“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.

The post Instructions for Repairing a Robot Black Boy appeared first on Electric Literature.

Elementary school in Palmdale, California was a sprawling flatland of cement, and a fence around the perimeter separated us from mounds of brown dirt and rock. Even the buildings were flat, as if everything was made from clay pressed down by the palm of an eager child. When the sun was out, it was hot without relief. The cool air inside the library was a reprieve from the weather, and the loneliness, though I didn’t have words for it yet. My homely appearance as a child was the kind that is remarkable only in retrospect, for the isolation it added. My hair was straight and my mother would put a bowl on my head, hold it down, and cut right around the rim. I wore whatever she dressed me in, and style was never something she prioritized, even for herself. 

When our class took group trips to the library, we gathered on a bright blue rug with cartoonish books and apples around the border. I always sat near the back. The librarian, seated on a chair at the front where we all faced her, pulled a book from the display on the shelf. Week after week she read to us from colorful picture books, her voice animated, her hands pressing the pages back where they wanted to turn. I was enraptured; I loved listening to her read, giggling at parts that were funny, studying the images on the paper. 

Sometimes, she read from the No, David! books, where a devious little boy drawn with few hairs and fewer teeth wreaks havoc on his surroundings, against his parents’ wishes. At the end of every story, they remind him he is still loved, no matter how he betrays them. One week, the book was A Bad Case of Stripes, about a girl who wants to fit in but becomes covered in stripes that change to match whatever is happening around her. The image of her skin, the color of rainbow stripes or red white and blue stars captivated all of us on the rug that day. I never spoke when the librarian asked for audience participation, didn’t so much as whisper along to myself. After her reading time was over, I would find my way back to the book we had heard aloud, picking it up, listening to the crinkle of the cover where it was laminated.

My mother started picking up on the fact that reading was something I enjoyed. She took me to Barnes & Noble, holding my hand as we crossed from the parking lot to the entrance. I was always annoyed at having to hold her hand, her palms so warm they made my little ones clammy. Once inside the bookstore, I broke free, rushing to the children’s section as she followed behind. There was a reading area for kids: a slightly raised half-circle of wood like an amphitheater stage, benches arranged in a circle around it, and three-dimensional cutouts of trees against a backdrop of illustrated forest with woodland animals. Once, there were cutouts of Frog and Toad stationed next to the benches. My mother sat cross-legged to my right on the little stage, a stack of books to my left. The three of them watched me read: her, Frog, and Toad. She sat and patiently waited for me to sound words out loud, watching from behind her round glasses, smiling fondly. Despite having no interest in books, and that we mostly spoke in Vietnamese, she did this again and again. 

In the house I now share with other graduate students, a pair of pink rubber gloves sits constantly by the kitchen sink. Nobody ever uses them, so I don’t know why they’re there. But these are the kind of gloves my mother always told, or rather warned, me to wear. A cautionary tale. If you don’t wear them when you wash the dishes, she’d say, you’ll end up with hands like mine. This would be her cue to look at her hands in disgust, at the textures of wrinkles and scars. She was always so afraid of me ending up with hands like hers. My mother wanted me to be different from her, to be better.Evidence of this pleased her, such as my living alone, traveling alone, even an ability to read music. Similarities between us upset her, like poor eyesight, gray hair, a fear of driving. I have never been able to understand this, because when I do something I’m proud of, I am reminded of her. I hear her in my laugh. In the way I talk to strangers, or read aloud, these things that she taught me. My mother taught me how to love reading and writing, though she rarely did either herself.

Now I write from a body that used to be part of hers, and this act is the final departure. I don’t know how to tell this story, can’t get myself to look at it directly. I have tried countless times. The problem with a story is that it needs a beginning, middle, and end. This story has no end. I can not find the beginning, though I have spent all this time trying to remember my way back to it. And so I find myself here, grasping at the middle, which is to say, at the moments of life that come between birth and death—at least the ones that linger in my memory. I keep wanting to give up. Instead, I’ll try again, to find the place where story begins.

Perhaps this is the location where it starts: the house I lived in from high school onwards. The last of five homes we lived in as I grew up, the place my parents would settle and, eventually, retire. I could start here.

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT

A middle-aged woman and a college-aged girl sit
side by side on a brown couch.
 
WOMAN
The other day I was walking behind a group of 
people, I was in . . .  Costco? Where was I. It 
was . . . where . . .
  
The girl, who has been watching the television,
glances at the woman. She stares at her as she
struggles through her sentence.
 
WOMAN
I was . . . I don’t remember. I was . . .
walking behind a . . . a group of people.
The girl rests her temple and the side of her face
between her thumb and forefinger. She squeezes. She
is no longer looking at the woman, or the tv, but
rather at a space in the distance.

Or here.

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT

The girl and the woman on the couch, next to a
middle-aged man.
 
WOMAN
I love that show. I could watch it 100 times and
never get bored.
 
MAN
(joking)
OK, that’s the one we’ll put on for you in the
nursing home soon. It’ll be like a new one every
time.
 
WOMAN
(laughing)
I think that’d keep me happy.

The girl shakes her head at the man and woman,
who don’t look at her. 

But maybe here’s where it really begins.

INT. SUBURBAN HOUSE - DAY

A young teenage girl bounds down the stairs.
She heads for the door to the house. On the
way there, she passes a woman in the kitchen.
 

GIRL
I’m going out!
 
WOMAN
With who?

GIRL
Kate! To the mall.
 
The girl continues to the front door.
The woman turns around, following the girl.
 
WOMAN
Where are you going?
 
The girl furrows her eyebrows. She frowns.
 
GIRL
To the mall, with Kate, I just told you.
 
WOMAN
Oh.
 
The woman turns around, then turns back to face
the girl again.
 

WOMAN
Where are you going?
They repeat this exchange a couple of times. The
girlresponds with increasing panic. The woman
grows frantic, fearful. There is a high-pitched
ringing in the background, getting progressively
louder.

CUT TO:

The first time that time looped, it also stopped. For me and for her. 

The internet tells me this was likely transient global amnesia. A temporary episode of memory loss that can happen, with no prior symptoms and no future recurrence. Diagnostic criteria includes having been witnessed by an observer, an absence of other cognitive impairment, and resolution within 24 hours. A unique feature is perseveration, in which the person methodically repeats statements with identical intonation like a sound clip looped over and over. After a few hours my mother was fine again, and she didn’t remember any of it. I was the only witness, the only one who remembers. An isolated incident of forgetting.

