The right one weighs 568 grams, the left one, 547, over two pounds off my chest. For five days, two tubes drain the incisions. Ruby, then amber, fluids pool into translucent bulbs pinned to my white compression vest.

It’s Christmas. 

I am the tree; the blood bulbs, ornaments. 

Inside the bulbs my red blood cells are shaped like marbles, tiny spheres. The name of this condition is hereditary spherocytosis, which means I got these marbles from my mother, a hematological heirloom. Behind our upper left ribcage, our spleens destroyed these marbles and made us anemic, jaundiced, low iron, high platelet. My mother’s spleen was six years old when it was removed; mine was 13. 

The night before my splenectomy, she ran me a hot bath and massaged my legs with lavender lotion. When you wake up you won’t be able to see or move for about 30 minutes, she said. But you will be able to hear. The surgery lasted four hours. I didn’t read or talk to anyone while you were under, she said. I just imagined your body inch by inch.

Once my destruction site was excised, the spheres passed through my blood undetonated. Spleenless me did new things: hike, run, make plans, keep plans, get good grades. The words on my report cards changed. The green insuficientes became suficientes, bienes, notables, sobresalientes. 

Sobre, above.

Saliente, salient.

Spleenless me rose above.

“Rigor” appeared everywhere, underlined. 

20 years after my splenectomy, three weeks before top surgery, my surgeon calls to discuss how my blood might behave. 

Spleenless people with spherocytosis have high platelets. 

Platelets make the blood clot. 

When it comes to surgery, you want to clot, not a clot. 

Normal platelet levels range between 150,000 to 450,000.

Mine are between 600,000 and 750,000. 

Because I’m a spleenless person made of marbles, my surgeon says my chance of developing a post-surgical clot that could move somewhere “tricky” is something to “consider.” By “tricky” I assume she means lung, heart, brain. 

“Do you feel comfortable doing the surgery?” I ask.

“Absolutely. It’s important to you, and you’ll be so happy when it’s done.”

I open my brown Moleskin and write down the words “happy” and “important.” I remind myself: I trust this surgeon. She’s thorough, serious, kind, a total genius; I love her results. 

Toward the end of our conversation she asks if I’m “excited.” 

The word surfaces in my clinical notes. 

I’m officially medically excited. 

I’m not excited to have surgery.

I do not feel certain about this choice.

Uncertainty does not negate desire.

Some people modify their bodies to experience self-alignment, but I don’t have a coalesced self I feel misaligned from.

I sense my lack of coalescence is my misalignment. 

“Dysphoria,” writes Max Delsohn, “[feels] like being a tourist in my own body.”

Right: tourist, interloper, spectator, seditionist, assailant. I watch myself from below and above. What I want is to become my own occupant.

“It sounds like this surgery is gender-expansive,” says my friend Moa. 

Her language piques me, a progression: gender confirmation to affirmation to expansion. We confirm dates and times; an external action concretizes the event. We affirm, state, declare; to affirm implies an awareness of the thing being affirmed. It makes sense to feel excitement or certainty if body modification stems from what is known. But expansion doesn’t have to be sure or aware of itself. Dough expands, and moss, and mycelium, and water. Expansion doesn’t require certainty, just curiosity; curiosity is enough. 

“And expansion can become affirmation,” says Moa. 

After wildfires tear through forests, dormant seeds germinate—slowly, then all at once. 

But I am terrified of my marbles, of my blood.

In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I spend hours trying to make appointments with hematologists who can’t see me in time because I’m new to the area and the waiting lists are long. I find an online hematology service and meet with a practitioner who looks at my labs and assures me I’ll be fine. I ask my primary doctor whether this conclusion is enough to clear me for surgery and she says yes. I ask my surgeon the same question and she says yes. But my fear gets the better of me, so I seek a fourth opinion. I book a flight out of state to see my old doctor who specializes in spherocytosis.

Then I cancel the trip. 

It’s too expensive, another risk.

I’m more likely to get sick from a trip than from a clot. 

Spleenless people are prone to infections. Certain bacterias—streptococcus or neisseria—sneak around our immune systems cloaked in capsules made of polysaccharides. These capsules protect pathogens from the body’s attacks; spleenless people have less ammunition. If I catch a bad cold, they’ll cancel the surgery. And if they cancel the surgery, it may not be rescheduled because look at the United States.

When I think about not going through with it, I feel crestfallen. 

And yet it would be so much easier to absorb risk for something I’m excited about.

“No one said this would be easy,” says Liam, my partner of 11 years. 

“I haven’t had a plan, or an ulterior motive, or a rhyme or a reason [for] what I’ve done,” says Dr. Susan Stryker. “I was just doing my thing to unfold the mystery of my transness to myself.” 

Unfold as in germinate as in expand. 

Years ago I went on social media and shared the name and pronouns that make me feel like a person rather than an assumption. Once the language around me changed, my curiosity teethed. Might I feel closer to myself if I shapeshift? “Sometimes the feelings are certain and come first, and the action follows,” writes Krys Malcolm Belc. “But other times, the action has to lead the feeling.” And sometimes clarity comes after action, after feeling. 

It’s an incredibly bureaucratic process, to become. I consulted, scheduled, perused pictures of stunning chests, found a few I loved, and set the date for my deconstruction. Then I graduated and moved down the coast, twice. Now I’m supposed to go under in two weeks, and I’m bone tired. Liam, who went through this surgery a few months ago, asks me if it would be better to wait.

“It’s not an option,” I say. 

My stubbornness surprises me.

I am unyielding—not excited. Rigorous—not certain. 

I read essay after essay after essay.

From Naomi Gordon-Loebl, I learn the Latin roots of the word “decide.”

De, off.

Caedere, to cut. 

I read medical studies about clots and spherocytosis.

I check my blood, once, thrice.

My platelets climb.

662,000, 681,000, 738,000. 

The day my surgery date was confirmed, I was with my friend Heather in the Nashville International Airport. This was before my surgeon cautioned me about my marbles and platelets. I was in the luxurious space between opportunity and execution; this was my specter of “excitement.” 

I’d met Heather in graduate school, where she was earning her Ph.D in fiction. I was drawn to her incisive humor and to the way she noticed subtle patterns in the novels we studied. We’d just spent 10 days in a writing conference on a campus with gothic chapels; at night we slept in a dorm that faced a cemetery. With hours to kill before our flights home, we drank iced coffee and I told her my news. 

“Congratulations,” she said, with a smile that seeped through me.

A few months later, Heather showed up to my graduating thesis defense with roses, carnations, and lilies in a round glass jar. For two hours she listened to me answer questions about my work; she observed a pattern, an undertone; she wrote it down. 

Later, over chicken yakisoba noodles, she air-dropped me this note:

“Billy uses information & research to feel in control but it also feeds their anxiety—can we sit in knowledge and use it to process & understand while accepting lack of control?” 

I do not accept lack of control.

I will control my body. 

I will carve it into what I imagine.

I can’t control the way my blood clots.

But I can control the information I have about the way my blood clots. 

I can read the right studies and ask the right questions and ask for the right tests and the right medication. And by that I mean: I can control the way my blood clots. No?

Once my imagination seizes danger, I gallop toward a solution. 

In my house I have a metal door jammer, a panic button, a radon detector, a propane detector, an alarm system. I can’t control whether an attacker or toxin infiltrates my house/body, but I can control how guilty I feel if something goes wrong. If I lock and jam my door and set the alarm and plug in the radon detector and something bad happens, I can forgive myself. If I read medical studies and get blood tests and talk to nurses and doctors and something bad happens, I can forgive myself. The problem with this logic is its perversion.

The system that tries to protect me assails me. 

I’m afraid I’ll die if I have this surgery.

I’m afraid I’ll die if I don’t have this surgery.

I don’t have a panic button for the panic I create. 

I am the hydra: I cut down one head, turn around, and there I am.

Three days before the surgery, I walk along cliffs. 

The sea is choppy.

Clouds coagulate; within days an atmospheric river will run through the coast. 

These currents of air can be over 1,000 miles long, 400 miles wide, more than two miles deep. 

My phone buzzes with flood, wind, and landslide alerts. 

My father calls.

“I want your right breast in a jar,” he says.

“Should I get it preserved in formaldehyde?” 

“Absolutely not. I don’t want the tissue to shrivel. I want it to grow arms.” 

“And where will you put my breast? Next to Tomás?”

Tomás is his human skull, a found relic from his childhood.

We laugh.

We talk about the river, my missing organs, my weird blood.

Along with my spleen went my gallbladder; several years before that, my appendix, minor meats. My appendix almost burst after the first time I visited my father, Michael, in the United States. 

Cambridge, 2001, Christmas. Rain, slush, snow, Moulin Rouge. I’d just turned nine. Before this, Michael and I had only spent time in Madrid or in the south of Spain, once or twice a year. His girlfriend, Hilary, paid for many of his flights to see me, even though she’d never met me in person.

I liked her immediately. We walked around Central Square, baked salted chocolate chip cookies, and chatted. She was writing her first book, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I also loved the precise way she and Michael assembled dinner every night, a choreography they’d learned together in culinary school. This was the first time I stepped into my father’s life. He introduced me to his rituals, Iron Chef, Terminator, good knives, duck fat, pickled beets, and salmon grilled on charcoal. After nine days I returned to Madrid; two days later a surgeon rolled me into the operating room. 

“Apendicitis aguda gangrenosa,” she said, after. 

Aguda, acute, sharp. 

Madrid, 2005, Christmas, again. 

Four years after my appendectomy, Michael flew to Spain for my splenectomy; my mother left our apartment so he could stay with me the week before. On sunny days we wandered through outdoor markets that sold items for nativity tableaus: tiny angels, goats, sheep, barrels of hay, myrrh. On rainy days we watched movies. 

On our fifth night I wanted a burger from a place called Foster’s Hollywood.

Michael said no. 

Anger prickled me. 

“I’m about to be cut open. Just give me what I want.”

He said no. 

Later, he knocked on my door. In his hand was a blue ceramic plate with a burger. He’d bought the bun from a bakery, mixed and spiced the organic meat, frosted it with thick flecks of sea salt, and caramelized the onions.

“I barely used any oil,” he said, “so this shouldn’t hurt you at all.” 

I devoured it.

The thing about only seeing each other once or twice a year was that our time together was all text, no subtext. We talked about concrete objects: movies, books, food; we didn’t have nonverbal shorthand accumulated in shared space. I don’t remember talking about how sick I felt. I imagine my mother may have told him that greasy food, from Foster’s Hollywood in particular, made me curl up in bathtubs, knees to chest in hot water, and pant with pain. 

By the time it was clear my spleen had to come out, I’d lost count of how many times my mother had to drive me to the emergency room after I ate something oily. For years I’d tried to control my diet to control the pain. I subsisted on bland things until I caved and reached for chips or cheeses or burgers that hurt with ferocity. My doctors couldn’t figure out the problem; they accused my mother of having Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. I’m not sure what was more disorienting: the pain, or watching medical professionals mistreat the person who brought me peppermint tea and lavender bath balls and demanded they take me seriously.

Eventually, as a result of my mother’s rigor, the right doctor ordered the right test and confirmed my gallbladder was atrophied. Up until I started writing this, I thought my awful stomachaches were unrelated to my weird blood. But a quick Google search reveals that people with spherocytosis often have gallstones. The chronic destruction of red blood cells releases too much bilirubin, which then crystallizes into sediments. I’m not sure why it took my doctors seven years to solve something the internet told me in seconds. But right after I turned 13, they decided to excise my troubles. Once I was two organs lighter, I’d be able to run, swim, dance, study, eat oil. 

“Te vas a re-encontrar,” the surgeon said. 

You’re going to find yourself again.

As if there was an authentic self I’d lost.

On the day of the surgery, while my mother imagined my body, Michael helped my grandmother with her Hebrew. My mother didn’t understand how my father could distract himself at a time like this; my father didn’t understand how my mother could not. As I came to, the wind whined and my parents shouted. I dipped in and out of consciousness, and by the time I could see again, they were gone. When I ask Michael why they put me in the intensive care unit, he says he doesn’t remember. 

What I remember most from the ICU is a little boy who I believe died in the bed next to mine. The sound of his anguish was desbocado, des-boca, un-mouthed. To be a body in pain so close to a body in so much more pain left me between shock and high octane fear.

At some point, a nurse brought me a TV that played Monster in Law.

With white curtains she sectioned off the little boy’s bed.

His cries turned to rasps turned to quiet.

In the morning the bed was empty.

The nurse told me the boy left, but the underwater tone of her voice made me wonder where “leaving” was. She didn’t say, “Se fue a casa,” or, “Se fue con sus padres,” which would have meant he went home, or with his parents. 

She said, “Se fue con los suyos.”

He went with the people who belong to him, who he belongs to. 

Pain is relative, a relative.

“Rate your pain one to ten,” says the nurse.

It is over, it is done, over two pounds off my chest.

“One.”

“That’s unlikely.”

“Overwhelmingly, patients tend to rate their pain as a five, unless they are in excruciating pain,” writes Eula Biss in The Pain Scale. “At best, this renders the scale far less sensitive to gradations in pain. At worst, it renders the scale useless.”

“Two,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

Later, Liam will tell me I gripped his hand so hard his thumb changed color. Hours before the surgery, I’d convinced myself that an earthquake would shatter the tectonic plates under the hospital, that I’d be the reason Liam ended up dead. I was also certain a shooter would come murder the people providing affirming care. 30 minutes before I went under, I Googled fault lines and blueprints and police records and clocked all the hospital’s exits and tried to figure out which waiting room would be safest for Liam. I am the hydra with hijacked heads. My terror must have glistened through the drugs, because as I woke up the nurse said: “You are completely safe here, and I would die for you.” 

Little presents arrive: two blankets and a pot of lavender honey, from my mother. 

A plant cutting with white roots in a glass jar, from Moa.

A mastectomy pillow, from Hilary. 

A coloring book, from Michael, titled: Well that’s a weight off your chest! 

A t-shirt, from Heather: “New tits, who dis?” 

For a fortnight Liam injects me with anti-coagulant delivered through a needle to my stomach. It lowers the risk of clotting but raises the risk of bleeding. 

The atmospheric river comes and goes; the clouds thin. 

My phone reminds me to move once an hour. 

I walk up and down the hall and will my platelets to loosen but not too much. 

Every day I measure the ruby I leak. 

At night, I re-read Jane Eyre.

In graduate school I became obsessed with Charlotte Brontë’s body. 

I learned she had a toothache the day she started writing Jane Eyre. 

I imagine the throb that travels from her molars to her jaw to her neck to her head as she writes the first sentence: “There was no possibility of a walk that day.” Then she describes the weather: “Since dinner the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.” 

In the medical manual used in Brontë’s household, Modern Domestic Medicine, Thomas John Graham recommends walking to soothe toothaches and headaches. As her mouth radiates, Brontë writes that Jane can’t walk that day. The weather that confines the character mirrors the pain that encloses the author. Jane can’t leave the house; Brontë can’t leave her body.

In Brontë’s extant letters she connects weather to pain. “Today the weather is gloomy and I am stupefied with a bad cold and a headache,” she writes to a friend. She implicates the weather, observes scholar A.J Larner, “including the east wind or cold wind, autumn, fog.” 

When I send Heather this essay, she texts: did you know a walk killed Branwell Brontë? Charlotte’s brother, found in a ditch. I read about him. I read about the sequence of deaths Charlotte endured: her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, then Branwell, then Emily two months later, then Anne, five months after that. Many of her siblings died from tubercular complications catalyzed by bad weather. 

With this context I see Brontë’s pain on almost every page. 

In Jane Eyre, the fog itself breeds “pestilence.” 

The word “rain” appears 34 times; “cold” 65 times, “clouds” 34 times; “wind” 42 times.

I think about the atmosphere, about the writer’s grief, teeth, skull.

Books come from cells, fingers, bones. The way I read a text transforms when I learn about the pain that spread through the body that made it; texts ache, pain patterns and leaves marks. One of the problems with my writing, my teachers say, is that my body is nowhere to be found. You never describe your hands or hair or clothes or tattoos, they point out in college, in grad school, in workshops. To describe my body feels akin to describing a city I’ve flown through, a fool’s errand. My absence is the illustration: Nothing to see here, do not imagine me.

To make oneself visible is not neutral: Visibility begets violence; spectacle begets spectatorship. I want to erase myself as much as I want to be seen. Writing shears my mind from body. I have no canvases to fill, no stages to cross. I make no noise, no music. For years I wrote tucked in the back of a closet. I’ve backspaced that detail at least twice because everyone makes fun of me for it, so on the nose it’s embarrassing. My point is that I’ve been told my body is hiding, missing.

As I write this, I wear a purple robe.

A white bandage wraps around my chest.

The drains are out, so are my blood bulbs. 

My incisions don’t hurt. 

My bones hurt. 

My mind hurts.

The pain in my mind amplifies the pain in my body.

“Don’t forget,” says my therapist, “most people feel like shit after their surgeries. It’s normal to feel like you made a mistake.”

I don’t feel like I made a mistake.

The feeling is akin to infection.

Encapsulated bacteria sneak around my psychic immune system.

I have nothing left to fight anything off.

Every few days a nurse calls and asks me to rate my pain. I say one or two.

“The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration,” writes Biss. “This may be its greatest flaw.” 

