logical and stoic Joanne. Boys in class said of me to a friend, We know she’s a lesbian, but what about you?

I think about my father’s room in Wichita, the three of us hugging. Did my father see any of these parts of me? Would he ever be able to, with almost 800 miles between us most of the time? Was that chuckle his way of saying: You silly girls, you don’t know yourselves like I do?

He had said the right words, but it felt like being unable to crack your shoulder when you’ve been hunched over all day, a nagging discomfort somewhere under my skin that I couldn’t ever find. I didn’t know what he thought okay meant.

In the shuffle of rooms in our grandmother’s house, I moved into the sewing room with just a mattress on the floor. The room had become a storage space for family memorabilia, so I had to crawl through piled up boxes to get to my mattress in the middle of the room.

Rifling through the stacks late one night, I found a wedding album from my father’s first marriage, which I hadn’t ever heard him talk about. I looked down at the glossy pages in awe, the writing neat and feminine and hopeful. Under the prompt How did you meet? I read:

Grant was my drug dealer!

I turned page after page, trying to understand this life my father had before I was born. Drugs? A first wife?

We never talked about this, his drug addiction. If he had told me about his addiction and his recovery, and the long and winding roads in between—or if I’d been brave enough to ask—would I have brought him into a hug and said, It will be okay?

My father died a few years after I found the wedding album, just before I turned seventeen. I learned at his funeral that it was getting clean that brought my dad to his faith. At the end of the service, Hope said to me, “I feel like they were talking about a stranger.”

Even knowing that his recovery had included his turn toward Christianity, it was not until many years after his death, watching a TV show about recovery, that I put together the pieces on why we had so many serenity-prayer items around the house. I had thought, naively, that he liked this prayer because his name was in it. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. But this prayer dotted our walls and countertops because he had been in recovery my entire life.

The knowns and unknowns of our relationship follow me everywhere. I spent years on the lookout for addictive qualities of my own, sure that the most dangerous parts of my father were lurking somewhere in me, that a dormant predilection toward guns and shooting might appear when I least expected it. I worry, still, over whether it was genetics or drug abuse or alcohol abuse or bad luck that led to his cancer. I wonder whether, if he were alive, we would be okay.

A couple years before my dad died, my sister and I found a pink, pearly revolver hidden in our grandmother’s old dresser, with a note addressed to us from our godmother. She wanted us to have the gun, to be able to protect ourselves. Presumably she wanted us to have a pink gun because it was lady-like.

When we showed it to our father, he told us it wasn’t a suitable gun for us, assuming incorrectly that we had an interest in it for the fact that it was a gun, rather than the fact that it was a gift from our recently deceased godmother. That Christmas, he gave us disassembled guns, compiled together in a DIY kit. He wanted us to know not just how to shoot a gun, but its inner workings, the things that made it possible.

Is this even legal? I thought. (It was not.) Could a teenager carry a gun across state borders and just … own it? (We could not.)

We did not assemble the guns. We left them, without comment, in my grandmother’s house and left Wichita a few days later.

The year before he got sick, my dad wrote an email with a business proposal to Hope and me. He wanted to ensure, he explained, that we both had enough money to pay for college. So he offered to help us set up our own business. An easy “work from home” part time job where we could make up to $5,000 a year.

What you will be selling, he wrote, is, of course, gun parts.

He reassured us, twice, that there would be nothing illegal about a sixteen- and eighteen-year-old selling gun parts online. He knew, he wrote, that it wasn’t something we’d ever had an interest in.

But again, he wrote, I must stress that is very important for you to do this in order to get through college.

Did my dad think this was legitimately the only way we could make enough money to go to college? Did he need us, for some reason, to be a front for his business?

He went on to say: I have recently felt as though I should just say, if my daughters want to go to college, they will have to move to Wichita, and start off in Butler County Community College, living with me and working towards an Associate’s Degree. My logic being, if I am to support all of the expense of getting you through college, I should have some control of how money will be spent.

Like Bill throwing Calamity around: a sack of flour.

We were not getting associate’s degrees at a Wichita Community College. We were not selling guns online part-time. We were not, for damn sure, letting our father tell us what to do with our lives.

My father signed off the email: I love you. And I want to see you. And I want to see you succeed.

When I sit with this email as an adult, I know my father was trying to do the best he could with two children from whom he’d become untethered. He was not connected to our guidance counselors or many other people our age who were going through the process of applying to schools. He didn’t know all the options, but even if he had: he was a man who believed in self-determination. The only path forward was to go it alone. He was, after all, the Wild West.