Nothing was really wrong, then. Maybe this isn’t actually the point where the story starts, but where my fear does. A few years later, my mother started to forget things. A few years later, everyone around her bore witness. Whether or not this incident was unrelated, I had already learned everything I needed to. How to dread. To pretend I was living in a movie and someone else was writing the script. To harbor a kind of fatigue so familiar it can only be observed, and cannot be expressed, so deep it presents itself only through the eyes of a third party, like someone looking at you and saying, you look tired. 

Oh, I think. How tired I am. 

Allegedly, there was a neurophysiologist from the early 1900s who departed from all previous cognitive research with his idea that memory is an illusion. There’s no evidence of Geoffrey Sonnabend’s existence beyond an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice, California, where I first came across his information last year. A video on his research plays on a small screen in the museum, and visitors can sit on the seat in front of it and listen. Sonnabend and his ideas could be completely made up; this museum is a place that straddles the line between fact and fiction. The exhibit makes little attempt to convince visitors that his ideas have scientific backing, but details about his life and theories bolster their persuasiveness.

According to Sonnabend, experience is the only thing that exists, and forgetting is the inevitable outcome of all experience. We are condemned to live in the present, he wrote, and against that, we have created this idea of memory “to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events.” Sonnabend did not deny the existence of memory, but saw it as just experience and its decay. To illustrate this more clearly, he created the Model of Obliscence. 

All living things have a Cone of Obliscence through which we experience life. The cone is described as if it were an organ, integral and unique to each individual. The other element of the model is the Plane of Experience, a tilted flat surface which is always in motion. In the course of its motion, the Plane will intersect with the Cone. This movement depicts a sequence of events: being involved in an experience, remembering it, and then having forgotten it. The initial intersection of the Plane and Cone is the involvement. As the Plane moves through the Cone, past its base, this is remembering it. Once the Plane and Cone are no longer touching and the Plane has completely passed through, we have forgotten.

As presented, Sonnabend’s theory is based completely on narrative. Seeking verification of its claims leads only back to the museum itself, which places far more emphasis on telling the story than making sure a visitor can understand the concepts. The Model relies entirely on story, on making narrative out of something that would otherwise be too obsolete to be remembered.

In fourth grade, my mother signed me up for an afterschool program taught by my English teacher, Mrs. Jones. I whined and complained the whole way there, begging her to take me out of it. She simply kept driving, as if she knew something I didn’t. My mother had a habit of signing me up for things I had no interest in, which is how I also ended up at chess club after school, sitting uncomfortably in a circle full of white boys with glasses. I begrudgingly took my seat at a desk in the nearly empty classroom with Mrs. Jones at the front, swinging her permed blonde hair. She gave us writing exercises and encouraged us to write about what we were interested in. 

At the time, all the girls I knew had an interest in a specific species of animal. The most common ones were horses and cats. I had decided I liked wolves after reading Wolves of the Beyond, so I wrote a few pages about them every week, and then I began to write short stories. Sometimes they were about made-up events. Most were based on my life. When instructed to describe an experience we had over the summer, I gave an account of how I almost drowned in the ocean on a family trip. Not about the fact that we had been having fun on the beach before I attempted to swim, or that we were in Hawaii, where the beauty around me had surprised and fascinated me. Without being told, I understood how to use my own fear as fodder for a story, where the narrative tension would have to come from, where the strongest emotions had appeared. 

In capturing this memory, I forgot about all the new sights I had seen, about the good food we ate and how much we laughed. I had unknowingly limited the scope of my own ability to remember. In putting a life on the page, the words calcify into memory, regardless of truth, regardless of intention. The memory shifts. Eventually, it is replaced completely by the written account. Maybe it’s true what Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, in that the safest memories are locked in the minds of those who can’t remember. I can’t tell if the story I am attempting to unlock will be the thing that saves or ruins.

I sat in the top bunk of the freshman dorm room I shared with two others. It was late at night, and I had just returned from dance practice in an empty garage. My roommates weren’t around. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling that filled my chest, clouding the edges of my vision whenever I was alone. I was barely 18 and months into college and my first real relationship, with a girl who swore that pain was a natural part of dating and queerness. After practice had ended earlier, when conversation petered out and people began to leave, I became acutely afraid. 

I didn’t know how to ask someone to walk ten minutes back to my dorm with me, not because I was afraid of the dark or being on campus alone, but because I was afraid she would surprise me on the walk. I flinched at every person-shaped shadow that passed me on the way home. I was scared of the person I was becoming in the shadow of this relationship. I had no idea how to convey the depth of what was happening to me. I didn’t even understand it. 

Resting my back against the beige wall, I stared into the eye-level fluorescent ceiling light. I wrapped the edges of my comforter around me and opened a blank Word document. Written in the second person, I began a letter to her, but, through writing it, realized it was also a letter to myself. I wanted to believe that I would survive this. I wanted to be able to look back one day and remember that I had. It was, at the time, a perfect catharsis. Writing brought me into a new register of understanding myself.

The relationship had a clear before and after, an easily understood narrative arc. As did the stories I wrote about my life then, ones that allowed me to neatly impose a beginning and ending. After college ended, I was living at home again, working and coming back and realizing how much worse my mother’s memory had gotten. I found myself writing about it constantly. I thought I would wrangle this body of thought, fit it into the neat shell of narrative, but it falls apart with every attempt to grasp it. Years of gradual decay. Some days are better than others. What do I do with that? With how you can know someone like your own hand and yet appear as a stranger to them? How do I make it into story, this unraveling mind, while I’m still disappearing in front of it? 

During the time I lived in Korea in my senior year of college, I decided to visit a shaman. I took my friend Rose with me to translate, who was also interested in seeing what they would have to say. We walked together to the building where the fortune-telling place was located. Outside, multiple stories with storefronts advertised themselves on each level, a Tetris of multicolored vertical and horizontal signs. Our destination was on the first floor, and once inside, we were checked in and told to wait in the entry room. We sat on a couch with small circular tables around it, the surfaces strewn with open binders of different services and readings available. Rose and I agreed to the basic reading, and within a few minutes we were summoned into another dimly lit room. A candle burned from one corner of the table, a dark blue cloth laid out over the rest of it. 

An older man with bright gray hair sat behind the desk, one chair directly in front of it, a few others around. He smiled and greeted us, then asked which of us wanted to start. Rose and I looked at each other, then she sat at the desk while I pulled up a chair beside her. The shaman asked Rose to pull cards from a Tarot deck. He spread them across the table, but didn’t look at them once. He spoke of her personality, relationships, her tendency to move countries throughout her life, her career. Later, Rose told me that his reading aligned closely with the one her parents had done for her with an expensive, reputable shaman when she was still a baby in Korea.