Before they took my spleen, I was listless; before they took my appendix, I was gangrenous; before they took my gallbladder, I had stomachaches so piercing I asked my mother to find a doctor who would kill me. But not all pain is legible in a blood test or in an ultrasound. I don’t know how to measure the pain I put my body through to escape the dysphoric pain it was in: the alcoholism, the anorexia, the pulse behind my panic buttons and alarms for catastrophes lived and imagined. Right now, right now, I am “in” pain, not above or below it. It swallows, like fog.

I receive my post-operative report on Christmas Eve.

I highlight the weight of each breast, record the grams in my brown Moleskine, next to “happy” and “important.” 

I turn the page and start writing this. 

I give myself a constraint: This essay will end as soon as the pain passes. I’ve written through discomfort before, but this particular ache shortens my sentences, takes me to Brontë’s mouth, and mixes my parents and my organs into the same text. I send drafts to Liam, Moa, Heather, Michael, Hilary, to my best friend, my writing group, my writing partner, my editor. I absorb notes and questions and line-edits and corrections; I have a fantasy: There is a right way to tell this story. I’ll sandpaper one word after another until I become legible to you and real to myself. “It is the narrative constructed in retrospect—perhaps even more than the body—that makes the self recognizable, even cognizable,” writes Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. “But narrative requires language.” 

And language confirms, affirms, expands, harms, regulates, warps, blesses, sanctions; like the body, language is wielded, not controlled. The pain passes and I don’t stop writing. If I revise, research, get more feedback, read another book, maybe I’ll get it right: sobresaliente. I just don’t know what “right” means. Or rather, the definition keeps shifting. To reverse-engineer a narrative around an experience that lives at the end of language feels like catching mist; I am tattered and embryonic at once. 

Winter ends.

Now, I’m 99 days out.

It’s spring. 

I look up the symbolism of 99. 

Google tells me I’ve completed one cycle and begun anew.

I should “trust” myself and “embrace a major life transition.”

I look up the symbolism of my missing parts. 

Appendix: uselessness, resilience. 

Gallbladder: courage, judgment. 

Spleen: melancholy, fear. 

Breasts: nourishment. 

 “Something I’ve noticed,” says Liam: “when we hug our hearts feel closer.”

I had an idea of euphoria, loud, bang, ecstatic.

But when I read about the word’s origin, I learn it comes from Greek: Euphoros.

Eu: well or easily.

Pherein: to bear.

To bear well. 

Around the eighteenth century, “euphoria” surfaces in medical contexts. A patient may experience euphoria after acute periods of illness, treatment, suffering. This euphoria exists not outside pain, but within its endurance. A sentence from my post-op report: “The patient tolerated the procedure well.” Meaning: Even unconscious I was euphoric; my body metabolized its expansion. Euphoria can be as quiet as collagen fibers, synthesizing. 

“I said to the sun

“Tell me about the big bang,” writes Andrea Gibson.

“The sun said

it hurts to become.”

Today feels like the first hot day in forever.

I walk 15,000 steps down the coast past the harbor, boats, and seals.

I sit in the shade.

I open Instagram.

I assemble a carousel of images: wet dough dotted with pools of oil; leaves of mint crystallized in ice cubes; Liam carving our initials in the sand; me, shirtless, stunning chest turned toward ocean. Days ago I put my silhouette on my close friends’ stories but now it will live on my grid. The caption: winter decadence. I’m not sure who I’m posting this for.

The performance of self is as strange as the performance of certainty, but sometimes spectacle makes the self concrete. By that I mean: I become aware of how much I love this body as I watch myself want to put it on the internet, like a painting: Look at me. But I feel pressure to resist the arc in which I finally get the surgery and look in the mirror and think: There I am. This may be true, but I’m also as unknown to myself as ever and have zero interest in arrival. I don’t think my authentic self awaits; I don’t think such a self exists. It’s mutable if it does: mycelium, water.

I post my carousel and think about the month ahead: By the time Christmas lights climb the streetlamps, I’ll be long gone from this slice of coast that teems with rain and fog and seals. I’m moving once again and so many tasks await: sorting, bubble-wrapping, packing; all the minutia of taking a life apart. I think about a lecture I went to once, about ruins, how a site’s destruction teaches us as much about its history as its construction. What I abandon—apartments, clothes, books, organs, oceans, concepts, tissue, names—matters as much as what I generate. There is no right way to expand, and I anticipate more destruction. But right now there’s not a cloud in sight.

The post I Wasn’t Excited for My Top Surgery. That Doesn’t Negate My Desire for It appeared first on Electric Literature.

For six weeks, every painting on the wall is brown. Pretty, stoic deer stand and stare with wide wet eyes; slick panthers stalk across the frames; and dawn breaks over some craggy mountain tops. Entire galaxies churn, the panels bursting with starfields that could be anywhere, in our corner of the universe or another. So many worlds rendered in sepia.

“He paints with tar from the La Brea Tar Pits,” I explain whenever a visitor asks about the material—and they always ask about the material. They’re intrigued by the thick, sepia paint, all the subtle textures. What is this, what is that? They always want to know how a thing is made. I introduce the Tar Pits over and over. It’s the end of summer, and people are on vacation in Los Angeles, many for the first time. “It’s the only active Ice Age dig site in the world,” I say. “It’s in the middle of the city—if you go right now, it’ll only take you twenty-five minutes to get there.” Most seem surprised to hear this, but dismiss it as a random oddity. A few insist they’ll go as soon as they leave the gallery, where I am the director. 

Explorers and scientists have spent the better part of a century pulling fossils out of the natural asphalt that bubbles up through the grass in Rancho La Brea, now a park where the tar pits are located. You can walk around the grounds and watch the staff work, ten feet, twenty feet deep in the earth, dredging up oil and dirt. This muck is called the matrix—an ancient mixture filled with microfossils, tiny toes and teeth, shreds of ancient leaves. 

Walk into the museum at the park—an outpost of the LA’s Natural History Museum further downtown—and you’ll see the paleontologists working in the Fossil Lab, the fishbowl station where they prepare findings from the pits. They’re all wearing white coats and blue gloves, like doctors who might swab your throat in a different setting. Here, though, they rinse and sort bones. Once I saw a paleontologist with something large and meaty in her hands, maybe a femur. She held the bulge at one end as though it were a baby’s delicate head and used her other hand to swipe a long Q-tip along the length of the bone, probably cleaning off residue, though you couldn’t see any progress. The tar stains are impossible to remove. Her desk was crowded with tools, canisters of brushes and Q-tips, a large white microscope. If a specimen is broken or damaged, the paleontologist will try to reconstruct it with glue, putting all the little bits she can find back together. She set the bone down and shuffled muddy fragments across the desk, touching them carefully with green-gloved fingers. She was looking for something specific. She arranged the pieces, stepped back and considered her work—she saw something there, in the mess. 

We visited the Tar Pits often when I was a kid, my parents eager to show my sister and me the layers of history buried under our city—a place they’d moved from Texas just a month before I was born. The pits were discovered by a Spanish expedition in 1769. A friar who tagged along with the group noted the strange climate and landscape of the area in his diary: “In the afternoon we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us,” he writes. “We judge that in the mountains that run to the west in front of us there are some volcanoes. The explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch, they were boiling and bubbling.” He wondered about the relationship between the tar and the earthquakes, unfamiliar with both.

When I was seven and eight, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I drew myself on a dig for a school assignment, crouched in vibrant orange sand, wearing green cargo pants and a boxy red shirt. There was a bone outlined in thick black marker by my dusty knees, drawn the way all cartoon bones are, with big, bubbly ends. My face was obscured by a wide-brim hat, the kind I imagined you would wear for long days in the desert. I conjured myself as part-sleuth, part-storyteller, able to make sense of things that happened thousands of years ago with only the tiniest shards of information. 

The obsession with this line of work perplexed my parents, even as they tried to feed my curiosity. I was terrified of human bones, my own especially. I sobbed when a pinky finger bent the wrong way when I caught it on a playground slide, sure it was going to fall off. Tears ran down my cheeks at the emergency room; I refused to make eye contact with anyone else waiting to be summoned deeper into the hospital, disturbed by our shared status as sick or injured. 

I was anxious about obscure diseases, too, like Mad Cow, the scraps of information I heard on the radio or at someone else’s house plaguing me. West Nile was on the news at my uncle’s house, on the TV crowned by a stuffed pheasant, its dead wings spread wide across the wall as if in flight. There was an epidemic in Texas, the reporter said. I was there for the summer, bouncing between family members. Mosquitos loved me; I was already covered in red spots the size of quarters. I imagined my infection, my spinal cord stiffening and my brain swelling. I cried and cried on the phone with my mother, begging her to come get me and take me home, certain every second spent away from her was an exponentially greater risk.

There isn’t a clear connection between the pits and earthquake activity, though both are endemic to Los Angeles. The pits formed as crude oil moved up through fissures in the Earth’s crust, and when people began mining the asphalt here in the 1800s, one of the holes they left behind collected rain and groundwater until it became a bubbling pool, dark and pearlescent. Today it is the iconic Lake Pit, where model mammoths are arranged to show visitors exactly how so many animals and plants got stuck there. The tar looks like water but for its slight iridescence, the little methane bubbles, and the unmistakable petroleum smell. Covered in fallen leaves or other debris, the pits would have been perfectly camouflaged. Animals wouldn’t know they were stepping in tar until it was too late, before they stuck and sank, buried for tens of thousands of years. 

The probability that any organism will be completely preserved after it dies is very low, which is why the troves at the Tar Pits are so special—a mecca for students of natural history.  “Natural history” refers to the interdisciplinary study of the natural world, with its roots in Ancient Greece. It encompasses many modern subjects, including biology, paleontology, geology, and philosophy, but unlike contemporary sciences, it was mostly observational, not experimental. In the long lifetime of such study, there have been many points of convergence between science and religion, fact and fiction, as scientists and scholars tried to come up with stories that linked the phenomena they saw into a logical narrative without much concrete evidence to go on. The problem is, the fossil record is sparse. When an animal dies in nature, its flesh is mostly gone a few weeks later. Bacteria, fungi, insects, water, wind, light—all these forces pull it apart, scatter the pieces. But asphalt is an impermeable preservative, keeping things as tiny and fragile as hollow bird bones and broken leaves intact for thousands of years; no water or oxygen ever reaches them. The Tar Pits have preserved specimens so perfectly they still contain original biological minerals, like the apatite from bones and calcite from shells. Using the molecular data from this material, scientists can date the fossils very precisely. They can establish a clear record of the natural world as it once was, and create a detailed narrative of change. 

The summer I turned 10, I saw the inside of my own body for the first time. After school, I bent over in my uniform skort and hospital gown, exposing my back to the new surgeon and my mother. The surgeon, a referral from my usual pediatrician, pointed out the slight hump of my ribcage—I could see him gesturing with a pencil in the air above me, tracing the shape of the curve. I could see the red and black checkers of his starchy shirt, the slick of dark hair on the side of his head, thick and wet with product. His olive skin was sallow in the hospital lighting, almost waxen. 

My pediatrician had suspected I had scoliosis, a spontaneous, abnormal curve of the spine. The surgeon confirmed it. The curve wasn’t severe then; it was still invisible to the untrained eye and unnoticeable under clothes. But it was there, on the computer screen. The surgeon annotated my X-ray, drawing a line across the top of the thoracic curve and another along the bottom, the lumbar. He traced a third line, an intersection. He measured the angle and typed quick notes. The nature of the condition, sudden and random and persistent, horrified me—but it was also, in a way, a relief. Here was confirmation of what I had often suspected as a small child: I was right, my body was not safe. On a structural level, it was unreliable. 

There was nothing to do but wait for a while. Scoliosis like mine is quite common, especially in girls, and it doesn’t always become a bigger health concern. But the surgeon told my mother what might happen: I would grow, and so would the curve; I would need a back brace, and if that didn’t control the curve, I’d need a spinal fusion for permanent correction. Without surgery, my moving spine could twist my ribcage, forcing it against my heart and lungs. Potential complications were infertility, heart failure, pneumonia. Pain, certainly. Low self-esteem, likely. 

It was a relatively routine surgery, he said, but it had its risks: fusion failure, chronic pain, paralysis, death. My mother held me close and tried to shush him as he rattled off the list of potential outcomes. She didn’t want me to hear those details, but it was too late. I had already stored them away, these new ways my body could betray me.

If my curve progressed past 45 degrees, we would have to move quickly. Once it hit that threshold, a curve would usually keep progressing even after the growth plates closed and the skeleton was fully developed. Plus, better correction is possible when patients are younger, when their bones are still pliable. Surgeons prefer to operate as soon as possible. 

There has been only one human specimen ever shown at the Tar Pits: The La Brea Woman. She is the oldest human found in California, and her display case used to sit between a ground sloth’s and a suite of bird bones. It was almost too dark to see inside, her skeleton just barely illuminated in weak amber light. But every ten seconds or so, a hologram would turn her into an exaggerated woman with a neat hourglass figure—topless, brown eyes, and shiny hair down to her hips. Then the lights would change again, and she would shrink back to bone. When I stood in front of the La Brea Woman as a 10-year-old, we were about the same height, just under five feet; looking in the dark glass, my reflection slipped over her skeleton; I was her. 

The La Brea Woman isn’t on display anymore. Sometime in the early 2000s, museum representatives decided it wasn’t right to display her remains: Her identity was mostly speculative, and she wasn’t actually found in the pits—she had been buried in a nearby grave. Her skull shape meant she may have been ethnically Chumash, and the museum’s director was worried about negative attention and demands for repatriation of the bones. So he put her remains in storage, where no one could see them. As far as I know, she’s still there.

I grew too much, too fast, and the new height twisted into deeper curves in my spine. For all of sixth and seventh grade, I wore a back brace molded to my body for 23 hours a day. At school, I layered t-shirts and sweatshirts to hide the bulk of the brace. Middle school cliques coagulated, but I was insular, and kept my distance from other kids. When a girl playfully poked me in the stomach before first period history, her finger bent back against the plastic under my clothes. Her eyes grew big and confused; I couldn’t explain. I just walked into class and sat down, the shame of it making me mute, skin sweating under the brace until I turned cold and stale. I was sure I would start crying if I tried to tell her what was wrong with me. I didn’t know where to begin.

I had X-rays taken every three months to monitor my spine’s movement. Each time was the same. Clothes off, drafty gown on. Wait in one room, then another. Bend over, then walk a few feet, let’s see how you move. The room is always cold, the doctor barely there. When he is, he notes another few degrees of movement in my spine.

We were waiting for my period. Your period means you’ll stop growing in a year or so, the surgeon told me. By the time it started, just days before my fourteenth birthday, my thoracic curve had already bent to 50 degrees. 

The scoliosis had become more obvious in the skew of my shoulders and hips, the swing in my gait, but even then, it didn’t hurt much. I struggled with the dissonance of the impending surgery and my daily experience. My body looked bad, I was told, but I felt mostly fine. I got a little stiff after spending hours crunched into the small desks at school or in narrow airplane seats, but that didn’t seem significant. I was fencing competitively, successfully. I wanted to make the US national team. I saw myself as a promising athlete and a sharp student. I loved writing essays, sketching with charcoal. I wanted to be an artist, maybe. I was confused. I couldn’t feel the disease threatening me, though I was told it was. Now I see my mother’s fear was clearest in her willingness to try every treatment option, no matter how questionable. When the back brace didn’t stop my spine, she took me to a massage therapist who tried to move my vertebrae through violent bodywork, pushing muscle directly against bone. I lay on a table in his garage and cried quietly while he worked, tears squeaking a little against the faux-leather face rest. My bones seemed to burn where he pressed hardest, shoving my paraspinals against the curves with the full force of his large body. This was the dynamic of treatment: pain now that would supposedly salvage my future. I was taught every bad thing I felt was the mechanism of a cure.

There is a picture of me at 15, a few months before my spinal fusion. For years, the photo has moved with me from home to home, one of many in a box of keepsakes. My family went to a water park to celebrate my sister’s thirteenth birthday, and my mother gave my sister and me disposable waterproof cameras so we could document the day. In the photo, I am sitting on the top of a water slide, facing away, ready to go down. My arms are folded across my chest in preparation for the slide, my wet hair shellacked to my head, my whole back exposed in a string bikini such a pale shade of yellow, you can hardly tell I’m wearing anything. My spine presses against skin, each vertebra clearly articulated, the sequence forming a perfect S-shape down my back. My body appeared like an object I could see and describe, but it wasn’t me anymore. Before my last move, I threw the photo away.

It’s completely unusual for so many specimens in a natural history museum to be dug up on-site. Many of the world’s great collections, like those in the British Museum in London, or the Natural History Museum in New York, are the results of long colonial campaigns.

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century, a commission of scientists and scholars went with him. They took detailed notes on Egyptian art, culture, and history; they found the Rosetta Stone, and they took that too. As explorers returned with more stolen corpses, Europeans began hosting unwrapping parties, which revolved around literally unrolling and examining mummified remains. At first, these gatherings served a purported medical purpose: Only surgeons were present, ostensibly there to learn more about the effects of mummification on the body and the natural history of certain diseases—mummification via salt preserves soft tissue well enough to stop the degradation of DNA. But surgical operations were often punishments and performances: Public autopsies might be retribution for extreme crimes, and the parties kept growing, hosted by wealthier people for intrigue and entertainment among friends. They started selling tickets to the public. You could pay to see a body excavated right in front of you. 