In adulthood, for a long time, I refused to watch Calamity Jane. I’d think about it, especially on the anniversary of my father’s death. Sometimes I’d watch another classic from the same era, like Singin’ in the Rain or Oklahoma!. But my first AIM screen name was not farmerLaurey or Debbieintherain—it was calamityjane09. Calamity was who I wanted to be.

Just watching the trailer for Calamity Jane churned my stomach. I was terrified that watching the full movie would tarnish my childhood memories, that the racism and casual genocide would warp my own view of my youth and who I’d idolized.

When I finally did watch it, I cringed. The movie is rife with period-specific language, disrespecting and dehumanizing Native Americans, but also male sexual dominance that I didn’t remember or expect.

But I also felt pulled toward Calamity, still. I still found myself thinking, Of course I would want to be her. She’s often the punchline, but always herself.

About three quarters of the way through the film, I suddenly noticed that I didn’t really remember the plot. The song lyrics got fuzzy. I wondered, Had my attention span as a child waned, or did I lose interest when Calamity started to move away from Katie and toward Bill in the film?

This thought made me laugh in itself. Suddenly things clicked into place. Of course Calamity had been my idol: Calamity, who wore men’s clothing, and shacked up with her “best friend,” and didn’t see herself as anyone’s sack of flour. Calamity, the movie character and historic figure, both viewed through a modern lens for her adjacency to queerness. Of course, even within that, she subscribed to the ideas of her time, just as my father did of his time, just as I did of my liberal enclave in Wisconsin.

We all grow up in containers.

The last time I was at a shooting range, I was a senior at an expensive private university in Boston. I was trying to impress a guy I was dating, even though I knew that our time was coming to an end, and this was, perhaps, why I agreed that he could bring a friend along on our date for his birthday.

For years, I’d used the fact that I was a good shot to brag with suburban kids who had grown up with more money than me. I liked the look of bemusement boys gave me when I said I could fire a gun, though, in hindsight, this was the way Bill looked at Calamity. I probably should’ve been looking for Katies.

When we got to the shooting range, the attendant who was checking us in asked about our comfort level around guns. My boyfriendish guy and his friend both had fired guns before but weren’t super familiar. Me? I grew up around guns, I told him. I’m fine with them.

It was true and it wasn’t. I was posturing. I had done a little googling re-cap before this trip. I was worried that I would no longer be a good shot, but I was delighted when the attendant put me in charge.

My dad had been dead, at that point, for about four years. I thought he would’ve liked this guy I was dating, who did not really make me happy other than the fact that other girls liked him and he had chosen me. The guy was a Republican, which I thought my dad would’ve approved of, though he actually probably would’ve hated—he was a rich California Republican, not the Republican Libertarian type my dad was. But he was also a guy, which I thought my dad would’ve preferred.

I wondered, before we went to the shooting range, if I was a bad person to support gunmanship as a hobby. And, either way, was it ever something I could extract myself from fully, given how many times I’d watched my father package up magazines and ammo to unknown recipients across the country?

After he passed, I thought often about my father’s faith and prayers. The refrains he used to get himself through the day when he was alive seemed both useless and priceless once he was gone. I got the last line of his favorite religious poem, Footprints in the Sand, tattooed on my back as soon as I turned eighteen: It was then that I carried you. When people asked about it, I would always apologetically explain, I’m not religious, but my father was.

Later, I would extend this apology to more than just religion: I’m not Libertarian, but my father was. I’m not into guns, but my father was. I did not grow up fully in that world, but my father did.

I offered these apologies with guilt on both sides: guilt for who I come from, guilt that I understand why someone would go to a shooting range, and guilt that my apologies might dishonor my father’s memory, guilt that it might mean I love him less.

I still don’t pray, but if I did, perhaps I would say: God, grant me the wisdom to know that both things can be true.

At the shooting range, I let the boys shoot more than me, but I was shocked by the comfort of sliding on ear protection and holding the gun up to aim it at the silhouette target. That feeling of power came back to me, the weightiness of the gun, the grip, the aim. The feeling I imagine you might have if you were Calamity Jane swinging down off a stagecoach, knowing exactly where your legs are going to land.

I did not know, on my trip to the shooting range outside Boston that day, that it might be my last time shooting a gun. I didn’t consider this implication, whether letting go of the possibility of returning might mean letting go of a piece of my dad.

I did not know, on that trip, that years later I would look back on that time in my life and wish that I could give my younger self a hug and say, You do not have to date him because other girls would, or because your father would’ve approved. You do not have to cry over him.

I did not know, on that trip, what to make of feeling so separate from the world of my childhood, the world of guns and make-believe and puppies and coconuts. I did not know what it meant to be an adult, on the other side of that growing-up-ness, how to hold two halves of myself, two different versions of freedom.

I did know one thing that day, though: I was still a pretty good shot.