Then, it was my turn. Again, the pulling of cards and the shaman’s ignoring them. He spoke to me about the same things as with Rose, and said there was harmony between the field of writing and me as a person. He also issued a warning. He said I had a tendency to give up on endeavors once I felt like they were too difficult or weren’t worth the effort, something I already knew about myself. If I was to succeed, he told me, I would have to stop doing this. “You don’t follow through,” my friend translated. “You need to see things to their conclusion, to get where you’re supposed to be.” 

I figure if the story inside me is still trying to break free then it hasn’t concluded. But maybe I’m just telling it so I can look away from the future in front of me. The splayed deck of cards. The stories we tell ourselves.

In Lisbon, at my first writing retreat during graduate school, I took an experimental poetry workshop. On the first day, we all wore masks, but a woman across the table from me caught my attention. The crinkle in her eyes was unmistakable. She tittered with friendly laughter at nearly everything anyone had to say. I was curious what was making her so happy, and ended up staring too long on a few occasions. When her blue eyes met mine behind her bright green glasses, she waved. When the class was over, I asked if anyone wanted to walk around, and she joined, smiling brightly.  

In the blazing, unshaded heat of the Portugal summer, Hazel and I made the fifteen minute trek to an open plaza with one of Lisbon’s oldest churches, the Church of St. Dominic. I learned that Hazel was in her 50s, about the same age as my mother, and had come on this trip with her husband and daughter. We talked about everything but our writing. She laughed often, her joy so earnest that I couldn’t help but laugh too. It was my first time befriending someone my mother’s age, and she was so easy to be around. There was no tension in my shoulders when I listened to her speak, no tightness in my smile when I mirrored her expression.  

Upon entering the church, a poster by the door described its history, that the building survived several earthquakes and a devastating fire in 1959. The effects of the fire were still visible, the church pillars scarred, the interior walls charred. In 1994 the church reopened, and the restoration purposely left the signs of the fire in place. Its visible damage served as a preservation of its history, a reminder to visitors of the impermanent nature of even such a grand structure. 

Hazel and I meandered separately around, inspecting the stations of the cross and statues of saints around the walls. At the statue of Mary by the altar, I decided to light a votive prayer candle the way I watched my mother do so often growing up. I dropped a 50-cent euro coin in the box for donations, grabbed the electric lighter, and lit a candle near the edge of the row of candles. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and didn’t know what to do next, so I let images of her come to mind. 

As I closed my eyes, I wondered what it would be like to meet my mother as a stranger here, in a foreign country, at a conference with shared interests. I wondered how it would feel to listen to her tell me about her children and her work with such clarity. If we would have gotten along well, if I would have also marveled at how easy she was to spend time with, been so  grateful to meet her purely by chance. 

The following year I found myself at a highly-attended, annual writing conference for the first time. In the conference hall around thousands of strangers, I walked through hundreds of booths trying to convince me to buy their magazines or submit my work. The feeling appeared in me vaguely and then acutely, the weakening of will. I was one of so many. I had only a hazy sense of why I was doing any of it or why it mattered and it was possibly the least useful thing I could have been doing with my time. I wandered around the building in a daze, as if on the precipice of splintering, when I saw her again. Hazel, in her bright green glasses, stood working by the entry area of the conference hall. 

When she spotted me, she smiled widely and walked over to hug me. Even as she spoke about her divorce, about how it was the hardest thing she’d ever done, the mirth never left Hazel’s expression. She remembered the boy I had been dating at the time we met. She remembered the things we had done together in Lisbon. Hazel invited me to lunch later that day, and there in the restaurant, laughing over tea and dan dan noodles, I remembered. Writing had become a way for me to understand myself, but I had forgotten, for a moment, there was still a self outside this understanding. 

In one of my favorite movies, The Boy and the Heron, a young boy follows a heron into a magical world, under the guise of being reunited with his dead mother. His mother died in the firebombing of a hospital during war, when the boy was only a few years old. The heron is a mischievous entity, the Birdman, in disguise. The boy goes on an adventure in this magic world, and meets his mother as a young girl, though he doesn’t know who she is. Eventually, the world starts to collapse in on itself and the boy must escape. 

The girl grabs his hand and runs, leading him down a fluorescent rock tunnel that opens into a dark hallway, the floor an unfurled red carpet of velvet, the walls lined with endless doors. The girl brings the boy to the door that leads back to his world. Through it, he can see his father running through green fields, frantically calling his name. The girl goes over to another door, where a burning building awaits. The boy expects her to go with him, but she reveals her identity, and hugs him. He warns her she will die if she goes through that door. She smiles, tells him, I’m not afraid of fire, but it’s clear that she is. I’m so excited to be your mother, she says, it was the most beautiful thing for me. 

I can’t remember which of them leaves first, just that they leave each other. Soon after returning to the real world, the boy starts to forget the details of what happened in the other one, and panics. The heron assures him, forgetting is normal, encouraging the boy to release his grasp on memory, to embrace the natural progression of its falling away. The Plane and Cone no longer touching. The boy is distraught. Memory is all he has of their relationship. It is the only thing that keeps his mother from being a stranger. Researching the film after watching it for the first time, I discovered that its original title was How Do You Live?

If I could have met my mother as a young girl, I wonder if she would have laughed like she does now, if I would have. If she would take my hand and lead me on adventures the way she did when I was a child and she was not. If she would choose the fire, if the fire is inevitable in every universe. So much if, could, would. How to know these things. The overlap between memory and experience is so brief and so temporary and there is only so much I can imagine. These days, my mother tells me, I want you to know if I died now I’d die happy, smiling like she knows something I don’t. 

When she was my age, she was still an undergraduate and her mother was still making her dinner after classes. She had just met my father. My mother used to joke that she was waiting for the day she’d see grandchildren. She doesn’t anymore. Now, she just wants me to eat well and do well and be happy, but I don’t know how to do that while remembering all that I am losing, even if memory is just a concept we invented and my hands are still her hands and the script repeats and loops and lacks narrative cohesion and I will never be a stranger and I hate this story for what it will never be. Here language is failing me, but language is all I have, and I don’t know how to let go. But I am trying. Can’t you see? I am trying.