An immersive King Tut exhibit recently toured the U.S. in honor of the 100^th anniversary of the discovery of the child-pharaoh’s tomb—“the King Tut Experience takes you on a mythical journey through the afterlife!” There is something perversely soothing about experiencing death as fictive and fantastical, an experience so separate from your own. The bones I saw at the Tar Pits as a child were never real to me—they belonged to sublime creatures that no longer existed. I found comfort looking into empty eye sockets and between gaping ribs. It’s much easier to grapple with disease and decay when it affects an object, or even an animal, but not a person. But King Tut was hardly more than a boy when he died, only 18 or 19. He was buried with many things, most notably over 100 canes—generations of incest had left him with many medical issues, among them severe scoliosis and a rare bone disease that made it impossible for him to walk without assistance. 

My dad asked me recently what he might’ve handled differently about my scoliosis treatment; I said I only wanted someone to ask me how I felt, how I wanted to approach it. Maybe it’s a parental prerogative to surrender their child’s body to science. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where I went to college, is filled with medically anomalous remains donated for research. “The goal of the Museum is to help visitors understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease,” their website explains. Many are fetal remains; there are several babies’ skulls. No child, even an older one, can really sanction medical decisions regarding their own body in our current biomedical model. Legally, any patient under 18 cannot consent, or grant permission. They can only assent—they can agree with an opinion already given. But I don’t remember anyone truly asking me mine. It was my body in question, but the decisions affecting it would always be made by someone else.

I don’t have the records from the pediatrician who discovered my curve when I was 10, or the assessments from my original surgeon, who I saw for the first few years after my diagnosis. I don’t have the notes from the orthotist who strapped me to a glass table and created a three-dimensional image of my torso that would become the back brace I wore everyday for two years, until it was clear surgery was inevitable. 

 I do have years of X-rays, email attachments and PDF downloads showing my spectral spine bending between splayed ribs, the angles of each curve marked with red lines and numbers that keep ticking higher. I have 72 pages of password-protected notes from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where my operating surgeon was the head of orthopedic surgery, where I spent six hours on an operating table and a week recovering, hallucinating on oxycodone and learning how to walk again.

I didn’t read the operative report for my surgery until I was nearly 30. It took me a few weeks to get my records from the hospital staff, who had to find my papers in analog storage and scan them for me. 

The patient: a 15-year-old girl of normal height, weight, appetite, and disposition. She presented on July 13, 2010, for a posterior spinal fusion of T-2 to T-11—her entire thoracic spine—to correct her case of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Her spine was twisted into an S-shape; surgically straightening the upper curve would pull the lower one along with it.

When the team opened her body on the operating table, conditions were more difficult than they anticipated. Her primary curve was extremely stiff. The vertebrae were wedged so tight, they had to remove more of the patient’s bone than planned. The patient’s right lung was severely impinged. The surgical team estimated it was only at 70 percent capacity. 

It took nearly six hours to dissect the patient’s spine, apply grafts, and implement the hardware that would hold everything together. The surgeon used bone grafts scraped from the patient’s iliac crest and morsels from cadaver donors to close the gaps between her vertebrae. He added steel screws and a thick crossbar for extra support. The patient was an athlete. The extra stability would help her return to competition sooner. 

The patient tolerated the procedure well. 

There are holes in my hospital records. There’s no note about my return to the orthopedic floor, just three days after I’d gone home. The fainting episodes, which began in those days and continued for years after surgery, only get two lines, brief notes of “recurring syncope.” There’s no mention of my weight after surgery, of my concerningly low body fat percentage, of the number shrinking on the scale in my mother’s bathroom. There’s no mention of my intolerance to oxycodone, the hallucinations, my dad trying to strangle me, hands shoving my neck into the mattress. There was no inventory of the bottles of Advil I went through to control the pain without narcotics. 

Recovery was mostly pain. Pain in my back, my chest, running down my legs and arms. The IVs pinching my wrists and ankles. The aching when I lay down, the stabbing when I stood up. I remember thinking, They did this to me, they did this to me.

Technically speaking, if a patient experiences any recurring pain after a spinal fusion, she has failed fusion syndrome. It’s been almost 13 years since my surgery and my back still bothers me. If I sit too long, there is pain; if I’m too active, pain. I’ve been hospitalized several times since for pain management. I’ve had more X-rays taken, seen more physical therapists, swallowed more Tramadol and steroids. There is nothing wrong, all the specialists say. There is nothing wrong.

Also, I didn’t know about the donors. It wasn’t just my vertebrae being fused, but flesh and metal, my bones and another’s. I feel displaced reading this, jolted out of my skin as if I’m on an airplane that’s suddenly losing altitude.  

I understand that there’s a wide spectrum of reasons why a person isn’t allowed to make their own decisions. Maybe they’re too sick or simply insane, their skin the wrong shade, their bodies too big or too small. Maybe they’re just women, or girls with no grip on reality.

Public interest in personal medical narratives is not only about prurient curiosity; it’s also about individuals asserting the truths the medical system fails to acknowledge. That people, patients—women especially—are sharing their experiences, correcting records and insisting on the details that have been left out, is as essential to our cultural record as it is to medical knowledge. A natural history is also that of a disease without treatment, usually defined in four stages: susceptibility, subclinical, clinical, and of course, the final outcome. This last stage varies widely depending on the case. It could be recovery, disability, or death. 

In the Mütter Museum, some of the dead people are disassembled. There are bones and body parts everywhere, spongey lungs soaking in jars of formaldehyde, tarnished skulls stacked along the walls. But hanging in a glass vitrine, Harry Eastlack’s bones look more sculptural than scientific. Harry had fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, an extremely rare genetic disorder that turns connective tissue to bone.  It was as though the artist hadn’t finished hewing the shape from stone, leaving tenuous connections between ribs and teeth. Harry’s remains remind me of Michelangelo’s Prisoners, a series of sculptures arranged in the hallway leading up to one of the most famously perfect works in the world, the David. Carved into huge chunks of marble, the Prisoners are unfinished, perpetually in the process of emerging. They’re examples of Michelangelo’s approach to his work, his manner of carving a subject from stone freehand. It’s believed the Prisoners were left like this on purpose to demonstrate man’s ongoing struggle to free himself from his own body. 

“When my time comes, I would like to hang next to Harry,” Carol Ann Orzel told her doctor. A Philadelphian who had FOP too, Carol decided to donate her entire skeleton to the museum after she saw Harry’s there in 1995. She wanted more visibility for their terminal condition. More funding, more research, better chances at longer lives for future patients. 

Carol died at 58, which was old for someone with FOP. There have only been about 900 patients ever diagnosed with the disease, and most don’t make it to 50. The overgrowth of bone itself doesn’t kill them, but the constraints on the rest of the body do. Over time, their mobility decreases. Eventually, their hearts give out, exhausted from lifetimes of pumping against chest cavities that cannot make space. I remember the way the brace wrapped around my ribcage, the intrusion of its foam wedges under my armpits. I remember the weight on my shoulders when I tried to get out of bed for the first time post-op, like a man shoving me down with both hands, refusing to let me stand. My left lung, trapped by twisted ribs for years, ached as it expanded again.

 In a final act of self-determination, Carol requested her costume jewelry be shown alongside her skeleton. Now, under her fused feet, there is a pink rhinestone tiara, a black and white cameo ring, and a brooch made of thickly clustered pearls. From a certain angle, the brooch takes on the abstract shape of a woman, bulbous and shimmering.

I used to look away when my X-rays were up on the screen in exam rooms. I would wait for the surgeon to tell my mother what he saw, for my mother’s reaction to interpret his words. All the hospitals and hallways are mixed up into one spare, white room with vinyl floors and a drop ceiling. I am always sitting on an exam table, wearing a thin gown that gapes no matter how I pull at it. I am always looking down, denying the fact of my body even as it’s submitted to scrutiny. I am not asking any questions. In the hospital’s records, I am described as “tearful,” “agitated,” and “determined,” but my name is never used. I am always “patient,” or “pt,” abbreviated for efficiency.  

I don’t want stories told in bones or blood cells. I’m after another kind of natural history now, one composed of personal reflections, records of sensation and emotion, structured by association, not cause and effect. Rather than list symptoms or attempt to pin down the slipperiness of chronic pain, I want to approach pain as structure: synaptic and expansive.

It’s still easier for me to look away and out, to observe and describe some other object, some other person. But more often now, this looking becomes a reflexive exercise. I talk to the artists at the gallery, ask them what sorts of clay they use, why they work in oil versus acrylic, how they know when a piece is finished. I draft their bios, describe their upbringings and educations and materials. Writing about art, I’m articulating what it means to make an object, to shape a narrative that honors this process. Not everything makes the cut. The ceramicists sometimes break the things they don’t like—it’s called “decommissioning.” One of them shows me a video on her phone: Face obscured by a gas mask, she takes a sledgehammer to a monumental vessel, slamming it and shattering it and stomping on the shrapnel. 

The man who makes the tar paintings, with all his sharp, perfect lines, uses a number 11 Xacto knife to cut his images in relief. If you make the wrong mark, I ask, what do you do?

You can see a mammoth’s skull sitting on the ground in the middle of the Fossil Labs now, his jaws wedged with what looked like pieces of styrofoam and crumpled paper. The preparators decided to leave the matrix inside his skull for support, so that over time, gravity doesn’t pull the teeth out of his fragile mouth. Years before, conservationists had used basic adhesive and Elmer’s glue to keep his teeth consolidated. Over time, little bits of his bones would crumble off, and they’d just keep gluing them back together. Now, the team applies layers of Japanese rice paper and archival adhesive to the outside of his skull for extra stability. The Lab’s manager describes this process as a kind of papier-mache—an art form. 

It only takes a few months, I learn, for bone grafts to grow into solid bone. My body has had years to integrate the cadaver tissue in my spine, to weave around the screws and insertions. Different cells move at different speeds, though. Some cells, like the musculoskeletal, can take decades to grow back. Others, like those in your spinal cord, never do. 

In the gallery’s storage room, there is art everywhere. There’s an old ping pong table stacked with ceramics and sculptures. Rows of paintings lean against an overstuffed bookshelf on one wall; on the other, there are 20-foot-tall wooden bays filled with canvases and stacked with boxes of photographs, both personal and professional—the gallery owner has been here for 31 years. My entire lifetime.

We bring a client back to see some of the tar paintings, back in storage now that the show has ended, and he steps on something—I hear the soft crunch underfoot. It is a sculpture made of thousands of individual ceramic links, together mimicking a malleable pile of patinated chains. The client startles—he hadn’t noticed the piece against the grey carpet. The gallery owner, standing just behind me, sighs. I look back at him, and he shrugs. He knows the precarity of it all.

“The artist can fix it,” I assure the client.

The post The Decisions Affecting My Body Were Always Made By Someone Else appeared first on Electric Literature.

As is usually the case with television, when oversight intensifies and budgets increase, writing tends to worsen. Previous seasons were already showing signs of decline, so I suspected going into season five that the ending would suffer from the same formulaic-slop-syndrome that now plagues most streaming platforms. Unfortunately, I was not far off. What started out 10 years ago as an insightful, character-driven story about friendship, trauma, and nostalgia devolved into an action-packed wannabe Marvel movie by the end. Writers and producers sacrificed depth for flashiness and wound up with over 10 hours of redundant dialogue and expensive action shots. 

The $500 million budget of the final season is proof that you can’t buy a good story. But, sitting by a pile of bunched up tissues as the final credits rolled on January 1, I could not shake the sense that what I was feeling was not just the disappointed goodbye blues. I felt like something precious had just been gutted, and its carcass made to dance for entertainment. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the Duffer Brothers had betrayed the heart of their own story, a transgression worse than bad writing. Some days later, my suspicions were confirmed. In an interview with Variety, the Duffers explained that Eleven had to die in the final episode because she represented “the magic of childhood. And we knew for our kids to be able to grow up, the magic had to leave Hawkins.” I was floored. Had not the whole story been about keeping the magic alive? And what does growing up even look like? For the Duffers, it looks like conforming and forgetting. 

I had always admired Stranger Things for its insistence on imagination and nonconformity as keys to seeing the world for what it is, demogorgons and all. For years, we followed along as nightmarish creatures and state agents threatened the town of Hawkins. Characters attuned to this reality were often dismissed for being delusional or infantile, but the story consistently told us that the real heroes were the ones detached enough from social conventions to risk believing what might seem outlandish. Nerds and outcasts, queers and misfits, trailer park kids and single parents were the ones at a vantage point to believe in magic. From the margins, they could see and fight monsters. We are not just talking about demogorgons here. The story was a blueprint to struggle with the monsters of everyday life; the ones we fight alone and the ones we fight together. 

The power of friendship can be an overused trope, but in its early seasons, Stranger Things did it well. Love was the show’s engine—the reason Will’s friends and family went looking for him, that Mike took Eleven into his home and Eleven saved Mike in return, the reason Bob died for Joyce and Eddie for Dustin, that Lucas could pull Max from Vecna’s curse, and that Hopper raised Eleven as his own. It was significant to see attachments on mainstream media premised on friendship not as a noun but as a verb. Friends in our story were rarely able to spare each other suffering—on the contrary, they were at times inadvertently causing it. But they chose to be together through it. And as external and internal forces ripped them away from one another, they refused to let each other go. In insisting that friendship was not an accessory but a potent part of the magic, the writers invited us to think about bonds as necessary rather than bound to dissolve with age. 

In this regard, one of the most meaningful moments of the show for me was when Will destroys Castle Byers. The scene represents the very real pain that comes from change, but it does so without presenting childhood as something we permanently leave behind. Yes, the symbol of Will’s childhood is damaged, but it’s there that his friends come looking for him. Even after the destruction of Castle Byers, the kids know exactly where to find Will; their affection for each other is grounded in their histories, and by way of those histories they continue on their journey together. Things change, but they don’t have to end.

But by the show’s final season, the Duffers had departed drastically from this messaging. In the final shot of the saga, a new generation of kids takes over the Wheeler basement to begin their own D&D campaign, and Mike shuts the door behind him, leaving them with a bittersweet smile. The closed door is the last thing we see before the screen fades to black. We get it, they want us to grow up. Indeed, they beat us over the head with it. And growing up this time is rendered with isolated finality. While the remains of Castle Byers were a place for Will and his friends to embrace their next chapter together, the closed door of season five creates a barrier between childhood and adulthood. The message is clear: There is no going back, and the rest of life, you must do alone. Beyond this door? A set of sad tropes. In antithesis to everything the writers had expressed as important, magic is now a setback, and adulthood is a milestone that cannot be achieved without forgetting the past and conforming to a normative idea of life. 

It is a familiar norm our society feeds its children, a tired American dream, and Stranger Things ultimately caved to it. Eleven dies, and the magic dies with her. As for the rest of our heroes, monster hunting ends and real life begins, which entails leaving community, creativity, and nonconformity behind in favor of “real” dreams like college, mortgages, marriage, and promotions. They barely speak of what happened to them and talk, instead, of moving on and not getting stuck in the past. In the end, the only characters who maintain meaningful relationships with each other do so in romantic partnerships, and almost everyone’s happy ending involves becoming a productive member of society and embarking on a solo identity building project: Jonathan, Robin, and Dustin are off to university; Will is finding himself in the city; Nancy is out girlbossing; and Steve is looking to settle down and start a family. 

With the finale, the Duffers’ coming-of-age narrative becomes about manufacturing absorption into an idea of adulthood. I say idea here because, just like childhood, adulthood as a category has come to signal more than just an age range, but a standardized, socially acceptable set of attributes. In early seasons, a grown-up’s proximity to childhood was seen as an asset. Characters like Joyce, Hopper, or Murray had not really grown up yet, by societal standards: Joyce was a chain-smoking single mom, Hopper was a divorcee living in a trailer, and Murray a conspiracy theorist. But their failure (voluntary or not) to be disciplined into adulthood enabled them to believe what other adults dismissed and save Hawkins because of it. 

By the end, even the adults are made to properly “grow up.” This is most obvious in the treatment of Hopper. When Eleven disappears in a storm of debris, I was sure he would never recover. He had, after all, spent the entire show fearing this would happen. Instead, he bounces back faster than I did. In their last heart-to-heart, Hopper encourages Mike to accept Eleven’s choice and move on, lest he make the same mistake Hopper had made after Sarah’s death. While there is nothing healthy about dwelling in the past, and Hopper had dealt with the trauma of Sarah in ways that hurt him and those around him, her memory also enabled him to sympathize with Joyce, help her save Will, and open his heart to Eleven, even at great cost to himself. There is a difference between healing and forgetting. Hopper deserved the former but got the latter. The Duffers wrote him a future at the cost of his past. To move on, he must cut ties with most everything that binds him to his own story—namely his friends, his town, and his cabin in the woods—in favor of an ending that mirrors all the others: marriage, a promotion, and a real house in a different city.

There are many reasons why youth are often at the forefront of struggles for justice—sure, they have more time and energy, but they also dare demand what the adult world has declared impossible. We saw this in the Black liberation and anti-war movements of the ’60s, in the early 2000s Occupy Wall Street, and more recently in efforts to abolish ICE and the movement against the genocide in Gaza. In Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley writes that progressive attributes and liberatory demands are often dismissed as childish in a society that wants to blunt their potential. “Language of infantilization,” she writes, “is consistently employed to demarcate what and who has gone too far, too often for the sake of defending the status quo, if not to moralize reformism.” Qualities like hope, creativity, and communal struggle, at the core of early Stranger Things, were ultimately relegated to kid things by what Lane-McKinley would call the “disciplinary horizon of adulthood.” Was Stranger Things ever telling us to be radical? Maybe not exactly. But it was telling us to be curious and imaginative, to embrace our singularities and use them in service of others, to love in concrete ways, to remember the dead, to play, and to keep the magic alive. These are small seeds for potentially big change if cultivated in earnest. 

Instead, the Duffers presented the traits above as childish pelts to shed. The kids are all grown up now—time to put the toys away and settle down. But the reality is that we need more people who are not done imagining better worlds and fighting monsters. Stranger Things started off in praise of the underdogs who dare to believe their own eyes and take risks accordingly. In the end, it parroted a societal dismissal of what it had originally set out to praise: collective life, the courage to take risks, and the belief that things could be different. In so doing, it joined the catalog of texts that present the ideals of childhood as something to leave behind. This not only made for a poorly crafted ending; it was harmful to its audience. The writers encouraged generations of children and young adults to put their play away and leave their communities behind in favor of an individualist, cookie-cutter life. In the footsteps of our protagonists, we are to desire the ostensibly happy endings of well-adjusted adults—that is, nothing that rocks the boat or that exists beyond the parameters of “normal.” 

This is why the only tragic ending in Stranger Things is also the only honest one: Mike, in love with Eleven, refuses to let go entirely. Their story, of course, should be read literally, as one of two young people learning how to be together. But if we run with the Duffers’ allegory, we also learn something important—that the only character who keeps the memory of childhood alive becomes a writer. Mike is not stuck in the past, he just lives life with continuity. Unlike the others who show no signs of being tethered to what happened, his life remains grounded in his story—he keeps a picture of Eleven on his desk and Will’s painting hangs on his wall. And so he writes, to make memory where the others won’t. It’s not a comfortable ending. But it is the one that shows that it is possible to exist in the world without succumbing to the death of being in awe of everything. Because losing the magic of childhood is not inevitable; we are just made to accept adulthood as life without wonder. The spark should be passed along as much as we should carry it with us. After all, it’s not just up to the kids—it’s up to you too. 

The post Growing Up Shouldn’t Mean Conforming and Forgetting appeared first on Electric Literature.

“A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity.”
– Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

When my mother died, I was handed some pamphlets about grief, its permutations and stages. What to expect. What falls within the range of normal, although what I could have used was a field guide. Suddenly everything around me, the animals and plants, people and objects, changed utterly. I had changed. The birds had changed. A hummingbird was no longer just a hummingbird. A hummingbird could be a decoy for my mother. The mother deer that feeds from my garden could be a proxy for her. My brain craved my mother, needed to see her or at least see the world as she once did. Its vibrations, bundles of energy and meanings that once lit her up did the same to me. I took an interest in the things that once riveted her, and I needed to inhabit her perceptual world, her Umwelt. When I missed her most, I imagined her sitting next to me, inhabiting the same space, looking out at the same view.

Grief cracked me open, rewired my brain, transformed me. Now, I’m filled with questions.

My mother died of esophageal cancer. I have all sorts of questions about what caused it. Her systemic scleroderma is a likely contender (an autoimmune disease that tightens the skin and organs), but there are other dark-horse candidates: the toxin chromium-6 that is found in her town’s drinking water, her apartment’s proximity to a nuclear power plant, and the industrial park abutting her old house that was once a Superfund site. How clean can a former Superfund site really be? A federal review tells me: “. . . the EPA is satisfied that the site poses no threat to human health and the environment if the property is reused for commercial/industrial use.” But I don’t trust the EPA anymore, which allows fracking companies to steer clear of regulation. Most of the time I don’t really know what I’m drinking when I fill my glass from the tap.

To townies and tourists, my mother resided in a coveted place, a coastal town in Massachusetts. But I’ve pored over the cancer cluster maps, and there’s a high incidence of cancer right where she lived. She lived and died in a polluted ecotone, a place by the sea that in the summer is flooded by tourists.

In her monumental work of conservation Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes, “There is an ecology of the world within our bodies. In this unseen world minute causes produce mighty effects . . . To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts.” Carson would later die of breast cancer, but before that she was constructing a biochemical map between the complex ecosystem of her body and her region. In my own way, I’m doing the same, charting my mother’s inner and outer ecologies. There are territories of body and place that leave me with more questions than answers. Climate change and the polycrisis of our times upend ecological interactions, threaten biological health, increase mortality, undermine hard-won resilience.

Ecotones are sites of transition. A forest clearing is an ecotone, as is the littoral zone of a lake, the saturated swale of the marshland. The word’s etymology comes from the Greek roots “oikos” (home) and “tonus” (tension). It is a meeting zone, a space of interchange and energy. Think of it as akin to a contact zone, a bordering habitat rather than a line, a place where ecosystems converge. For Rob Nixon, ecotones “may . . . open up new configurations of possibility (and for some species, introduce new threats) as the transitional areas create so-called edge effects.”   

Ecologists have found high species diversity in ecotones where rich habitats sustain different kinds of life. Birds frequent the edges of land and water, while the edge between seas and rivers have many fish species. Some animals are restricted to the edges of ecotones while others travel between habitats. Many migrate across ecotones. Some creatures thrive in them. Others may meet their end. Climate change has introduced new threats. Drought, for example, may exceed a plant’s ability to withstand a water shortage. A shortage of rainfall can limit flower and fruit production, which in turn can have system-wide impacts on wildlife and people. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The ecotones my mother and I shared were the placenta, the umbilical cord, our cells and DNA. Then, later: the ecotone of her milk, which included vitamins and minerals, but also the pollutants and pesticides and heavy metals in my mother’s system, in many mothers’ systems in first world countries these days. Those tender hydraulics between mother and child are marked with uncertainty. An ecotone is a “place of danger and opportunity.” A site of slippage and risk. In that fraught zone, my mother and I were knitted together from the get-go. Ours was a geometry of leaning in, of giving and receiving. Another word for this might be love.

Grief, too, is an ecotone: I’m half in, half out of this world. A sense of unreality pads alongside me. Weather passes through me, unseen, unfelt. The seasons too. My mind wanders off somewhere again. A serious question: Where did I go? Send out a search party; take me home.

Branching out of my heart are all sorts of versions of me: the one who wants to float off on a barge down the river, destined for who-knows-where. The one who daredevils too rapidly on the highway. The one who wants to call up my mother on the telephone and tell her about the lifetime of things I have experienced since her death. I did hardly anything in the months after my mother’s death. But emotionally speaking, I was trying to make a go of it on a dark planet with no vegetation or water, with no soul save me.  

I’m seeking out the ecotone of the page, where there is potential interchange, perhaps even a sort of dialogue that I might enter with my mother. I’m testing out the contours of a spiritual field where we might transfer energy between us. Energy, they say, can’t be destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. I imagine her voice, what would she say. I know my mother would tell me that, whether I’m wounded or not, I have more life to live. To get on with the business of being. I know this, yet I want to see her again, disheveled but radiant with life, her jeans garden-soiled, her hair flung back from her face. Her friends gravitated to her warmth, her irreverence and integrity. Once, her laugh and smile were all I needed to recalibrate myself, to remember the small wonders around me I missed: butterfly bush, coneflower, the bright orange shock of a newt in the soil. Look, Sarah, look! I miss that voice, loud and buoyant, ripe with awe. My mother was most alive at the ocean, in a forest or garden. Before the chemo, my mother was vibrant; after, it was like she curled in on herself.

Grief feeds off my body from the inside out. It feasts on my doubts: Did I do everything in my power to help my mother during the eight months her health declined? What if there was more I could have done? 

Cue her voice, cue her wonder. I can hear her in my memories, but I’m fearful of what my mind is capable of undoing. I would give a garden’s worth of bird songs to hear her voice again. I want it to be more than an echo in my mind. I suspect that all my future writing will be made in pursuit of her voice. It is inside of me now; I have to excavate it.

In his book Game Management, the ecologist Aldo Leopold identified what he termed the “law of interspersion,” noting that animals flourish in ecotones where they can simultaneously benefit from ecosystems. In an ecotone, they can flourish as they take advantage of the vegetation and abundance of prey. But abundant life also offers new opportunities for predators. This space of energy and entanglement, opportunity and danger, is what’s called an edge effect.

Writing has become an ecotone between my life and her death, a place where I tap the sources of memory and creativity to bring her back. There’s energy in this contact zone. Perhaps we are both trying to communicate with each other. Call this magical thinking (Didion is right: We become magical thinkers when we lose a loved one), but my mother—in whatever form she is now—would want me to feel her steadying presence. Sometimes I feel her presence in the thoughtful stare of a doe or the hummingbird that hovers by the living room window, peeking in, or any of the other creatures (red-tailed hawks, cardinals, chickadees, dragonflies, and monarch butterflies) that I associate with her. Spirit animals, those she sought to draw to her garden. 

My mother’s signs of good fortune have become mine.

The summer my mother died was the summer of hummingbirds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds at the feeder. Ruby-throated hummingbirds whizzing inches past my face. To the Aztecs, hummingbirds were warriors. To Mayans, the sun in disguise. To Emily Dickinson, “A Route of Evanescence.” Perfectly agile and unworldly creatures, which enchanted my mother and filled her with delight. Sometimes I imagine there must be a gap between her world and mine, and she’s scooting them through to send me a reprieve from my sadness. True: It’s hard to sustain sadness when you’ve glimpsed a hummingbird. You have to surrender to their spell.

Hummingbirds are drawn toward ecotones, the edges between meadow and forest where they can feed, breed, and nest. Telegraphing their iridescence, they swoop and turn on a knife point, drinking from our false indigo and columbine, our sugar water in its red bottle. But summer is fading, and I know they will soon return south for the winter. To sustain my cheer, my partner refills their sugar water each time the bottle runs out. In her love of animals and love for me, she is not so different from my mother. 

But can hummingbirds be a substitute for her? Can writing? Can I forage in the margins between life and death until I find a version of myself I can live with? I don’t know. On some days, it’s enough to see a bright flash at the bird feeder. On other days, I rage at the thought anything other than her, proxy or not, could possibly be enough to sustain me. 

I miss the little things: the way she treated strawberries as a delicacy, placed sachets of lavender under her pillow and mine, left treats out for the birds, mailed me greeting cards with photographs of wildlife “just for the hell of it.” She loved the sound of ocean surf and could spend a whole day reading on the beach. She could pass the hours watching old Hitchcock movies with me or exploring a new bookstore. She made the best mushroom soup. The most decadent brownies drizzled with chocolate fudge. I miss calling her on Sundays to tell her about my week.

My mother was a caretaker at heart and managed a home for developmentally disabled adults. She was fiercely protective of them, but she had a tough side too. She quickly grew frustrated with self-pity or extreme emotion: When I discovered that her cancer was at stage 4 and she was given a year or less to live (she would ultimately have eight months), I cried and cried. Although in my thirties, I wanted her to treat me with kid-gloves, to reassure me. “Knock it off,” she said when she saw my tears. Then she dragged me for a walk along the beach. All our walks from that point had an air of desperation. I think she was trying to teach me how to walk off my grief, how to pay attention to something else, anything other than the pain.  

After she died, I kept finding myself in strange places: at an unfamiliar part of the city, on a street bench too stunned to stand up, or crossing the street against moving traffic. I don’t know how I ended up at any of those places; my feet had their own mind. 

Not the deathbed body, not the graveyard scene, not the paper-thin proxy of icons or the mirage of blessings, but the close-up of her big laugh; that’s all I want.

I crave her momisms, wrapped in material tough as rawhide, but softhearted in intent.

Before she died, I wasn’t aware of what I see now. I see in photographs that she had eyes only for me, forgetting all about the camera lens. How did I never notice this? Every snapshot is another iteration of her breaking into a grin, her eyes crinkling as she peered down at me, while I rolled my eyes. This was part of our act. We were mother and daughter, not terribly far apart in age. She was a single mother. I was her only child. Of course, we loved each other. Of course, we grated upon each other’s last nerve.

She could be slapdash or refined, hysterically funny or annoying. She was playful, which I realize now is a smart way to disarm people, to open them up or—in my case—to provoke a reaction.  

“Mom, do you want to run out to the store with me?”

“Only if I can tease you.”

“Stop it, Mom.”

“Stop it, Mom,” she would parrot back. Inane, but on and on it would go. 

Once her habits grated, like her loud voice or the way she forgot to wash the kitchen counter clean. Now I just want her back. 

I would greet her as a zombie, Edwidge Danticat once said of her desire to see her mother after she died. I get it: I would take my mom back no matter what unholy arts resuscitated her.

I connect ecological trauma with my mother’s death. I pore over Massachusetts cancer data; the graphs tell me that 2017-2021 (the last years that data was collected) in my mother’s region had a higher incidence for esophageal cancer than in previous years. Is it normal for the bereft to search for answers like this? I don’t know. Grief, like my OCD, is a frightful loop. I can’t fully pull myself away from the questions that I can’t answer. They summon me back, even as I write this essay.

I don’t know for sure if the unseen toxicities of the land and water gave my mom cancer or not, but if so, it adds another layer of horror to her death. My mother who stewarded the land, who kept soil and shovels in her car trunk for the next garden she promised to re-design or just spruce up, usually for her work or her sister or a friend. My mother, who never forgot to leave seeds out for the birds.

I don’t feel like I can face the collective traumas of the current moment, ecological and political, without her. I check my body for tumors. I check the news for the latest atrocity. I watch the skies for smog and wildfire.

Sure, in a way the Earth is my mother, but in a much more real sense, my mother is my mother.

I hear silence and wonder why the birds are not singing.

If you mapped the home that my mother created for the two of us, it would be full of books and jagged edges where the past could lie in wait around the corner or the summons of the present appeared in the form of a sun-bright day and a couple of walking sticks at the door. We lived in a tiny summer cottage, cold and uninsulated in the winter, on a dirt road not far from the bay. We looked for clams in the summer, frequented ice cream shops, the ocean, and the library all through the year.  

Inside and out, the plants were toothed and full of berries, some sweet, others bright and bitter. All sorts of creatures drifted in through the front door. My mother taught me the names of the flowers in our yard: lady’s slipper, Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions. She showed me which I could pluck, and which I could only look at, like the lady’s slipper, a delicate orchid, which is endangered or threatened in some regions.

She taught me about the secrets of the soil: how to look under logs for rich earth glinting with worms and slugs, when to plant sunflower seeds, how to watch for deer in the morning as they nuzzled their snouts into dew-licked grasses. We took headcounts of the purple beach pea in the dunes and in the spring we left sugar water out for the hummingbirds.

“Look, Sarah, look.” I miss her voice, edged with wonder, exhorting my attention. Maybe a small gesture, but significant for me who is often too much in her head. When you carry unease inside of your body much of the time, you begin to cherish the moments your stomach unclenches, your muscles slacken, and your throat tastes, no longer, of acid. In the forest or garden or bay with her, I was present. I listened to her injunctions to pay attention, to be alive to the world beyond my own worries.

And I miss my mother’s body of knowledge, my favorite body of knowledge, who recognized the calls of most songbirds in the Northeast and taught me to be present to the creatures, plants and little animals around me.

“Go get dirty” she’d urge me, and as a child, I would play in earnest with my friends in the woods, unafraid, unlike some of the other kids, to come home with ripped jeans, skinned knees, or dandelions and violets tangled in my hair.  

My mother furnished our home with bedtime stories and works of art and old jokes, the same ones like touchstones across the span of years. Sometimes we dined on chocolate pudding while winds from the north tried to knock down our door. Roughhewn but welcoming, our home flushed with pink light almost every morning. Cicadas and orange-bright newts roamed its edges. Once upon a time, no mercury or toxins or disease could get past the front door. Once, a mother and daughter counted themselves lucky.

The post My Mother Lived and Died in a Polluted Ecotone appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Aquí estoy,” reads the text from the man I am supposed to meet. I am here.

All I know of him is that his name is Dani, he is from Ecuador, and he is scared. It is a cold, damp morning in November, and we have arranged to meet in front of a coffee shop near the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza for his asylum hearing. But I don’t see him, and I’m worried that he is in the wrong place. If he misses his hearing, the judge will issue an expedited deportation order. The night before, Dani texted me that he was “aterrada.” Between my phone set to English and my less-than-excellent Spanish, the text conversation was so full of typos and mistakes that I didn’t notice the feminine form of the word terrified. With cold fingers, I am texting back, “Donde esta?” when I am approached by a woman in black leggings and long false eyelashes. “Hola,” she says with a deeper than average voice, and I understand why Dani has double the reason to be afraid of being detained by ICE. 