In college, my friends and I took a day trip to a bookstore in Ojai. Fuchsia flowers and bright green vines climbed a trellis around the sign reading “Bart’s Books,” marking entry to the world’s largest open air bookstore. Shelves of books faced the street, spines of different heights and colors crammed into messy rows. The entrance opened up into a sprawling courtyard, tall reddish wooden bookshelves and palm trees standing sentry. Tin awnings covered the shelves that line the courtyard, overlapping canopy triangles and string lights stretched in the open space between. The space was peppered with shaded reading nooks, wooden benches, and potted plants. Walking through aisles of bookshelves simply led to more aisles, and even deeper rooms filled with dusty books of poetry. 

We wandered around in the sunlight, idly pulling books from shelves, scanning their covers, putting them back. One friend and I walked into an indoor space lodged at the periphery of the courtyard. At a table inside the room, she found a palm reading deck opened, the cards spread out, invitational. I gave my friend my hand to examine and she tried to read my palm, squinting at the faint creases. I, too, studied them to no avail. The lines were inconclusive to us; we couldn’t form any narratives around them.

A few years after that day, another friend read my palm and found different versions of me in the lines etched into my skin. They studied my left hand cradled in theirs, and the lines indicated a split from a previous version of myself. The divergence must have occurred in the last two years. They asked if I’d changed a lot in that period, and it was around that time that I really started to pursue writing. 

I was glad, when I first started, to have found something that I felt could contain my fears, could convince me there were ways to survive. I wish, now, I had lingered just a little longer in the days I didn’t put words to everything. The days I didn’t trap myself on the page, when time moved forward and memory was left untempered, and both were nothing to fear.

Around a year ago, I held a bouquet of flowers my mother handed me, a small arrangement the length of my forearm. She took each of the flowers out, one by one, trimming the stems until they were half their previous height. They needed to fit in the tiny, bullet-shaped vase attached to the flat slab of marble where my grandfather’s name was etched. Once she was finished, we walked over to the outdoor columbarium. We located one gray rectangle amidst many, and it was in the vase attached to it that we squeezed a few green stems. I stepped back and said a few words in my head, a hand up to shade my eyes from the sun. As we left and walked back to the car, my mother told me she wanted her ashes scattered in the ocean. I was immediately repelled by the idea. I thought I wanted something to come back to. When I asked her why, that day, she said something along the lines of wanting to be free. Now, I understand she didn’t want to tether us to anything. When the time comes, I’ll follow her wishes. I’ll wait for a day when the world is bright and clear, the kind of day when I’d tell her it’s beautiful outside and she’d agree without hesitation, it is. Find a boat or a shore and fill the creases of my hands with everything that she was and is and always will be. The way I’ve come to understand the world. Where I’ve been, where I’m going, the roadmap of my life. Cast it all across the ocean, my closed fist unfurling. An open palm facing the sky.

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When I meet Arun’s parents for the first time that September, I bring flowers. On the drive down, he tells me not to worry: his parents will love me. I am an actual woman that he is dating. His mother will probably want to give me some of her jewelry, he says with excitement, as he turns into a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses called The Landings. 

But in his parents’ dark, shuttered house, we sit in silence. No jewelry is proffered, and my bubbliness falls flat. A large painting of Michelangelo’s David faces us. Their house is filled with fake flowers, Hindu gods, precious moment dolls, Italian statues of angels: monuments to a life that didn’t quite take off or land in the way they had hoped. They are eager for me to leave.

Later, Arun will admit that his parents advised him not to date me. It would be easy to walk away, they said, because we had only been dating for two months. I was another example of their family being cursed, they said. 

It was true that we hadn’t known each other for long. We talked on the phone for the first time that March. Ambika, a childhood friend of mine, had decided she wanted to become a matchmaker for Indians in Atlanta. Like me, Ambika had been unlucky in love, was my hypothesis; now, she wanted to help others. Those who can’t do, teach. I had lost touch with Ambika, but my mother and her had stayed in contact. 

One day, my mother said that Ambika had someone she wanted to give my number to. I had always refused to be introduced to an Indian man in this way because it sounded like an arranged marriage. But I had just turned 34, and I wanted children, if I could have them. After ten years in New York, I had just moved back to Atlanta, where no one was interested in me. I had also just gotten out of the hospital. It was a moment in time when I would have said yes to a dog. Ambika didn’t want money. Why not talk to this thickly accented Indian man in Durham?

But Arun, the guy on the other end of the line, did not have an Indian accent. He sounded Southern, like me. It felt almost as if we already knew each other. We did in a way, if shared backgrounds could do the work of backstory, which I suppose was the exact premise of an arranged marriage. We had both grown up eating thick, brown sambhars and thayir sadam mixed with baby mango pickles. We had both attended rival prep schools in Atlanta, two years apart. We were from such a thin lineage of Tamil Brahmins that we were likely related, far down, though why look too closely into that. He was handsome.

I had never been the kind of Indian girl that Indian guys liked, though I was interested in being that girl. This girl had skin a lighter brown than mine, and wore pink eye shadow and long, dangly, Indian-ish earrings. Her hair was straight, but not too straight. She was gorgeous and vegetarian; exceptional at yoga. She had no darkness to her.

The second time we talked, I told Arun I sometimes ate meat. I’d forgotten I’d earlier told him I was a vegetarian. He asked if I was trying to hide my meat eating, and if so, that was weird. I realized I could be myself with him: a vegetarian who had just started to eat red meat, for complicated reasons.

That May, Arun drove down from Durham, where he was finishing a fellowship, to look at apartments. He planned to move to Atlanta that July to start a new job, his first, as a cardiologist.

He suggested we meet and go for a walk. In person, he was tall and gentle, and nervous, with huge, light brown eyes that had nothing to hide. On the walk, I suggested we stop for a drink. He was funny.

Across a picnic table, he showed me photos of the blue ancestral home outside of Madras that he’d just visited. But he liked the Hawks, hazy west coast IPAs, and Bottle Rocket. A long time ago, an Indian friend had told me it would be impossible for me to meet someone like me because I was too odd a combination of Indian and American. But now that person was here, in front of me. 

That July, Arun moved to Atlanta, and we began to go out night after night. We fell in love, giddy with our luck at having found each other after years of meeting people who weren’t right. 

I had sometimes had this feeling that if something good happened to me, something bad must happen next—a certain, universal equilibrium to maintain. No one deserved it all. But maybe this would be different.

That February, one month before Arun and I first spoke, I had woken up with a fever. I ignored it, not realizing how sick I was. Three days later, I couldn’t breathe. My sister drove me to the hospital, and in the E.R., a nurse said, “she’s septic.” They stripped me in a back room. I begged for a blanket, but my fever was too high, the nurses said, as they took a mobile chest X-ray. I apologized for not wearing a bra, and the doctor in the room smiled awkwardly. This girl is about to die and is worried about a bra, is what that smile said. A nurse slid a bedpan underneath me. 