The security line to get into the massive building is unusually long, and Dani has no coat, though the wind is biting. I offer her mine, my scarf at least. She declines, bouncing up and down in her high heeled boots. She tells me that she lives in Corona. She works as a home health aide during the day and cleans office buildings at night. On the way through security, we are barked at several times by overwhelmed security guards, and when we arrive on the 14^th floor, we don’t know which way to go. The floors that house the immigration courts are labyrinthine and confusing. Turns lead to dead ends or else go around in circles. Adding to the disorientation, the directional signs pointing to the numbered courtrooms have recently been taken down.

I ask a guard for help, and we head down the narrow hallway. We make a sharp turn and directly in front of us is what Dani has been fearing: a group of masked and armed ICE agents. They stand around an open doorway to one of the courtrooms, leaning casually against the walls on both sides of the hallway, making the space tighter than it already is. We have no choice but to walk through them. Dani’s boots click on the floor as she walks in front of me and between the ICE agents on either side of us, their gaiters and balaclavas tight across their faces. Standing among the ICE agents is the woman that some people call “Icicle.” She is under five feet tall, small-boned and thin. She is known to taunt photographers and brag about the number of people detained in court. As a supervisor here on the floor, she is the tiny boss to these men who tower over her. She looks like a child, with large brown eyes and hair pulled back in a tight bun. Sometimes she sucks on a lollipop. She is the only one who is maskless.

Inside the courtroom, Dani and I take a seat, and as the judge hears other cases, we wait. ICE lingers in the hallway. Dani notices my tattoo and shows me hers in the same place on the inner forearm, a butterfly. She leans her head back on the wall and closes her eyes. 

As a court observer with New Sanctuary Coalition, I volunteer several times a month to accompany people to their routine asylum hearings when they need moral support. They know that having someone with them is no protection against being detained, and yet it is at least something, a small kindness. I often text with the person ahead of meeting them on the day of their hearing. We are total strangers. Sometimes they share something of their stories with me. Invariably, they tell me how scared they are. One man asks if he should bring along his medication in case he is detained, and I have to tell him that ICE confiscates medications but he should bring it anyway. 

There have always been observers in immigration court. These hearings are by law open to the public, the idea being that deciding matters of liberty and family unity should not take place behind closed doors. But since ICE began abducting people in these buildings, the job of a court observer is more consequential. Among other things we do is to make sure to have the person’s information, including emergency contacts, in case they are detained. Some days, the security guards are helpful. Other days they seem especially anxious, even hostile, and they keep us from talking to people in the waiting rooms. On these days, all we do is stay and be seen. It is enough to be visible, to send a message to ICE that we are here, watching. There is a kind of tribalism in the courts, ICE agents on one side, and court observers, lawyers, advocates on the other. Even the press, though avowedly unbiased by nature, is there for a reason. Each of us knows where the other stands. 

This is the new reality of the immigration courts. They are traps for those who arrive papers in hand for their court appointed hearings, faces tight with fear, often with young children in tow. If they fail to show up, the judges will issue immediate removal orders. But showing up is a game of Russian Roulette. ICE regularly detains people in these very hallways, often violently separating children from their parents. It doesn’t matter if the judge has granted a continuance, or if there is no history of arrest—according to official records, more than 70% of those held by ICE nationwide have no criminal record. People leave the courts jubilant that a judge has granted them more time to make their cases, only to be taken by ICE in the hallway. 

On any given weekday, the waiting rooms begin to fill at 8AM. People from Ecuador, Venezuela, Senegal, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala take their seats and wait to be called. They are parents with young children and teenagers, couples, single men, single women. They live in the Bronx, Corona, Yonkers. They carry backpacks, file folders, baby blankets, and toys. Most do not have lawyers. Their faces register anything from mild anxiety to dread, and in some cases outright panic. The fear in these halls is like a stench, like smoke from a fire that everyone is breathing. 

Only the children seem unaware of the danger. Dressed in their Sunday best—girls in dresses and pigtails with bows, boys in crisp pants and button-down shirts—they run and play in the halls, oblivious. The parents admonish their children to stay close, to be quiet.

I check the accompaniment group’s Signal chat, which we use to monitor ICE’s whereabouts. It stays active with updates. None on 20. Heavy ICE presence on 14. A murder of ICE agents on 22. We never know where ICE will gather, but it becomes obvious when they are about to detain someone. A couple of agents will be joined by a few more, and a few more after that, until there are eight or ten of them pacing and peering into an open courtroom door. Photographers, if they are not already on the floor, will arrive and take their places against a wall, close but not too close to the ICE agents. Since summer, there have been photographers in the courts every day. They document scenes of family separation, of terror and anguish that otherwise would be impossible to fathom. As disbelief begins to register on the face of a person being surrounded by ICE agents, as the disbelief turns to panic, shutters click away and the knot of people moves down the hallway—photographers, advocates and lawyers, ICE agents, friends and family of the detained all moving in a tight scrum through the narrow space until the detainee is disappeared behind a door and is gone. The photographers turn to those left behind, the spouses and partners, sisters, husbands, the now traumatized children as they head for the elevators. Keeping abreast of ICE’s movements through the building is all we can do to try to anticipate their actions and to support those in danger. We are relieved on the days when, unaccountably, they are nowhere to be found. 

Much of my time in court is spent in this waiting room: witnessing, talking with people, trying to help where I can. I speak with a lawyer who sits with a stack of files on her lap, looking distraught and exhausted. She knows that her clients, a couple from Ecuador with three young children, are not going to show up for the hearing they are already late for and now they will be getting deportation orders. More and more of her clients are no-shows these days, she says, no matter how hard she begs them not to give up on the process.

A mother from Honduras eyes the agents with fear as her kids play a game on her phone. A young couple arrives; the mother pushes a baby in a carriage, the father carries a toddler. They make their way between two lines of ICE agents, single file, eyes straight ahead, pigtails bobbing over the father’s shoulder. There is no way to know which families will remain intact at the end of the day. 

A man from Ecuador sitting nearby looks nervous. When I ask if he is afraid, he says God will protect him. A young man from Peru leaving his hearing asks if I can walk him out of the building. We don’t see any ICE agents, but he is so scared that he asks if I can escort him all the way to the subway. He is 23 years old, the same age as my son. 

On the day of Dani’s hearing, she and I sit in the crowded courtroom and wait for her name to be called. She asks if I think it’s OK if she goes to the bathroom. I say yes if she goes quickly. I worry about her being in the hallway alone, but I feel I should stay behind in case the judge calls her. 

Dani leaves her purse with me on the bench and steps out. I peek out into the hallway where ICE agents are amassing in front of a different courtroom, wondering whether they have a target in mind or are there for sheer intimidation. Some wear tactical vests, mirrored sunglasses and baseball caps in addition to the masks. They look like soldiers going into combat in the Zombie apocalypse. Others wear casual street clothing and pull their gaiters up around their noses, leaving their eyes visible. Not only do the agents not identify themselves, they hide their faces and oftentimes their badges as well. 

ICE says masks are used to protect the agents from doxing, to protect their families, the irony of which cannot be lost on anyone. But besides creating an accountability void, what does the masking do? There is a kind of performativity to it, a thuggishness meant to threaten and bully—and it works. I try to imagine them at home, those linebacker-sized arms tucking a child into bed. Whenever I look directly into the eyes of an ICE agent, I am hoping to glean something of humanity, of reason. But I don’t see anything that can illuminate the cleaving they must do in order to do their jobs.

As usual, “Icicle” is the only agent on the floor who’s not wearing a mask. This somehow makes her the scariest one of them all. That “Icicle” doesn’t feel she has to hide her face tells us that she dares us to challenge her. That she stands by what she is doing. 

The Ku Klux Klan wore masks to shield the identity of their members who were bankers, lawyers, and leaders of their communities. But it was no accident that their elaborate costumes—conical hats, white robes—became instruments of terror all on their own. On the other hand, perpetrators of state-sponsored terror campaigns such as in Nazi Germany and Argentina’s “Dirty War” didn’t hide their identities at all, presumably because they didn’t think they would ever be held accountable. They were following the orders of the state, just as ICE officers say they are doing now. Do the laws of the state override personal accountability? At this moment in the United States, we are living inside this question. International human rights law rejects the doctrine of “due obedience,” so what kind of reckoning awaits those who enable DHS and ICE? If they believe they are only following orders, then why the masks?

It is because of the activities of the KKK that eighteen states have anti-mask laws, though they have been challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. In New York State, a mask ban was recently defeated by the ACLU which argued that it stifled dissent. Both sides of the political divide have fought for the right to wear masks and also for mask bans. Since COVID and the attempts to suppress pro-Palestine protests, the issue of masks has only become more fraught, a political yo-yo to say the least. But in the halls of immigration court and elsewhere, masks allow ICE to engage in cruel abductions and family separations without due process and with no accountability. As an inevitable and predictable fallout, ICE impersonators are now preying on women in immigrant communities, and according to a recent FBI bulletin, kidnapping and sexually assaulting them. 

Dani comes back from the bathroom, and soon after, the judge calls her. She smiles at me nervously, goes through the little swinging gate and takes her seat in front of the judge. 

One day, I help a woman from Honduras fill out the emergency contact form before her hearing. Her name is Noemi, and she has two boys with her, Jeremy and Justin, in third and fifth grade. They are dressed in shirts and ties, and they interpret for me when my Spanish fails. Inside the small and airless courtroom for Noemi’s hearing, the judge is weary but not unkind. He drones on about “advisals,” then one by one attends to the cases, first in Kréyol and then in Spanish, with interpreters appearing on a screen. In every case, he states the government’s assertion that the respondent is in the country illegally. In every case, he sets the next hearing for August 2026. 

These courtrooms scenes can feel like another universe, one completely detached from what is happening in the hallways. One gets the sense that the courts are operating the way they are supposed to, with judges fairly deciding whether a case has merit and giving the respondents time to get a lawyer and to gather evidence for their cases. At least, that’s how it feels for now. Many judges considered favorable to asylum claims are being fired, and ones with DHS prosecution backgrounds are replacing them.

When it is Noemi’s turn, she and her boys sit at the table in front of the judge. Her back is to the room and to the doorway, where I see ICE agents beginning to arrive and gather, “Icicle” among them. I am sitting next to the NYC Comptroller, Brad Lander, who is often here, and we share a concerned look. Whenever ICE agents converge in various states of agitation, it becomes nerve racking and necessary to try to determine who their target might be. I stare at Noemi’s back. The judge asks if she would like to terminate her case. She must decide right away. To terminate or dismiss a case should mean that the government no longer seeks to deport the respondent, but ICE has been asking judges to dismiss cases precisely so that respondents no longer have an active case before the court and are therefore technically subject to expedited removal—which means that ICE can snatch them as soon as they leave the courtroom. 

The judge repeats that Noemi must decide right now, and I don’t know if it is good news or a trick or how much she understands. Noemi responds, “Si,” deciding to terminate her case. Her hearing is quickly adjourned, and I meet her at the door. My heart is pounding. We walk out into the hallway right past the ICE agents. I ride the elevator down with Noemi and her boys. In the lobby, she smiles and we say goodbye as her boys skip ahead of her towards the revolving doors.

I go back upstairs and a little later, I sit with two sisters from Venezuela, Nelsy and Astrid, and Nelsy’s son who is about seven or eight. They have had their hearings and are waiting for their brother, Luís, to leave the same courtroom where his hearing is now occurring. 

ICE agents begin to gather and hover. They seem a little more agitated than usual. They adjust their gaiters, peer inside the courtroom and back out again. We learn that this judge is new, another reason for concern. The sisters are scared. I am taking down their emergency contact information in a hurry when Nelsy whispers something to me. “No entiendo,” I say, and she repeats it, slower and a little louder but not much. “I have my next hearing in August of 2026,” she says. “Will ICE be here then?” 

 “Desculpe,” I say, and the word doesn’t do nearly enough to convey how sorry I am that she has to ask me this. I tell her we never know when they will be here. The little boy gets up and runs in the direction of the ICE agents; Nelsy calls him back.

Our accompaniment group quickly arranges to surround Luís when he comes out of the courtroom. Sometimes this helps, although most of the time it doesn’t do anything and the person is detained anyway. Nevertheless, it is all we can do. He comes out. He is young and looks very tired and worried. He says he has to go down to the 15^th floor to attend to some paperwork, so we post people around him and walk toward the elevators. The ICE agents do not approach, which is some kind of miracle except that we know someone else will be taken. On the 15^th floor, Luís looks dazed. He puts his head on the wall and closes his eyes. 

We go back up to the courtroom where ICE is still hovering by the door. The press is there now, a small bank of photographers. All this activity tells us a detainment is imminent. ICE agents keep looking inside the courtroom where there are only two respondents left. We hear from another court observer that one of them has been here less than two years, which means he is the likely target, as the current rules state that unless a person can prove they have been in the country for at least two years, they are subject to expedited removal. Our group meets the man at the door. He is with his wife, an American citizen. They give their information to one of the observers, and then we make a circle around them and make our way through the small waiting room where the ICE agents are. They swoop in and push the man against the wall. The cameras are click-clicking. The man looks surprised. He makes no sound. It is the wife who yells, “Why are you taking him? This is stupid! This is so stupid!” As our observers go to her, hold her hand, speak quietly to her, she breaks down. The agents hustle the man, who has not uttered a sound, down an ill-lit hallway. It is only when he is out of sight that we can hear shouting and scuffling from around the dark corner. The wife sobs. A priest walks with her to the elevator. I go with them. She keeps saying, “I knew it! I knew it!” 

We ride down the elevator together, the priest’s hand on her shoulder. They are headed to Representative Dan Goldman’s office for help with tracking her husband through ICE’s system. There is no way to comfort her as she cries. I say goodbye, tell her I’m sorry and that I hope her husband is freed very soon. Then I take the subway home, unable to shake the image of the woman crying, of her husband’s stunned silence as he was hustled down the hallway. I am afraid for her and for him, afraid that one day I will have grown accustomed to walking the gauntlet of ICE agents. 

The judge verifies Dani’s basic information, and, as she looks over Dani’s filings, something in her tone changes. She appears to be choosing her words carefully to protect Dani’s privacy. That the judge seems sympathetic bodes well for Dani going forward because this is the same judge who will eventually decide her case. She sets a date for Dani’s individual, and final, hearing for late in 2026. Dani says, “Grácias.” She comes through the little gate, and we head out to the hallway. ICE agents lean against the wall and watch us pass. 

We take the elevator down. Dani is eager to get to work. As we pass through the lobby, her steps get lighter and quicker. The revolving doors deliver us onto the sidewalk where there is a rush of fresh air, people hustling past on their way to do normal everyday things, a blue sky. We have spent four hours on high alert in the stifling, airless rooms of 26 Federal Plaza, rooms steeped in fear. Out here, the weather is blustery and brisk. Dani smiles. She hugs me and says, “Grácias por todo.” I want to say something more than “De nada,” but she turns quickly, heads for the subway, and is gone.

The post Observations from Inside Immigration Court appeared first on Electric Literature.

We are not ever just writers—we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to grab a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don’t have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and among and because of these moments. A scene is not only a moment on the page that takes place in space and time—the writing of that scene takes place in space and time too. I remember working on an especially dark section of my first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes pogroms by fleeing with her children into the Russian wilderness where she survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a swimming pool at a Southern California hotel where my father-in-law was staying while he visited us. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation. You can’t see that in the pages, but the energy of that good, easy day provided an opposite to the story from the past and its fictional counterpart. That strange pairing was part of how I powered the writing.

We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them. Writers make a choice to carve out significant time—some squeeze writing in while a baby sleeps on their chest or during the lunch hour. Some dictate a story while driving to work. The walls of stuck-ness are easily built. Time is always short; fear is a capable bricklayer; self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. While I love encouragement and good cheer (can you see me waving my pom-poms? I am!), those are not enough to free us. What I believe in, what has worked for me over and over, is a repertoire of small, playful, and unintimidating experiments. Lots of them. A small choice is huge. So often you need a little light, some air, and a handle turns in your hand, you peek through to the next thing, and you’re back, you’re in, you’re running.

My new book, Unstuck, contains all the skeleton keys to all the secret doors I know—I’m sharing a few of them with you here.

Doorway: Begin Anywhere 

There Is No Better Time, No Right Answer

You have this idea for a novel. A young woman disappears in the woods, or a new planet is colonized, or two people fall in love. Ahead of you there are no fewer than one jillion decisions: Are we in 1876? Is the couple driven apart by their hateful fathers? Does the book take place over the course of twenty-four hours or a year? Is it told in first person? And that’s only the big stuff. Every page is a string of words picked by you. Every scene is populated, full of characters and places (real or imagined) where every tree, every vase full of dead flowers, every old, tired cat is placed there by you.

You cannot, no matter how much you wish, know at the start how this will unfold. Like all the best parts of being alive, it requires you to enter without a map or a promise of success.

I was in such a place when my eldest child was in the fifth grade and it was time to go on tours of middle schools. I had spent the morning staring at a Word document on which I intended to begin a new novel. The document was a white, ominous nothingness. My job was much too big. Defeated, I closed the computer and picked up my kid at his sweet little elementary school, a place that had seen him through the pandemic, that had brought him from a tiny person to a big kid. We drove to a middle school and parked. Nervous eleven-year-olds and their more nervous parents hummed in small groups. Inside, the building felt huge. The echo of sneakers in the concrete stairwells, and halls leading to other halls. How were we here? How was my small person going to be okay in this wilderness? We came around the corner and there was a lit theater marquee at the end of the hall with these words: “BEGIN ANYWHERE.—John Cage.” I stood there for a long minute. My child tugged at me. He did not know how to be a middle schooler yet, as he would not know how to be a high schooler a few years later or all the steps to come after. I did not know what this new novel would contain, as I had not known how the three before it would work until I had written through the years and the many drafts. “I’m ready,” I said, and we began there, at the anywhere where we stood.