I mentioned to one doctor that I had been to India the month before, and then no one could let go of that puzzle piece. Had this very anxious girl been to any dirty places in India? they kept asking.

One week later, I graduated from the ICU to the main floor of the hospital, after rounds of IV antibiotics for pneumonia, and assisted breathing and luck. I remember looking in the mirror (they did not have mirrors in the ICU) and feeling shocked. I had imagined the worst, and I looked much, much worse. I remember wild hair, a darkened, hollowed face. 

After I passed a test of walking down the hall with an oxygen tank, I was discharged. I was ten pounds lighter and needed to regain my strength. I began to eat meat. Arun called.

As I recovered, my mother said that I looked better. She was so hopeful for and invested in my health in the way only a mother can be. But I felt scared. I had gone to different doctors over the years, saying that I felt sick, but each had dismissed me as anxious. It felt as if there was something in me that I couldn’t see.

Two weeks after Arun moved to Atlanta, I found a lump in my breast. It was the size of a pea, and hard, like a frozen pea. 

The OB I sought out said it was a cyst. She chided me for doing my own self-exam because now, she had to send me for a mammogram. Three hours after my mammogram, I was the last, pink-robed person still in the waiting room. A radiologist came out and told me that they would do an ultrasound and biopsy of the lump, to be safe. 

I got dressed and joined Arun, who was in his white coat in the outside waiting room. He had just started work at the same hospital, down the hall. 

Another radiologist called three days later, on a Tuesday, to tell me the lump was cancerous. I hung up and called my mother. 

“Hi, yes,” she said nervously.

“It’s cancer,” I blurted out. 

In the past, I’d had trouble asking my mother for soothing, but in this moment, and in all moments of sickness, I knew to call her. Here, take this piece of information and do something with it. She said she and my father would be there immediately. I asked her if I should tell Arun. Gently, she said, “Yes, you have to call him.” 

“What do you fear the most?” Arun asked me in darkness, later that night, in bed, back at his apartment. 

We had just returned from my parents’ house. After I’d called my mother, my parents had apparated and brought me to their home. Arun had come straight from work. My parents and sister and cousin had fallen in love with Arun over dinner, despite the subterranean context of the meeting. Now we were alone, back at Arun’s place. 

In three days, that Friday, I would find out what stage my cancer was. I could have found out the next day, but I hadn’t wanted to cancel my second class of the semester. I had just started teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor at Emory. It was a dream job for me, and I didn’t want to lose it. 

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You probably haven’t thought about this, but do you want kids?” he said.

“Yes. Do you?”

“I think so,” he said.

“I really want kids,” I said. “That’s my biggest fear, that I won’t be able to.”

“When you meet the surgeon, can you ask her what your options are?” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

Two weeks later is when I went to Arun’s parents’ house for the first time. When I would badger Arun about their coldness, he would assure me I was imagining it. 

But then I’d find a text from his father saying we barely knew each other, so not to get too close to me. Arun would later admit to me that his parents believed that their family had been cursed. His older sister had eloped with a Muslim man. This was the worst thing they, conservative Hindus, could imagine, until their golden son met a girl with cancer. 

The words underneath their words being: They didn’t want a daughter-in-law with cancer, who did? What if she’s always sick, his mother would ask Arun. 

She cursed me, I yelled back at Arun, during fights later, when I was sick a lot.

A three day wait. A feeling of jet lag, my brain far behind my body, trying to catch up with what my body already knew. 

In a tiny room with a surgeon at the end of that week, I hear the words “treatable and curable.” I text them to Arun. I want him to want to stay with me.

“Can I still have kids?” I ask the surgeon. I realize I have no idea how cancer works.

“You will still be able to have kids,” she says and pauses. “You should not have this.”

I ask her if I should freeze my eggs. She says there may not be time for that: The most important thing is for me to get the cancer out of my body. But she hands me the card of a reproductive endocrinologist.

Arun stands when he sees my mother, sister, and I walk back out into the waiting room. My mother, with all the hope in the world, tells Arun that I can still have children.

He smiles gently, as if he has walked through the wrong door. The door he had wanted  was the one downstairs: the door to the OB office, where young couples hold hands, waiting to hear their baby’s first heartbeat. But this is the door that opened for him. 

I had been wearing a long silver chain with a locket at the end that had an inscrutable piece of paper stuffed inside. Michael, a white guru that my mom found online, had given me this talisman two years earlier, to ward off evil. Michael practiced Vastu, the Indian version of feng shui, a “yoga for the home.” He had purportedly helped Bill Gates to rearrange the furniture in his first Microsoft office. My mother had asked Michael to shoo out the bad vibes from my Carroll Gardens apartment and open up new doors. I had ended up moving to Atlanta.

“It seems as if this silver pendant isn’t working as well as it could be,” I say to Arun. 

In Hinduism, there is always a curse explaining why things have gone bad, and something you can do to try to remove the curse (talisman, short white man flitting around your apartment, using his phone like a compass, drawing yellow dots in corners, busily placing tiny stickers on windowsills.) 

My parents’ neighbor used to take her golden retriever on walks in a stroller. My grandmother would watch and say confidently, “The dog must have done something very good in her last life.” There is a karmic equation, and it includes dogs. This slow-growing tumor, that started expanding in me ten years earlier, must have had its origins in some other layer of time. 

One day, my father tells me that he’s always believed our family has been cursed, so this diagnosis makes sense to him. Before he was born, my father’s mother gave birth to two sets of twins. Each baby died before turning one. Bai, their family’s housekeeper, knew what to do. Bai was stout and only had a few teeth and was always squatting and washing dishes and speaking Hindi loudly and animatedly.

Bai said that for my grandmother’s next baby (my father) to live past one, my grandmother, a devout Hindu who believed in the holiness of cows, would need to watch a calf be killed. Afterward, Bai would need to sift my father in a banana leaf, like rice separating from its husk. She would need to throw my father up and catch him, like a rice kernel in a sieve. My grandmother would follow these instructions, and my father would live. 

I want my cancer and new relationship worlds to stay separate, but they collide quickly.

The first reproductive endocrinologist I meet with, an older, icy Southern woman with perfect make-up, tells me that it is too late for me to preserve my fertility: I am 34.7, and I should have frozen my eggs in my 20s for IVF to work. 

The second doctor I meet with, a kinder, older man, tells me that actually, I can have kids at 38, and Indian sperm donors are very popular right now. He says that even though embryos are more likely to end in live births than eggs, I should not freeze embryos with a new boyfriend. I wouldn’t want to end up in Sofia Vergara’s position. 

I read online that frozen eggs are fragile and can crack when thawed; embryos tolerate freezing better. The summary of my research seems to be: If you know that you are going to want to have children with someone, freeze embryos. 

There is a short, month-long window between my surgery, at the end of September, and the start of radiation, in November, in which I can freeze either eggs or embryos. If I want to freeze embryos, the conversation has to happen now. 

One night that week, Arun and I are reading in his bed, which is a mattress on the floor. Since he has moved, our lives have been a storm of new jobs, new love, and new cancer, and our apartments feel like bare boned play sets. It feels as if we are still trying to figure out where things go, and what will stick and what will not, and what is worth investing in.

We haven’t talked about marriage, or children, except for that one quiet question he asked me in bed, the night of my diagnosis. But it feels as if we are heading in that direction. 

I turn to Arun and casually ask him if he’d be open to considering freezing embryos with me. 

“Do you think that’s wise to freeze embryos after two months?” Arun says, not meeting my eyes.

“I guess not,” I say and turn away and cry.

Of course, Arun is reasonable not to give away his valuable Indian sperm to someone he has just met. But option value, as my father, a finance professor, would say. The example of option value my father always gives is: Just bring the umbrella. If you bring the umbrella, you have the option of using it. That does not mean you have to use it. 

What I want to say to Arun is, why not ensure our future happiness with those embryos in the bank? We are in love, we both want a family, and we are both morally fine with destroying embryos if we ever broke up. The clinic requires that we find a lawyer to draw up a contract stating this, since we are not married. I cannot see any downside to freezing embryos, only a greater possibility of having a family down the line with the person I love. I feel deep in my bones that we will stay together, and that this is our shot. 

A few days later, we are eating tacos at Arun’s long, stainless steel kitchen island left behind by the apartment’s previous tenants. His apartment has become our world. The lucky bamboo plant that he gave me while I waited for my biopsy results sits on the island, next to a thick packet of my Livestrong paperwork. Livestrong provides financial aid for fertility preservation for cancer patients, but they only allow you to apply once, for either egg or embryo freezing. My application is due in two weeks. Chemo may permanently affect my fertility, but I will have to make this decision before I will know if I have to have chemo. 

Pushing past my fear of difficult conversations, I bring up the option of freezing embryos again. 

“I didn’t realize freezing embryos was a possibility,” Arun says, as if astounded by the technology that could make this possible. 

I am astounded that he does not remember our earlier conversation. I realize at this moment that I do not know him at all. At two months, you can feel as if you know someone, but you can’t really know anyone without time. 

He says he needs more time to think about it, and that he would like to involve our families. I suddenly don’t want him to be the perfect Indian son anymore. He walks to his balcony and sits alone. 

I am trying to tether my fate to a stranger’s. We are orbiting on our own planets. 

At night, we continue to meet each other’s friends at different noodle houses along Buford Highway, Atlanta’s long road of ethnic food stalls. We cheer on the losing Hawks and walk down the winding Beltline, admiring other peoples’ dogs. We both have career ambitions and work to make small marks at our new jobs.

I choose to have a lumpectomy surgery, in which my surgeon will remove my tumor, but leave the rest of my breast intact. After that, I will freeze eggs, or embryos, and finally, undergo radiation. When the surgeon takes out my tumor, the pathology lab will run a test on the tumor to see whether it responds well to chemo.

Before my lumpectomy, a nurse starts me on an IV of anesthesia, and I wave goodbye to my family. A moment later, I am awake again, facing Arun, in the post-op recovery room. I throw up.

“You look beautiful,” Arun says. 

Back at my parents’ house, my father and I stand a few feet apart in the kitchen and play catch with a tiny, Vicodin pill. Things feel light. I love anesthesia.

A few nights later, Arun tells me my breast actually looks better. I look in the mirror. He’s right, my left breast is slightly more perfectly round, perkier. A science breast. 

The weight of whether we are freezing embryos or not is still on top of every word we say. But I try to stay breezy and wait for him to bring it up again. I try to be as nice as I can, as if that might help. 

An old couples counselor once told me that I tend to demand things angrily instead of asking for things softly, a more emotionally intelligent, subtle approach to negotiation.

The night before my Livestrong application is due, Arun and I are on opposite ends of his stiff, blue velvet Ikea couch. 

“If you don’t know, you know,” I say finally.

Arun pauses and shifts. 

“You’re right,” he says finally. “I’m not ready. You’re asking me to be a father and I’m not ready.”

“You have the option of being with someone else, years down the line, and having kids,” I say. 

“Yes,” he says, as if that’s exactly right. “This feels equivalent to me asking you to marry me. I’m not ready for that,” he says and is strangely cold, and I am glad to know he doesn’t want to marry me.

“I’m going home,” I say then, getting up from his couch.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he says, getting up. 

“I want you to say that you want to be with me. That this doesn’t affect how you see us or what you see for us in the future.” 

With no other option, I choose to freeze my eggs and embrace injecting myself. 

Later, as I will recover from my egg harvesting procedure, I will call to tell Arun that they retrieved 26 eggs. I feel proud of my body. “That’s great!” he says, and he will mean it.  

I will try hard to push down any resentment I have. 

That October, my mother, sister, and I wait to meet my medical oncologist, a young Indian woman who will go over my tumor’s pathology. A young Indian man storms into the office first, unannounced.

“You got pneumonia, and then cancer? What’s the connection?” he demands. 

My sister and I make eye-contact and try not to laugh. Who is this kid-detective in an oversized suit? 

Now, after having had years of lingering symptoms, I wonder about what that resident asked. Why wasn’t any doctor, including my doctor boyfriend, trying to connect the dots between my illnesses? 

I want Arun to be my doctor, but he often doesn’t want another patient. He has trouble asking me how I am feeling when I am sick, which goes against my fantasy that it is his passion to uncover the source of my health issues and help me to regain my health. This seems as if it should be a built-in perk of dating a doctor: the ultimate concierge medicine. 

But Arun will admit, deep in the throes of couples therapy later on, that it’s hard to be with someone who sometimes just has to sit on the couch instead of cleaning the kitchen because she is exhausted, again. 

He has trouble believing that something more systemic could be happening in the underworld of my body. He says I do not look sick, unlike his actual patients, who are dying of advanced heart failure. Maybe there is a comfort in hoping and pretending as if the person closest to him, the person that he loves most, is healthy. 