Key

You are here. You are anywhere. Start with a single scene, a single memory, a single question. Set a timer and keep writing for twenty minutes. Whatever you have done at the end of that time, your page is no longer blank, and you have, beautifully, gloriously, begun.

Doorway: Primordial Slush 

The Matter from Which All Life Is Created

What I have come to understand is that you can’t start where you intend to end up (i.e., a book that feels like a book) because you have to start three billion years before that. I’m writing fast, following curiosity and questions, writing scenes even if I have no idea where they’re going, writing backstory for characters so I can figure out who everyone is, writing place and space. Eventually you want a book-shaped thing, but before that it takes the shape of a freshly bloomed tulip, the back half of a rhinoceros, a mountain stream, a bird’s nest. And before that it’s a beam of light or a ball of clay. I remember a friend asking how my second novel was going and I said, “It’s a swamp monster that oozes around on the floor waiting for me to feed it dead fishes? Is that an answer?”

This was not the creature I wanted. I wanted a unicorn or at least a sturdy, faithful dog. But here is what I now understand: You don’t get a dog right away, you have to evolve there. You have to start with a vat of primordial slush, the making of all life, and that slush is not pretty or decipherable. Then something crawls out and maybe it’s a tiny little swamp monster. You need that guy. Yes, that draft is super drooly and it’s awkward and lumpy and leaves mud all over the place. The swamp monster will grow arms and legs. When you come back to the second draft, he’ll be sitting up at a table and you can tie a little checked napkin around his neck and feed him crème brûlée. And when you loop back for a third draft, he’ll have grown a lovely coat of fur and now he’s looking more like a recognizable animal. A yak, maybe, or one of those Scottish Highland cows with the long red bangs. In draft four you have an apple tree that’s about to bloom and in draft six you have a crescent moon and in draft eight you have a wolf and in draft ten you can start to tuck all these eras carefully together between covers and hand it to someone and when they read it, by magic (and months or years of work), the story that you saw in your mind pops open in the mind of that reader and that’s when you get to start calling it a book, but by then I hope you trust that it’s also still a yak and still a moon, and that your old sloshy swamp guy is in there covered in primordial soup—the energy and possibility of the entire universe dripping from his slimy, squiggly body.

What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess. To trust the dust storms and the mud bogs and not rush on toward premature order. Order only matters if it contains something real. Sure, you can write a novel that follows a set of very clear rules and expectations, but you will have written a container, not contents. You will have a harness but no dog. Don’t skip the mess, because that’s where the magic lives.

Do you hear that this is not a quality assessment? Yes, a first draft can be shitty, but it’s hard to get very excited about sitting down to write a shitty first draft when quality control is already in the room.

There’s a dude in a white coat with a hairnet and a magnifying glass and he’s waiting for me to hurry up and take my failures and turn them into candy apples he can sell. If I’m trying to make candy apples, then a beehive is a failure. If I’m trying to write a novel, then a mud bog is a failure. And even if we are welcoming of failure, as we should be, as it is critical to be, I’m sorry but I’m kicking that white coat guy out the fire escape. There is no quality assessment in the primordial slush draft. The universe did not feel inadequate when all it had was an explosion in space from which all life would emerge.

Key

This is not a key you turn once. As you move through your first draft, you must keep going through this door-way over and over. Write the following on a sticky note and put it on your wall: It’s not supposed to make sense yet.

You might live in the slush for weeks or months or even years. When life begins to crawl out onto land it could happen quickly, a sudden understanding of your project and what it wants to become. Or it might happen slowly, one little toe out in the sunshine, then back underwater.

This is about the intentional, heartfelt creation of energetic, weird, unformed life. Every writer you’ve ever admired lives here too.

It’s not supposed to make sense yet. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I am discovering something still unknown on this earth. Create energy. Repeat.

Doorway: Writer Physics 

Follow the Energy

A story or a poem or an essay has logic, but it’s also a living thing. Imagine that a cat walks softly across the black landscape of a burned neighborhood. One valid approach might be to follow the logic: How did this fire start? Who or what was lost? What will happen to the people who used to live here? Those are good questions and you may answer them, but sometimes logic can sideline us on a kind of frontage road next to the story that never seems to merge into the real stuff of it.

Writer physics, which happily does not require a familiarity with the theory of relativity, is the practice of noticing and following the energy in your pages. That cat moves over the ground, and the ground is radiating with everything that was burned. The ash is full of the energetic force of the house, which was full of the energetic force of the ten years (let’s say) a family lived inside that space. The baby who was born on the kitchen floor after a labor too quick to get to the hospital; the photo album of great-grandparents in Hungary; a hundred dinners eaten on a simple plate, a shard of which is under one of the cat’s paws.

What happens when the family pulls up in a car in front of this changed place? Follow the energy between the people and the plate shards, the memories, the cat. Maybe the cat, afraid and traumatized, jumps at one of the children and scratches her, and the cut gets infected by something in the ash. Maybe the father becomes obsessed with rebuilding a certain room in the house exactly as it was. Maybe the mother returns in secret alone at night and digs through the rubble herself, looking for remains of her old life. Maybe there’s a coyote, also scavenging. All of these ideas grow from pressing together two sources of energy: a character and an object, a feeling and another feeling, a character and a tiny moment, a tiny moment and an object. Energy makes energy. Pretty soon that mother is running after the coyote, which has the cat in its jaws. Pretty soon, she’s got a jagged piece of wood, once part of her living room wall. Where does the energy go next?

Key

Take a survey of the energetic forces moving through a scene, image, or moment. Close your eyes and try to feel them swirling around. Pick two and press them together, see what happens when the energy of one thing mixes with the energy of another. What changes? What new force is born?

Now you have the keys to some of these doors, but where you go will be a place entirely undiscovered, all your own. Send me a postcard when you get there.

Excerpted from Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2026 by Ramona Ausubel. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC. 

The post Quick, Playful Writing Exercises for When You’re Feeling Stuck appeared first on Electric Literature.

It’s the kind of hot summer day in rural Alberta where my limbs hang so heavy that I wobble as I walk, almost drunkenly, and bump against Caroline and Kim beside me. “Sorry,” I mutter, and they push me away half-heartedly while Chris weaves back and forth on his yellow BMX bike. We’ve been kicked out of the house and told to go play. We already rambled through the ditches, took turns targeting trees with rocks, moseyed our skinny legs past the few houses around us, past a farmer’s field with cows, a small creek, past the frog pond where we catch tadpoles in the spring and pour them into glass jars that we set inside the house so we can watch them grow and lose their tails and sprout their funny legs.

I learned about metamorphosis in school last year, and it makes my stomach and fingers and feet and head fill with happiness to think about it. The magic of it. Right there in this pond. Like some witch is waving her wand and zapping creatures into other creatures, except the witch is Mother Nature.

I don’t understand it exactly, but metamorphosis seems a lot like evolution. And evolution means that some people think we used to be monkeys. I look at Caroline while we walk and imagine her covered in hair, imagine her teeth and mouth turned enormous, her picking bugs off my head and eating them like the sister monkeys do on nature shows, swinging from a tree with one arm. That I can imagine; we’re both excellent at hanging from the monkey bars on the playground at recess.

But she’s too old to actually do that now. The girls in her grade just stand around in groups and talk, yell at the boys, sometimes walk around the yard, but I can still do the highest baby-drop of anyone in my class.

I don’t think our family believes in evolution though. At least, I don’t think our church does, but I’m not sure. Maybe people at church who don’t believe in evolution haven’t thought much about tadpoles, because it’s scary to see how weird they look when they’re caught between half tadpole and half frog, but it’s also super cool. And that makes me wonder if maybe I’m a half something too.

The tadpoles in our pond have all turned to frogs by now, so we keep walking, aimless, talking, sometimes laughing, nudging one another along in the heat, meandering back home with no real purpose but that we want to return. Maybe this time we’ll be allowed to stay inside and watch something on TV in the cool dark of the family room, though we already know there’ll only be soaps on midafternoon. We aren’t allowed to watch soaps.

The roads are deserted. Heatwaves simmer ghostly above the asphalt while the power lines hum over our heads and a chickadee dee-dees to some bird-love in the forest. We have the place to ourselves, it seems. The world.

But then, there’s the sound of a vehicle turning onto our gravel subdivision road, coming behind us slowly. We turn to watch it, move to the side to let it pass as we’ve been taught. There’s plenty of room; the road is wide. It’s a white van. No windows on the side. But instead of driving by, it reaches us and stops. A man with curly hair smiles and asks us for directions to a place nearby. We all know where it is, but Caroline, the oldest and best at talking to strangers, steps forward and walks around to his window to answer him. She’s smiling and confident as always, easy with strangers. I watch her and envy that ease, wonder if I’ll ever learn to talk to people the way she does because I’m the shy one. I will also be “the tall one,” my aunt has predicted, because Caroline will be “the pretty one.” We follow her lead to the front of the van.

He doesn’t seem to understand what she’s saying, which is strange because the directions are simple, but how fun to know more than a grown-up. The man opens the door to hear Caroline better, I think, and the door comes between us, separates us from her while we wait. He’s still confused, and she repeats herself again, but she looks nervous and shy now, uncertain, which is strange. Finally, the door closes and the stranger drives away.

The air hums. None of us move. We, four children, stand on the gravel road, the sun hot on our dark heads. We look at the wet, white puddle on the ground in front of us until Chris asks what it is.

“Pee,” says Caroline. “He peed in front of me.” But it looks nothing like pee.

We look at one another, at the puddle, at our shoes. We wonder if something just happened to us. Some change planted deep and about to sprout. We feel it, but don’t know if it matters. Should we tell someone? Mom is at work, so it would have to be Dad. Dad is risky—he could get mad.

My stomach fills with something like fear, but I don’t understand it. We decide to tell. We turn toward the cool walls of the shop in the backyard, where Dad is at work on somebody’s car.

He’s furious when Caroline tells him that some man just peed in front of her, and he understands something about it that I don’t, something related to my fear. He calls the police and then jumps into his old green pickup with the other mechanic he’s hired for help and leaves us alone while he drives around looking for the curly-haired man in the white van.

I don’t understand: his anger, his driving around, his calling the police. But the something sick and scared is bigger now. We go inside the house. No one is around to tell us not to. We gather in the bedroom that I share with Caroline, the four of us on our two beds, and we wait.

There’s a very tall, very large police officer at our door later that night, and Dad greets him like a friend showing up to a party. Something has shifted in him now, and his anger is gone, replaced by an emotion that seems more like excitement. He guides the policeman through our house and sits him at our kitchen table, in Caroline’s chair. We stand beside him, two at each elbow, gathered like a family photograph. He looks at each of us children, asks us our names, smiles, puts a business card in each of our small hands. It has a silhouette picture of a man behind bars and black and red letters that say Crime Stoppers. His name is DET. G. F. (Gary) Jones, it says, but we don’t use his name. We hardly say anything. He asks us questions about the van, what the man said, what he looked like, what we said back to him. He writes down notes. It’s very quiet as the pen scratches along the paper. And then he pulls out a photo album as thick as my palm is wide.

“These,” he says, opening up to the very first page, “are all men who’ve done similar things to kids around here.”

Around here? I wonder. To other kids? Maybe kids I know?

There are pages and pages of men in the album, and I wonder why so many of them are going around peeing, why they would do it in front of kids. The men look sad and tired; some of them look scary; none of them look like the curly-haired man from the white van.

The policeman stays for a long time taking notes, and he tells us that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will search the area for the next few weeks. When he’s done, he looks up and around at our house, says that it’s very nice. Most visitors say this, and my dad smiles, pleased, and we all know what’s coming next.

“Would you like a tour?” he asks the policeman. And the policeman says yes.

Like a travel guide, my dad shows him our dining room off the kitchen and the table loaded with papers to be filed; he shows him the office packed with boxes from our childhood to be sorted through, the room with the empty hot tub that rarely works, the bathrooms, our messy bedrooms. He opens our door and shows him our pink canopied bedroom filled with clothes and toys, dolls and books, our life spread out before him.

The policeman smiles. I can tell he wants to leave now, had maybe only ever been politely interested, though my dad doesn’t seem to notice it. Dad continues to tell him about the double thickness of the walls, the fire-retardant insulation, how he designed the house himself, had the blueprints done up from his own drawings, and then finally, he’s finished. They’re at the door shaking hands. The policeman leaves. Dad returns to his shop out back; Chris and Kim go to their separate bedrooms; Caroline and I go to ours.

Years later, when I’m a teenager and old enough to understand but somehow still don’t, I say something to Caroline late one night, lying in the dark while we talk, about the time that man peed in front of us. “Peed in front of us” has become our code for the thing we don’t know how to discuss and the title we give to that moment that changed us without our understanding why. But Caroline’s old enough now, too, and tonight she’s had enough of the code.

“It wasn’t pee,” she spits, angry and hurt at my little-sister stupidity.

“Oh,” I say dully. And I remember again the man’s face, my dad’s anger, the police visit and the photo album. I remember, remember, remember how the van door had opened and cut me off from Caroline, and that something had happened to all of us, but in different ways. How no one talked to us about it. How Caroline had once told me that she’d stopped wearing pretty earrings after that day, said she’d thought that maybe he’d done it because she’d worn those earrings. Wanted to look pretty.

And I think of how it had ended with the policeman’s visit and a guided tour through our house, all our private spaces on display with us kids clinging at the edges. I think of the tadpoles we used to catch in the spring, the way their arms ripped through their chests one day when it was time. And I wonder if it hurt. If they knew what it meant. We carried them back to the pond when it happened so they wouldn’t die in our jars. They clung to the edges as we poured, their hearts beating hard beneath pale skin, little bodies of uncertainty shaken loose from their homes into unknown territory. They grabbed for one another as they fell, arms outstretched, like sisters in the dark, like fire reaches for fire, the warmth of another flame.

From The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming. Copyright © 2026 by Angela Pelster. Used by permission of Milkweed Editions. All rights reserved.

The post We Were Too Young to Understand What Happened With the Man in the White Van appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.” – Jack Zipes, folklorist

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” – Carl Sagan, scientist

Wind brushed the trees, like a mother brushing the long flowy hair of a can’t-sit-still little one. My baby daughter, who was born deaf, and I lay on the soft carpeted floor of our townhouse and watched through the sliding glass door. The sight was peaceful, hushed (for me) by the glass, the slim waving branches like arms conducting a silent orchestra. I said to my daughter (out loud, out of habit; I was still learning her language): “Is this what the world is like for you?”

Later I stood and slid open the door. As a hearing person, accustomed to thinking of sound as beautiful, I wanted to sense the wind in this way, too. I pushed aside the glass and let it in. The roar seemed angry, agitated. I thought of giants from fairy tales, the tiger-headed guardian at the Cave of Wonders where the genie resides. “Who dares disturb my slumber?”

The Princess and the Frog

When a child arrives outside the norm—a selkie, a fae changeling; or, to be more mundane, a baby with a disability—some parents cling to facts. These feel like grip-holds as you scale a sheer cliff face, as your fingertips pinken and pulse, as your foot slips and sparkling rock dust scatters far below.

Fact: The medical community uses the caduceus as its symbol, two snakes twined around a winged staff. Even though there’s a snake, its members take an oath: “First, do no harm.”

We brought our daughter in for the six-hour cochlear-implants surgery when she was 13 months old. Tiny blue hospital gown, treaded socks in the smallest size that were still comically large on her. She carried her frog puppet into the operating room with her. She wasn’t supposed to, but the doctors broke protocol because she was scared.

After the surgery, as my husband and I hurried through antiseptic halls to see her, I heard a foreign, ragged cry. “Whose baby is that?” I thought. I saw a drugged, hungry baby flailing in the arms of a nurse who was not her mother. The tight-wrapped gauze bandage pushed down on my daughter’s brow so she looked like a tiny Neanderthal. My first, irrational thought: “What have you done to my baby?”

We spent the night at the hospital. A sweet nurse turned the TV to a station that just shows digital stars after 9:30 p.m., white specks zooming through blackness. The bandage on my daughter’s head was tied in a way that gave her Princess Leia buns, one over each side where her brain had been invaded.

Villainy

From Aladdin’s Jafar and the thumb-sucking lion king of Robin Hood to latter-day Slytherin, snakes are aligned with villains. When Harry Potter’s friends realize he’s a Parselmouth, fluent in the language of serpents, they regard him with suspicion and fear.

The old ASL sign for “cochlear implant,” I’m told, was a snake sinking its fangs into a person’s skull. This is how maligned the devices once were in the Deaf community, and still are for some. Far more than hearing aids, which do not require surgery, cochlear implants are seen as brain-damagers (even as the technology has improved) and culture-erasers (especially since the technology has improved, and the devices have become more common, leaving fewer people reliant on ASL).

The current sign for “cochlear implants” still looks like this to me, although supposedly it has changed. To make both signs, you crook two fingers and stab them at your head. In one case, the handshape simply replicates the bent-over-the-ear device. In the other, it’s a deadly bite.

The difference in meaning depends on how you interpret it.

Quest

Before my daughter’s surgery, I searched. I wanted to make sure we were making the right choice.

Fact: A Google search for the terms “cochlear implants” and “child abuse” brings up many articles that contain both.

Years ago, while walking to my then-workplace in Washington, DC, I saw a protest: Deaf people with signs saying deafness is not a disability, not a flaw to be fixed. I mentioned this to people at the time, mystified. Now I’m not mystified. I get it: They say the issue is systemic; they are a linguistic minority who are rarely accommodated.

After all, deafness does not hurt. Deafness does not cut your life short. In this way it’s separate from other abnormalities—minorities—of the body. Your deaf kid could live a happy life if the world would just cooperate. No need to get a scalpel involved.

Fact: A Google search for the terms “cochlear implants” and “cultural genocide” brings up many articles that contain both.

When our daughter was six months old—before the surgery—my husband and I brought her to an ASL-immersive program for deaf babies and their parents at Gallaudet, a university humming with deaf students and staff. We stayed in this program for two years, including after the surgery. Some of the deaf babies got “the surgery,” others did not. Some families chose not to get the surgery; a few babies weren’t eligible for medical reasons (no auditory nerves to make the devices work). It was an omnipresent topic for the parents.

Three of my daughter’s classmates had two deaf parents each, entirely deaf families, some with deaf siblings. A classmate’s father told us—through an interpreter—that he and his wife had emphatically told their doctor: “No surgery.” They had the doctor put a note in their daughter’s file. The father was a professor at Gallaudet; his wife was an administrator there.

Fact: ASL uses different syntax than English; typically, the most urgent item in a sentence comes first. I’ll try to approximate it here: Surgery, all Deaf people? = Deaf people—all-gone. Deaf people all-gone? = Deaf culture all-gone. Gallaudet all-gone. Home all-gone.

Realms

One of the first things my husband and I learned about after our daughter’s diagnosis was “big-D Deaf” versus “little-d deaf.” “Big-D Deaf” refers to a culture, a language that’s signed. A hearing child of Deaf parents who use sign language at home would be considered Deaf—that hearing child is part of the Deaf world, a citizen of the Deaf community. “Little-d deaf” is a medical term. You could be medically deaf but raised apart from the Deaf community, using your voice and devices, and no signs—you are deaf, but not Deaf. 

You could be both. These can overlap. My daughter is deaf—in the paperwork at her “mainstream” school, where all of her classmates are hearing; at the audiologist’s office, where the focus is on the sounds she’s able to perceive with her devices. And, as someone who relies on sign language for part of the day, when her devices give her fatigue; as someone who’s connected to the local Deaf community, thanks to various programs we’ve participated in—she’s also Deaf, even though she has cochlear implants and chatters away vocally like any hearing child.

As a hearing parent who has spent my life in the hearing world, and still has my hearing, I will never be Deaf. Unless one day I am deaf—if, say, I lose my hearing in old age, and switch over to sign language. (A “CODA” is a hearing Child of Deaf Adults. According to the comments sections of Deaf influencers I follow on Instagram, there is no such term for parents of a Deaf child.)

At times it all sounds like a riddle, or the baseball joke about “Who’s on first?”

In this way, my daughter and I will always be native citizens of two different worlds. 

Instruction Manual

At the heart of this divide are these banal devices. Pieces of them sit in our kitchen right now, their batteries screwed into a charger, on a shelf that also holds cookbooks and bags of chips—part of a domestic tableau, as unassuming as a block of knives.

The devices are ugly, if you go by sight alone. They would look at home encased in glass at a drab museum about some closed-down sanitarium. Band-Aid beige, the color of old nurse shoes and grandma undergarments. Yet in one way they’re beautiful: We chose the color that most closely matches my daughter’s hair. (Viewed in this light, they take on the color of sandcastles, or a butterscotch-topped treat on a summer day.) 

They’re clunky, on her head, as she goes about her day; in the age of nanotechnology, you would think we’d have a stealthier design. Inspector Gadget head, especially when she was a baby, before her hair grew out to hide them. Too many components, like something you’d need a thick instruction manual for—we needed an instruction manual, when they were new to our household.

The parts that conspire to bring my daughter sound: A flat, round outer magnet like a poker chip, connected to a short cord. The other end of the cord connects to the “processor,” a vaguely snail-shaped hunk of plastic that hooks over the ear; this is the part a medical expert must program, the part that costs a million bucks, give or take, if you lose it, say, in the ocean. Attached to that is a chunky battery you screw on.

And there’s the part you can’t see, another flat, round magnet under the skin on either side of my daughter’s skull. Over the years her hair has grown over these places, like a maiden whose locks conceal an enchantment. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.

Consumer Facts

Sometimes I lean down to kiss my daughter’s hair and kiss beige plastic instead.

I visit the website of the company that makes these devices. I try to read the most basic, dumbed-down articles explaining how they work. This is where I should find reassurance in scientific terms, the language of progress. Instead, I glaze over. Electricity and magic, I conclude. Lightning and pixie dust.

The lights on her processors blink green when they’re working. This is what I need to know. I see the green flashes when she runs around her grandparents’ yard with cousins at night. The others sometimes hold glow sticks and sometimes hold sparklers, depending on the occasion, but my daughter is the one I can always find in the dark. There she is. My firefly. 

What do the devices feel like, to me? Smooth, like a life made easier. What do they smell like? Audiologist waiting rooms, scenes of cheerful complicity. I try to discern a scent other than “plastic,” but my brain gets rerouted and ends up at abstraction. If I try to assign them a personality, they come up void. They’re android by nature. My husband, a computer engineer, says with pride that our daughter has “bionic ears.”

Fact: Vicki, the child robot from a 1980s sitcom called Small Wonder, could shoot electricity into a car to jump-start its engine. She could jump-start a human heart.

Fact: If you ask Google whether a robot can get an MRI, the answer is no, because a typical robot contains ferromagnetic parts, and an MRI machine’s powerful magnet would rip the robot apart in a process troublingly called  “the missile effect.”

Fact: On the seat-belt strap that goes across my daughter’s car seat is a sleeve that says: “No MRI! I have a cochlear implant.” It’s for a potential ambulance crew. She has magnets in her head; an MRI machine could be disastrous, although scientists are now creating implants that are MRI-safe.

Fact: An MRI machine is not the only hostile environment for cochlear implants. When entering water, such as a pool or the ocean, the devices must be shielded inside a case made of plastic.

Fact: Plastic is not natural; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a “soup” of microplastics about twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

“I Want” Songs

I’ve heard that every Disney princess has a song about what she wants.

A “Faustian bargain” is when a character gives their soul to the devil in exchange for something worldly, and the deal ends in tragedy.

Fact: In the movie The Sound of Metal, a drummer named Ruben loses his hearing and joins a Deaf community that rejects the notion of deafness as a disability. When Ruben secretly undergoes surgery for cochlear implants, to restore the hearing he lost to years of harsh decibels—the community leader, a beloved friend named Joe, asks Ruben to leave.

Fact: At the end of Disney’s animated The Little Mermaid, Ariel stands with Prince Eric on his ship. She’s wearing a wedding dress, waving goodbye to the mer-people she’s left behind, her father and sisters and others. This makes me think of the surgery, of transformation, of realms entered and abandoned. In this light, Ariel appears to me as a traitor.

I realize sirens are associated with their songs, and Ariel bargains her voice for love, going silent to join the human world (not the reverse)—but the mer-folks’ way of life outside the mainstream/human world makes me think of the ocean dwellers as Deaf, the sea witch an unscrupulous surgeon:“Don’t you want to be part of that world? No matter the cost?”

Either way you look at it—when my daughter and I watch the movie, as Prince Eric and Ariel struggle to communicate on their boat date, the dire consequences and ticking clock, we always say: “This could have all been solved if they’d just learned sign language.”

Red Rover

My daughter makes up songs. “Never take our clubhouse away!” she used to caterwaul as a toddler, to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” standing guard over her couch-pillow fort in a cowgirl hat and diaper.

Before her surgery, our family went to a Gallaudet homecoming football game. We wanted to immerse our daughter in her culture. One of our ASL teachers, a Texan who had wed his husband in matching cowboy hats, beamed down at my daughter in her stroller and greeted her in their language. They were members of the same tribe, and not just because of the cowboy hats.  

In my daughter’s preschool class for deaf children, she had a little boyfriend named Sami. At recess, he took her hand and gallantly escorted her to the slides, like a prince charming. They held hands and ran laps around the playground, giddily paired up as if in a happily-ever-after. Sami also had the surgery but hated the devices. His parents, both Deaf, signed to him instead of forcing their child to adapt to a world that didn’t feel like home.

Starting in kindergarten, my daughter and Sami attended separate schools—my daughter in a class with hearing kids, Sami at a school for Deaf students. We see Sami’s family each year at an annual picnic for the local Deaf community. For the last two years that we’ve gone to the picnic, my daughter and Sami haven’t recognized each other. They speak different languages now; my husband and I sign to our daughter when her devices are off, but she replies with her voice, knowing we can hear her. She signed as a toddler but has lost her muscle memory.

Fact: In the children’s game “Red Rover,” one team chants for a player from the opposite team to “come over” and break the chain formed by children’s linked hands or arms. The object: You try and cross over to the other side. You try to break through.

Thumbs-Up

A scene: My daughter’s nursery when she was a toddler, bedtime. It’s the weekend, and the neighbors in the townhouse next door are having a party on their back patio. They talk and laugh at a respectable decibel level. My daughter has declined to remove her cochlear-implant processors, not finished hearing for the night. She stands at the backyard-facing nursery window in footie pajamas and the pink-bowed bonnet we use to keep the processors on. She scowls down at the audible mirth below, which she can hear even through the closed window. She looms, disapproving, like the world’s tiniest “Karen,” as if she’s going to report them to the HOA for a noise-ordinance violation.

Another: “Mama, I hear a woodpecker,” my daughter says, registering the percussive drill through hollow wood that resonates through the woods we’re walking through. She’s correct.

Another: While playing with blocks, my daughter shows me a new accessory she’s built for some angular, Lego-dimension character. I say, “Oh, cool pirate hat!” She says: “It’s a pilot hat,” detecting the minuscule difference.

One more: When getting dressed for school in her room upstairs, I hear my daughter sing: “You’re my soda pop! My little soda pop!” I think: From down here, I’d never have known if she’d been signing the song instead. 

I share these scenes on Facebook. They’re easy for my hearing friends to like. People click on the thumbs-up, they click on the heart. Sometimes they even click on the laughing face. 

Deaf Like Me

But there are things I mostly keep to myself, not wanting to seem ungrateful.

Such as: Sometimes I hate this.

How her brain has to work harder than other kids’ to process every word and sound, so that by the end of the schoolday, she’s as tired as if she’s crammed for college exams.

Seeing her run on Field Day, the devices falling off, tripping her up, holding her back. Knowing that having the devices in her life means special equipment forever: Special headbands for P.E., sports, theme-park rides, bounce houses. Special waterproof cases for the beach. A special lanyard with a microphone for her teachers to wear. Everything “special,” like “special education.” My daughter has a sort of extra report card—an IEP—that grades how she’s doing with her disability (if you consider deafness to be one). One category is “self-advocacy.” This means: Does she speak up if she can’t hear?

The constant attention to battery power—are the lights blinking green, or orange? Are her batteries charged? Away from home—did we bring the charger? Forget about living off the grid. Power outages that go on for more than a few hours are cause for panic. We are a family powered by electricity. A modern family. Meet the Jetsons.  

Yet, technical frustrations aside—my daughter seems proud to be Deaf. She says that she’s “rare.” She wants a puppy—a Dalmatian, because so many are deaf. She wants a deaf one. “He’ll be Deaf like me! I can teach him sign language.” 

Fact: A 2020 study presented in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine showed that deafness among Dalmatians in the United Kingdom is in decline “thanks to careful breeding decisions,” which include selecting only hearing dogs to produce puppies.

The Ballad of Land and Sea 

There are times my daughter goes to a place I’m unable to go, even to visit. I can never truly know it as she does. She removes her devices and dives in, able to breathe there. It’s a place beyond foghorn, beyond the churn of waves, beyond whalesong. It’s a slippery place of gestures. I can only reach her through gestures. There was a time when this scared me.

The lights on her devices blink orange when the batteries need to be changed. I used to bolt to the charger for fresh batteries—twist, twist off the old ones; twist, twist on the new ones. Each second in between felt like holding my breath underwater. I wanted to save her from that dark place that was so unknowable for me. It was the only choice I knew.

Now I know she’s okay there. It’s her natural environment. Like an empty nester, I only hope she visits me.

Now I see that in addition to facts, I’ve been clinging to fairy tales. Conquering my terrors through metaphor.

A metaphor: I stand on the shore and wave as my daughter plays in the ocean with others born like her. I can’t join them; I’m a landlubber, a dry-lander. Born with legs instead of a shimmering tail. I stand and hold a big fluffy towel for when she decides to come out. When she emerges—a shape-shifter, thanks to our deal with a sea witch—ready to join me, we wave to those who remain in the water, free from devices and noise. We snap on the devices, nestle them in her sand-colored hair. Her eyes are still blue like the sea. She is sand and sea; she is both.

The lights blink green when they’re working.

Blink, blink. Goodbye, mermaids. 

The post What Was Lost When My Daughter Gained Sound appeared first on Electric Literature.

I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.

By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.” 

When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”

Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”

Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans, The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi

Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”

Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”

Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.

Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.

By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right. 

In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to The New York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.” 

Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:

Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.

I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing. 

Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.

The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis. 

“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.” 

The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically. 

It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.

Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)

Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program. 

Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.

The post My Undiagnosed Chronic Illness Taught Me to Love Sci-Fi appeared first on Electric Literature.

Recently, I’ve been distracted by the fact that all the Black men in my family are gone. I’m the last one. And these dead guys won’t leave me alone. Every essay, poem, and cryptic Facebook update for the past five months has veered into my obsession with them. 

What a joke it is to be haunted. 

I tell this to Josie, and she stares at me. I suspect half of her therapy schooling was spent honing this stare. It’s dreadfully effective at getting me to run my mouth.

I cave and eventually say, “It was either commitment issues, suicide, or white women.”

“You need to unmute, Mar.”

New-fashioned therapy. I was so excited for a virtual platform because—and Josie would love that I’m admitting this—it’s much easier to be vulnerable with the shield of an unstable connection, non-working camera, and therapist who isn’t technically licensed in your state.

Unmuting, I say, “Oh, my bad. I was saying that these family members either died by killing themselves, or abandoning their family, and—well, my great-grandfather was actually shot because he was having an affair with this white woman.” 

I leave a dollop of quiet after I say that, trying my hand at the therapy stare. 

. . .

I cave again. “It must run in the family. Claire is white.”

. . .

. . .

Damn, she’s good. 

. . .

“And maybe there’s something real to that. Maybe I’m afraid—”

“Mhm?”

“Well, yeah, you can probably guess what I’m thinking.”

“I can guess, sure. But mind-reading isn’t my gig.”

I tell her how these Black family men keep coming up for me. First, I call them distractions, then generational curses, then, “I wonder what they were like.”

Josie gives me a Buddhist anecdote before telling me, “Being the lone anything in your family can be a lot. When do these distractions happen?”

. . .

My computer desk sits in front of an open window. I’m cold. No, frigid—that’s a better word. I often gaze at this same tree. Well, he’s not much of a tree now. He looks like a map of a city’s roads, his branches crisscrossing each other, with shrivels of pink flowers dotted about his wooden hands like sleeping butterflies—oh, I see it now. My special tree looks like one of the online interactive maps I used while researching for essays. There are spatterings of pink dots along backroads, and if your cursor hovers over those spots, a picture of a hanged Black body, or a burned Black body, or beaten Black— 

“Mar?” Josie is still with me.

“Sorry. I get flashes of my great-grandfather’s face. I don’t see him literally,” I say. “I’m not seeing things—no need to worry.”

“I’m not worried at this particular point,” Josie says.

I tell her my Granny kept a portrait of her father, “Lefty,” atop her shelf collection of porcelain cows. It’s been thirteen years since I’ve been in the same room with that photo of Lefty, but I can envision him perfectly. In the picture, Lefty has a leather army jacket and motorcycle cap. He has pretty eyes, and I hate that I remember them. In 1954, he snuck around on my great grandma with a white woman. The white woman’s brother gathered a few buddies to shoot Lefty at the end of his workday. I still can’t find his pink dot on the map.

 “Maybe I’m so obsessed with this dude because I’m dating a white woman,” I say. “Think I’m onto something?”

“There’s probably a reason this idea is coming up.”

More staring. Only this time, I don’t cave.

“I’d like to try something I hardly ever do,” she finally says. “There’s something called writing therapy.” 

I perk up. 

“We can try this out if you’re willing. Here’s a prompt: Keep a diary—or it could be one of your stories—where you write your life in third person.”

“Mar is afraid that’ll make his head bigger than it already is,” I say.

“Mar shouldn’t feel forced to try this. But if he did feel comfortable, Josie thinks he’ll enjoy it. And this might stir up some different writing, so you won’t have to keep—”

“Beating dead horses,” I interrupt.