Maybe it is that he is a doctor, and he is used to death. Life moves on. I am still getting to know him and learning to understand what his silences mean. 

My oncologist comes into the room and tells me that my tumor pathology has come back. I do not need chemotherapy. 

The next week, I break down when I find out that the surgeon has to redo my lumpectomy because my tumor had positive margins. In every moment lives a recalculation: How many more days do I have to give to get my old life back. I don’t want to have to play Vicodin catch again. That night, I ask Arun to explain positive margins to me. He brings up something called micro metastases, and I beg him to stop. He pauses.

“Do you want me to talk to you like a patient or a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know, both,” I say. 

On the back of a magazine, he draws two circles: the tumor and the circle the surgeon cuts out around it. The circle the surgeon cuts out should be larger than the tumor. Clear margins mean the excised tumor has healthy cells all around it. If the excised tumor has even one cancer cell on any edge, that means that there may still be cancer left in my breast. After my re-excision, my breast has been shifted a little wayward to the right, as if its sculptor’s priorities have shifted too; but the cancer is gone. 

For the last six and a half weeks of my treatment, I lay daily on a mat as radiation techs, like Cinderella’s mice—if Cinderella had cancer—shift my clothing and hair and arms so I am in the perfect position for the radiation to hit. I watch other patients finish their final rounds of treatment and one by one ring a silver bell in the hall labeled “radiation vacation.”

On one of my last days of radiation, I spot a pre-med writing student of mine nearby, on Emory’s basement radiation floor. I run around the corner to hide. 

I want my teaching world across Emory’s campus to stay separate from my sick, shadow, hospital world. I have a deep shame around having cancer, as if I have failed in some metaphysical way. As if, if no one knows about my diagnosis, I can still be perfect: a joke. Maybe the curse talk has settled in.

After my last session, the front desk attendant, Fatima, claps her plastic clapper hands and yells hahahaha with insane joy. My parents film on their cell phones as I ring the vacation bell, as if I am a radiation influencer now. My mother brings out a cake. I blow out the candles. Arun surprises me and shows up for the weird, joyful basement party. 

They let radiation patients valet for free at the hospital. By the end, I realize why—there are no free rides. I can barely walk. The fatigue that comes with radiation crescendos, and is cumulative; you are most exhausted in the month after treatment. I begin to take tamoxifen, an estrogen blocker, which I will take for ten years; I wake up every night with hot flashes. But I made it. My job now is to rest. I am on vacation.

Around then, Arun and I go to the holiday party of an acquaintance, who stresses as her grandmother’s special cocktail glasses are broken one by one. I quickly have to leave because I am exhausted from standing. I had told Arun I was too tired to go, but relationships are always this negotiation between who we want our partners to be, and who they are. I could tell he really wanted me to try, so I pushed myself. Now I feel resentful.

In the parking lot, Arun runs to get his car and drives it as close to me as he can. He gets out of his car then and runs to me, picks me up and carries me back to his car. Back at home, he carries me to bed, wheezing the whole way. It’s an image and feeling I’ll never forget. 

Through all of this, I won’t miss teaching a class or tell anyone outside of my immediate family and friends about my diagnosis. I only use my cancer to ask for a break once, when I’ve been asked to, for free, read through hundreds of essays for a writing prize I won the previous year. This reading period coincides with my radiation fatigue. I nervously call the founder of the prize and admit to him, with shame, that I have breast cancer and am too tired from radiation. “I’m so sorry I can’t do it.”

He pauses. Then he tells me, actually, he also had breast cancer and went through radiation. It actually made him really want to read, so it’ll help me to get through the radiation to have this reading work.

I laugh. 

It’s as if the universe is saying—you’re lucky—you’re one of the lucky ones—don’t ask for breaks. I am one of the insanely lucky ones. 

I select a few essays.

That New Year’s Eve, over enchiladas at a divey Mexican restaurant, Arun takes my hand. It’s been five months and a lifetime since we started dating. He tells me that he wants to buy a house, and he wants us to move into it together. He says he wants us to get engaged before we move in, and he wants us to get a dog. I think about those frozen eggs. My dreams are coming true, but in a different way. Why couldn’t he have decided all of this two months earlier?

That summer, I email Ambika to tell her we’re engaged and to thank her for setting us up. I tell her that we’d love to invite her to our eventual wedding. She writes back within minutes and says that she’s not available to attend our wedding that doesn’t have a date yet, but she’ll add this to “her files.” I have this strange feeling that Arun and I were her only matchmaking experiment and that she is maybe a little sad that it worked. But I am grateful to her.

My favorite moment of our large, joyful three-day wedding will be napping with Arun in a dark hotel room, in between our 8 am ceremony, and 5 pm reception. I was supposed to have washed and dried my hair in that time, but I would have shown up with the greasiest hair in the world to our reception (and I did) to lay there in Arun’s arms, allowing the weight of the last two years to fall away. 

We finally reach that miraculous point where we can try. I temporarily go off of tamoxifen, a teratogen that can cause birth defects if on it while pregnant. But tamoxifen is what prevents my cancer from recurring, so my OB says I should get pregnant fast. If, after three months, I am not pregnant, I should use my frozen eggs.

We try for three months, and I have one chemical pregnancy. I call my reproductive endocrinologist. This time, together, Arun and I will fill out paperwork and begin the process of making embryos with my previously frozen eggs. These embryos will be different from the embryos we would have made. 

Everything I had thought would matter does not, due to sheer luck. 25 of my eggs fertilize, and ten of our embryos grow to “day five,” when the lab freezes them. After genetic testing, we will end up with six chromosomally normal embryos. Six perfect little embryos waiting to be born. I imagine a girl with pigtails, though I know they are just cells. 

I get pregnant after my first embryo transfer. A few weeks later, Arun will come into our bathroom one night and find me keeled over, bleeding a lot. I will always remember his face—like one of those Italian pentimentos: underneath this sad face, a secret, sadder, more heartbroken face. So much is unspoken; if we can just have this baby, we can put the past and all of its darkness and resentments behind us. At an ultrasound the next day, a doctor tells us that the embryo’s heartbeat is low, but possibly viable. We take the ultrasound image home but do not know whether to tape it up or stuff it in a drawer. Two weeks later, the ultrasound tech can no longer find a heartbeat. 