“That wouldn’t have been my choice of phrasing.”

[2. HAVE MOMMA SLAP-TEST THE BATTERIES]

Dear diary that only Josie reads, I tried telling my mom

On a Facebook video call, Mar tells Momma he’s been officially diagnosed with depression. Mar has battle plans depending on her reaction. He could tell her this was only cooked up by his therapist to screw over the insurance company.

First, Momma says, “But what about all your accomplishments?”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Mar responds. “It’s more like I don’t like myself.”

“Oh, baby. But you’re an amazing man. And I’m so proud of you—your Momma is so, so proud.”

“Thank you, Momma.”

. . .     

“Can you do something that makes you happy? Are they going to get you meds for it?” Momma’s voice starts buffering.

“It’s really not that big a deal. I just feel cold sometimes.”

“Cold?”

“Yes—maybe not cold, but numb, you know? Like a robot. I need to think about feeling before acting it out. Does that make sense?” Mar says (Josie, the third-person thing feels off. It’s not my kind of dorky. Can I go by Robotman after the Doom Patrol comics?).

“Yes, Momma gets that way from time to time, too.” She stills. “What about your writing? Isn’t that going well?”

“My writing is—to be honest, I’m not sure anymore. Weirder,” Robotman says (No, that doesn’t feel right either).

“Ain’t nothing wrong with weird, baby,” Momma says.

“Very true,” Gizmo (now we’re onto something) becomes closemouthed.

Gizmo sees Momma contemplating. She sighs, puffs, jitters, and grits her teeth. It’s like watching an electron avalanche. Gizmo doesn’t wish to say it, but her anxiousness peer pressures him. “This is probably all coming out of my situation with Claire,” he beeps.

“Are y’all going through a rough patch?” Momma calms. Now she has her answer.

“Yeah, kind of. I told her I wanted to break up.”

“Ah. That’s a rough patch, alright.”

. . .

Momma says, “Do you think you’re dating the right sex—are you gay, honey?”

“No, I don’t think that’s it.” Gizmo proceeds to giggle. He wonders how long she has suspected her little machine was gay. He wonders why she didn’t ask a more helpful question—or maybe that question was helpful. What had he done to be so unknown to his own mother? Gizmo’s last book was about Momma: learning grace from her and all other Black mothers across the country. It wasn’t the best researched, it seems.

As he stops his giggle fit, he realizes this conversation will make its way into a future essay: She’s the motherboard that keeps giving.

. . .

“Did you hear me, Mar?” Momma’s question cuts through.

Gizmo wasn’t paying attention. Again. “What’s that, Momma?” 

“Maybe you need to get some more Black friends. Remember you’re still Black.” 

Something crumples within Gizmo’s chest. Gizmo squeezes his eyes in—pain? Maybe Gizmo can feel.

“Mar, I’m for real; you’re all the way up there. And white people make everyone feel lonely.”

“Sorry,” Gizmo says. “You know, there’s only two other Black students in my grad program, and we’re each separated by genre, so I never see them.”

“That’s alright, baby. There’s got to be someplace close to D.C. with some Black folk. Because you got to remember you’re a Black man. And—I know you love white girls—but maybe look for a Black girl next time.” Momma snickers, and Gizmo files the sound of it away. 

Local Disk (D:) Internal Storage>>Essays>>>forFam|

Her_laugh_like_sweet_neighing.mp3| 

[3. RENEW ANTIVIRUS SUBSCRIPTION]

Claire does not want to break up with Gizmo. She asks him to give their relationship a chance, to fight for it. “After we moved here, we stopped going on dates—that’s the problem.” Claire is sure about this. “This happens all the time to couples. Let’s try dating again.            Please.              Please.             Mar, I love you. Say something,           please.”

. . .

Gizmo accepts the terms of the agreement.

Six days later, Gizmo is on a Smithsonian date with Claire. After a selfie with C-3PO and R2, Gizmo and Claire’s silhouettes hold hands under a Barnum and Bailey banner with elephants balanced on beachballs. Each elephant’s eye is too honest. Gizmo can’t bear looking into those dots of ink that form their irises. He imagines the elephants whispering, “Yes, we really were whipped until our trunks flourished convincingly for the crowd. Yes, humans, we really were true.”

Claire disrupts Gizmo’s trance to say, “I can’t believe we did this to those animals. Let them get away with doing this.”

Gizmo’s teeth grind with desperation. He wants to tell her so many things at once, like: This section of the museum really is hilarious; only nine paces away from here—from Prince’s guitar and a circus poster—there is a room no one stays in for long where recordings of famous minstrel performances loop. And also: Isn’t it funny you just said “we.” And also: What’s the hard part to believe—that the We had the idea or that the We were able to realize their fantasy? All so that the We could cackle and awe at what can be made possible with a master, slave, and bullwhip. 

But those words would come across far more combative than Gizmo would hope, and it’s so damn difficult to be articulate when he looks into her eyes. So, instead, Gizmo says, “I know. Shit was wild.” 

They skip the Jim Crow show to marvel at Captain America’s shield. In person, its white stripe is gunmetal grey. The Handmaid’s Tale dress stares down at Claire like a weeping angel. 

“Realer every day with Roe v. Wade,” she says. 

Gizmo likes Claire’s speech. She is accidentally musical when she’s bleak. They make their way to a shrine of PBS heroes. Claire maraca-bounces her head and sings along to the “won’t you be my neighbor” coming from the speakers. In a photograph above a red, hand-knit cardigan, they see Mr. Rogers dipping his toes in a kiddie pool with Officer Clemmons. Claire catches Gizmo lingering on this photo longer than he should. “There are so many Black cops on TV,” he says. Gizmo is not sure why he says this out loud, but kudos to Claire for the respectful nod in response. 

As they *click click* past Dorothy’s slippers, Gizmo is startled that he can’t wipe Officer Clemmons’s face from his vision. There was something about his face— 

(There I go again, Josie. My distractions.) 

Officer Clemmons bears a resemblance to Gizmo’s great-grandfather: the bountiful glean on his cheeks, the sepia pupils. Though Lefty was lynched before he could grow grey hairs.

“You hungry?” Claire speaks. “Not sure if we should eat here. It’s probably the most expensive cafeteria food you’ll ever see in your life.” 

And Gizmo is glad Claire said something, because, “You’re so right, and there’s this awesome place called Busboys and Poets on 5^th.” 

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Didn’t Uncle Pete write poetry? The one who shot himself in his bedroom. His momma’s shotgun. Never realized the Hemingway connection.]

“Busboys and Poets?” Claire asks.

“Yeah—they have books. And food.”

Leaving the museum, Gizmo and Claire pass a street performer bludgeoning a steaming-hot tempo against the winter air. He’s a paint pail riot thudding from the sidewalk. 

“Fuck me—he’s amazing.” Oddly erotic phrasing, but Gizmo couldn’t have gathered more truthful words. “I have a ten. I feel bad he’s beating his hands that hard in the cold.” 

Gizmo gives Claire the bill, and she bows after placing it in the performer’s hat. She bows like this is her performance. The drummer starts howling a thank you song—fiddling the spellbound chords within his throat. He’s so young and yet he sounds like a medieval war siren. His voice is so graveled and textured that you could touch the rivulets it leaves in the air—run your fingers over the sound as one flips through albums in a record store. 

Gizmo says, “Otis Redding. That’s who he sounds like.”

Claire says, “Ah, I love Otis Redding—grew up listening to him with Dad.” 

The drummer’s song bellows behind the two as they walk up the sidewalk.

“Really?” Gizmo can’t hide his shock.

“Yes!” Claire’s voice heightens over the drummer. “Didn’t expect a white girl to have grown up on Otis, did you?”

“I’m starting to expect the unexpected with you.” 

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. When I was a boy, I imagined all the disappeared Black men in my family would have voices like Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye.]

“Ha. What a writer thing to say. You’re also unexpected.”

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Grandma told me her brother, my Uncle Rat, was killed by a log truck. He was driving too fast behind the truck when the trucker hit the brakes. The log sawed through his Impala, and parts of him. Granny said Rat was funny, so I gave him the voice of James Brown in the stories she’d share.]

 “Being a writer is definitely unexpected,” Claire says.

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Such a dramatic way to die. Why couldn’t he have been like Mr. Perkins and simply left his family in the middle of the afternoon? Our family loves its flair for dramatics. Then, there’s what happened with Uncle Rat’s son: my cousin Derek. He overdosed on—what was it again?]

The paint pails are still thrumming.

“Did you find something in there to write about?” Claire’s eyes hook into Gizmo.

“Mm. Yes, yes, I think so. I might try my hand at non-fiction,” Gizmo says.

Paint pails thrumming. 

“Oh, really? How will you manage not to lie?” Claire pokes his arm in a delightful way. [disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. I remember thumbing through the box of Lefty’s vinyl stored in Granny’s closet to recover a trove of the unsung and unscratched.]

“I’ve been writing about my family, but I know so little that it might as well be fiction, you know? I basically only know how they died.” 

Paint pails thrumming.

“Could I read some?” 

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. My great-grandfather was shot nine times for dating a white woman. He’s still thrumming. My uncles wanted to die and did something about it. Thrumming. Thrumming. Lonely little Black boy, Truth is the executioner’s blade kissing your nape.]

“Only if you want to share, of course,” she says.

Gizmo never shared his essays with Claire, because he thought they’d be a healthier couple without those hard conversations about race dominating their time together (which is why I’m not sure this essay will help me, Josie. Writing has always been my hiding place).

This would be a fair time for Gizmo to dig into why he broke up with Claire, why he—out of the blue—saw her more as a friend than a future wife. But if Gizmo wants this to be non-fiction, the truer question—the non-rhetorical question—would be about the drumming. Gizmo has honest questions about the drumming. So let’s go back to that afternoon, with the paint pail man and that sound. What if it wasn’t really paint buckets? What if it were hooves? What if Gizmo turned around to see the street drummer on a horse? What if he would see a lynching rope in one hand of the drummer? Then, Gizmo might have seen the eyes he hadn’t noticed before. His eyes were sepia and glossy-burned. What if it was a daymare, and the drummer started galloping toward Gizmo, howling a strange laughter. Would this have been too obvious?

[4. SCAN FOR MALWARE]

Auntie called young Gizmo “little nigga” and “white boy” depending on the situation. Mixed inputs scrabbled his mind. Before his mother came back into Gizmo’s life, Auntie raised him. Momma, then Granny, then Auntie, then Momma’s second go—three Black women he’d trot between. All the hurt these women endured, and they’d never tried therapy. Gizmo wants to recommend it to them, but he’s fearful about Auntie’s reaction.

Gizmo admits he was hesitant, too. He never considered therapy an option until Claire proposed it. Claire convinced Gizmo therapy could overwrite his decision to leave 28 days after they moved in together, 28 days after they U-Hauled from Texas to start grad school together. Normal people don’t change their minds that quickly. Gizmo was malfunctioning. After all, he only applied to George Mason—was only here—because it was near Claire’s dream university. They had been together for nearly two years. What switched inside Gizmo? 

Claire pulled up “Zocdoc: Find a Doctor” on Gizmo’s desktop one evening after his writing center training. On the intake form, it asked something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea what’s wrong with you?”

“Why yes, I think I do, Doctor Zoc,” Gizmo typed.

Gizmo remembers (and you already know this, Josie) putting that he felt like a robot. For his whole life, people have seemed too . . . fleshy. Gizmo doesn’t understand how people can feel so deeply. After he told Claire about “his feelings” that they’d be better as friends, she cried in such a red-faced way. She was crying for them both. He couldn’t even well up one dry eye. 

Claire asked Gizmo when he last cried. He said, “Elementary school. I fell playing kickball.”

“That’s not normal, Mar. That’s not normal.”

A list of Black men Gizmo has seen cry: Barack Obama, Idris Elba on Hot Ones, Michael Jordan in that meme, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther after his father was bombed, Will Smith in situations involving Jada Pinkett Smith.

When Gizmo searches “How to cry as a Black man” on TikTok, he finds a video with 1.3 million views of a groom seeing his bride for the first time. The title: “Black Man Trying Not to Cry.” The groom’s tuxedo is made of pearls, and his lineup is devastatingly gorgeous—it’s one of those hall-of-fame cuts the barber would put on their wall. There is a warning that this video is “very emotional.” The groom cries so profusely at the sight of his wife that his neck glistens. Gizmo recalls that he and Claire would watch Burn Notice back when the love was mutual, and she’d mimic a tactic from the dangerous woman dating the stoic man on screen: She’d threaten with a smile. “You better cry at our wedding,” she’d say.

He’d play his part. “Of course I will. Even if it’s only one tear. It’ll be one big tear.”

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes. Or do you think they swigged their lives down like Irish car bombs with stoney faces? According to my family’s women, they’d often leave in autumn when even the trees were indecisive about what direction to die in. I have this fantasy where our family’s men are free-range horses: one of two expressions, engineered for running, heartbeats so strong they’d strip skin off the palm of anyone who put a hand to their chest. In the fantasy, there’s only the simplicity of what we are, not what we’ve been trained for.]                                                        

[SYSTEM ERROR] 

Josie, Gizmo is getting uncomfortable. Gizmo is getting uncomfortable with sleeping. He takes caffeine pills to stay up all night to write this essay or doom scroll for instructions. [SYSTEM COLLAPSE] He can feel his heart now. He wants to [Esc] with humor; how will he [Fn] with a disease his body has no willingness to fight? 

Nina Simone’s voice stands like a gargoyle in each corner of this dark living room. Gizmo has lied to Claire that he needs to sleep on the couch. It’s 2am. He is writing this with music in his earbuds at his desk. Claire opens their bedroom door. He is whispering binary and dictating pop-ups when Claire catches him. She will soon give up the repair effort. She lingers through the chill melody of the room to reach him, asks for his promise to stay in therapy—to stay even after he leaves. 

[6. REBOOT]     

Two years after the breakup, they will both be much happier. Gizmo will still feel guilty. Though it will be nice to know he’s feeling. Gizmo will move in with fellow grad students: poets, who—he will come to understand—are big fans of crying. And he’ll love that. On a fall day, they will invite Gizmo to a nearby park to write. Katey will point to a tree splotched with color, and say something blissfully macabre: “In autumn, things are either dead or dying beautifully.” 

And that will lead Gizmo back to his desk, to his window, to his tree, still dotted with pink. He’ll scribble verses where kids climb it, play pirate ship.

Youth is such a scarcity for a Black child.

The pirate children will find stick swords, launch into their “en gardes,” and he will watch them from a distance. He will build an imaginary castle wall around joy to sit outside and stare through its cracks, pushing his eyeballs in like quarters slotted through a gumball machine.

Eyes again. Always the eyes. That obsession came after Gizmo’s mother swore you’d always be able to spot a lying man by their eyes.

[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Except Claire. She couldn’t spot it in my eyes. And when I nightdream my younger self playing in a tree with other kids, they can’t either.]

[7. CALL SUPPORT]

Gizmo never

Josie, I never finished the essay. 

I stopped coming to therapy because I was afraid you would tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty. I was afraid of confronting defense mechanisms, and masking, and core beliefs, and pre-screenings for ASD, and moralizing, and hearing you say that there’s no instruction manual on repairing a robot Black boy. I was afraid you’d be warm when you asked me to do an imaginative exercise in which I speak to my younger self and realize it’s much easier to be kind to him because I don’t feel guilty about him—I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for him because he’s just a lonely kid trying to survive. Because he didn’t choose any of that for himself. Then you would ask me how I’m feeling, and I would say, “I don’t know. I can’t decide if I’m better because I feel better or because I can rationally prove why I should feel better. And maybe I would finally let you read this, and let you ask, “Would a robot feel all this—”    feel all this                feel             feel    

I thought I needed to be something steel and indelicate. I’m only 22, and I’m running out of family examples of living through this. Cousin Derek and Uncle Rat didn’t make it to 24 because, under this circus tent, performing Blackness is worth more on the market than the lives of its performers. To ringmasters, even dead elephants are worth their weight in ivory. That’s why I made the decision to come back to therapy; maybe I can be an example for those not yet here.

Working on myself, I won’t want to repeat the same mistakes and lies with Rachel (my deus ex machina). Tomorrow evening, she and I will attend a “Dining with Baldwin: Culinary Homage with Jessica Harris” event at the National Museum of African American History. It will be hard chowing down in front of folk I don’t know, but Dr. Harris will remind me of Granny. Rachel has turned me on to Ethiopian jazz, which we will listen to on our drive. She will tell me these songs remind her of Sundays in her home country. I’ll let her look into my eyes, and hope she trusts me when I say the songs remind me of a family I have not met. 

Josie, you told me that writing what I’d like to witness in my dreams before going to bed may help avoid nightmares. So here goes:

Outside cookout. Not too hot. The grill whistles like a steamboat, and the kids blow bubbles in each other’s faces. Granny is showing Uncle Rat (ever the impatient one) how to sop his injera in doro wat without it falling apart. Momma is raising hell with Lefty because he’s a horrible domino partner. Derek is trying to convince Auntie and Uncle Pete that the tere siga is fine to eat raw. I’m—as always—overdoing it on the berbere, so Rachel offers to feed it to me. There is the sway of old pine. She and I go back-and-forth: She feeds me, I feed her. I look into her eyes, and she looks into mine.

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