Though it isn’t like us to cope well, we decide to drive up to Asheville for the weekend. We hike through rolling green hills and drink wine. Back at the hotel, while we watch basketball in bed, I begin to have rhythmic, unbearable pain. Instinctively, I know these are contractions. Arun drives me to an E.R., and just as they are about to give me morphine, a red, palm-sized sliver slides out of me: the last of that embryo. The pain is gone in an instant, a switch turned off. 

At home, I ask the IVF clinic to send me my file. I want a project. In the file, the clinic accidentally includes a sheet of paper with a list of the genders of our embryos, a byproduct of genetic testing. We had told the clinic we did not want to know the genders. Now I see that the one I lost would have been a girl. We had both wanted a girl, so much so that we had named her: Lalitha. Was it the embryo, or was it me, or was it Arun’s decision years ago that has brought us here? Maybe those other ghost embryos would have worked. There is no counterfactual.

Later that summer, another transfer. This time, I get pregnant with M: my firstborn, my little soulmate.

For the last two months of my pregnancy, Arun and I live separately because it is March 2020, and Arun is potentially exposed to Covid in the hospital every day.

We reunite for M’s birth, and it is our best date. He swims out as “Under Pressure” randomly plays on my playlist. I am shocked that my baby has ten fingers, ten toes, and huge inky black eyes, and that he is perfect, and that we got here.

Two and a half years later, after another transfer, I have K: my angel baby. They lift K’s dark, brown, writhing body out—and hold him up over a blue curtain for me to see. He cries out.

There is no curse, I think as I watch them carry my baby away. There is no curse, I whisper to my baby on my chest, when we are reunited. 

Everything I dreamt of for myself has come true.

When K is a newborn, I watch the other mothers at M’s preschool drop-off. The ones with babies wrapped to their chests like koalas, or babies cradled in the crooks of their arms like footballs. I am envious. I never want to let go of K, but find myself panting when I have to bring him with me.

I watch these healthy mothers toss their children into car seats with ease: mothers whose arms and legs are strong and sculpted and young. I watch these mothers push their toddlers in double strollers and wagons, up and down the light hills of our neighborhood. Their silk shirts fill with breeze, like sails with wind, as they bike their children around town. They are free, and so their children are free. 

My dream came true, but I wonder about my children’s dreams. I assumed the doctors would cut out my cancer, and I would move on and finally be healthy. But I realize on many days that I am still not healthy. I have two wide-eyed, brilliant creatures and am not able to take care of themin the consistent, epic, daily way I had imagined. I try as hard as I can, but I have to pace myself. One day there will be an army of us older, frailer mothers who got here, but who are struggling. And one day after that, an army of our children wondering how to navigate their adult lives without us.

When I was pregnant with M, my therapist told me I was brave to have M, which made me feel brave. Later, I wondered what she meant by that.

Another therapist leans toward me on my computer’s Zoom screen, and says, “You must think about it, as a writer, how cancer is inside of you.”

“Meaning?” I ask.

“Well it’s metaphorical, there’s a darkness in you, some people would say.”

“No,” I say. “I disagree, I would not say that.”

I leave that therapist, but wonder about what she said.

My aunt in New Delhi was the first to tell me I have a “black tongue” because I have dark spots on my tongue, like the goddess Kali (and chow chow dogs). In South India, dark spots on your tongue mean that the negative things you say about other people will come true. One time, as a child in the Madras airport, at baggage claim, I said with my black tongue that my sister’s suitcase would not show up. Then, it did not show up. My sister still brings this up.

My mother tells me I projectile-vomited every day until I was two months old. A doctor in New Delhi discovered that the passage between my stomach and small intestine was blocked and corrected this with surgery. But maybe my body lost a way to rid itself of something.

When M is born, Pati, my mother’s mother, warns me about “drishti”: the Tamil word for the evil eye. Indian mothers will line their babies’ eyes with black kohl so that drishti, or the evil eye, will bounce off the darkness of this kohl. The darkness protects. 

Pati tells me not to take or post too many photos of M: This will invite envy on the part of others, which will curse M. When M comes down with a cold at one month, and his tiny nostrils struggle to breathe, though we are quarantined because of Covid, Pati says this is drishti. My baby is sick because I sent photos of him to too many friends, and they all said how cute he was. 

Arun plays hard with our boys, who are now five and three years old. He wrestles them during their self-coined “tumble time,” plants trees with them, stays up late to cook for them. He takes our rescue dog Sambhar, whom we named after the brown gravy we both grew up eating, on late night walks. 

He is still unable to help me with my health, but I can see better now that he would if he knew how. Doctors are trained to look for certainty. Uncertainty is more vexing. He has gotten better about asking me how I feel.

At night, M’s small hands reach for mine. I ask him if he knows how much I love him. He says: yes, more than anything in the world. I tell him yes, and I will love him this much forever, and in my mind, I think, unless I die. 

Sometimes I imagine M and K, older, stumbling toward the edge of the earth, looking for their mother and not remembering me and our every day that we have now. Was she nice? Was she mean? Did she love me more than life itself? Did she wonder if she was making the right decisions? Was she a good mother? Did she struggle a lot? Was she happy?

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

On one date, after Arun and I are already married and are trying to get pregnant, I down a glass of red wine. I tell Arun, “Let’s imagine your second wife. She’ll be so nice, give you blow jobs, never criticize you, be so nice to your parents, always want to visit them, and they’ll be nice to her of course because your second wife won’t have cancer.”

“Stop,” Arun says, and I burst into tears. 

I asked my old oncologist at some point, when I could consider myself cancer-free. 

“Whenever you decide,” she said. 

She meant never, technically. 

A few years ago, I decided to make my original diagnosis date my “cancer-free” date. 

That’s when I started fighting cancer, one therapist said. 

With slow-growing tumors, it is the fifth through tenth years that they are more likely to recur. I am now in year ten. I write to rid myself of, and embrace, the darkness. I am trying to be more free.

The embryos Arun and I made were different from the embryos we would have made. The babies we have are different from the babies we would have had. M who whispers with excitement, “Mama, there’s a new shape!” and tells me about the square with slanted, parallel sides that he learned about, is mine, for a little while. K, who asks Alexa to play Enya, and says, “Let’s relax, Mama,” and sways his arms, and whispers that he’s so relaxed. Who comes home in leggings and bursts out, “Mama, you forgot to give me pockets today!” These are the only children I could ever want. 

A curse is one way of saying someone in the past has done something that will affect you. Biology is another way of saying that. Our dog Sambhar recently went blind, seemingly overnight, while we were away on a trip. In the mornings now, M raps on each step of our staircase, while counting aloud, “One, two, three . . . ” Sambhar tiptoes down, following M’s lead, into his new, dark world.

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