I’m in Chicago, two hours ahead of my twin brother, Christopher, in California. At eleven at night, I brush my teeth and get into bed. Then our nighttime routine begins.

I keep myself awake for the next hour by scrolling through Twitter. Christopher settles on his couch and also scrolls social media. He itches and needs to distract himself. He plays a word in our game of Words With Friends.

It’s now midnight in Chicago. I listen to a podcast to stay awake and play Words With Friends back with Christopher. I flutter my heavy eyes and play a word. I keep refreshing to see when Christopher plays one back. He’s refreshing, too, playing word after word instead of succumbing to the itch.

I spend another hour alternating between fighting the sleep, losing, and waking up again. I’ve got to stay awake for Christopher. 

Around two in the morning, my time, I can’t take it anymore. I give in to the slumber.

Back in California, it’s midnight. When the plays from me on Words With Friends cease, Christopher takes a scratch. He pours himself a small glass of Jameson and sugar-free ginger ale. He sips while he listens to a podcast and ignores his thoughts. He finishes the drink by the podcast’s commercial break and pours another. He’s finished that glass by the next podcast break. He can still hear his thoughts, so he pours another. He flutters eyes that have grown heavy.

Christopher feels warm and numb. He’s had enough when he passes his litmus test of no longer hearing himself say he doesn’t deserve nice things because he’s an alcoholic. He feels calm and safe when he hears nothing but his deep breaths. 

He spends another hour watching thoughts come in and out but not stick. Then he gives into sleep.

Twins are supposedly bound more tightly than other siblings. That was true for Christopher and me. We were linked by the same birthday, interests, friends, teachers, classes, and bedroom far past an appropriate age. Since I can remember, I felt bound to take care of Christopher. I was the older twin by one minute. Protecting him was my job as firstborn.

I took this responsibility seriously. When we were in the second grade, our teacher summoned our mother, who’d immigrated from Belize, to a parent-teacher conference. She left work right away, worried we were struggling in school.

Thankfully, it wasn’t about our performance. Christopher and I were hitting all the benchmarks. It was me. I was doing everything for him, coddling him, stifling him. 

The teacher’s efforts to address my behavior had failed. She separated us since sitting beside each other made it too easy for me. “I’ll tell them to turn to a page in their poem books,” the teacher said to our mother, “and your daughter will turn her page and then turn her brother’s. Christopher’s not learning.”

 But the distance didn’t stop me. When the teacher moved my seat across the room and told us to turn to another poem, I turned my page, walked to Christopher’s desk, and turned his. I huffed back across the class to my seat. I waited for the next instruction minutes later and did the same thing.

“It’s very disruptive,” the teacher pleaded. “Please tell your daughter she can’t do everything for her brother. Your son has got to learn to do things on his own.”

My mom waited until we got home and pulled me aside. She acknowledged that independence wasn’t valued in our Yoruba culture as much as it was in the States. But, she asked me to let him figure things out himself. Let him turn his own pages, write his own chapters, live his own life. I didn’t grasp what she meant, but I told her I’d try. 

I winced when I looked across the classroom at Christopher rifling through the pages of the poem book. The teacher’s glance implored me not to get up. I remained seated and stared at the floor, unable to bear seeing whether Christopher had succeeded.

Later that year, school got out early for an administrative day. We sat on a blue bench in front of the building. It was a hot day in Southern California, so we picked the only bench in the shade. Soon, all the other kids had been picked up, but there was still no sign of our mother. 

The teacher peered down at her watch every so often. Christopher and I sensed her impatience. She muttered about getting to her meetings.

“Don’t worry, we can make it home, Miss,” my brother assured.

It was the early ‘90s, and, apparently, that was all the teacher needed. She released us. 

“I don’t know how to get home,” I whispered as we walked away, not wanting to expose us.

“I do,” he took my hand. “I’ll lead the way.”

I squeezed his hand, and we embarked on our journey home. 

Nothing looked familiar on our route. Not the streets, houses, or businesses. With each turn, Christopher said, “Almost there,” to allay me. He led us from road to road, through crosswalks and neighborhoods. 

As we weaved around another corner, and I was sure we’d never make it, I saw, then, the blue and white garage door of our house at the end of the street. I squealed.

“See, told you we’re almost there.” Christopher hurried us along.

We scurried to the front door and rang the doorbell. My mom opened the door.

Her look of horror caused me to let go of all of the tension I had been holding. I peed all down my legs, drenching my overalls and socks. 

My mother dropped down to embrace me. She removed my shoes and soggy socks, hoisted me by my armpits, and brought me inside. Christopher walked in calmly, giggling at my mess.

The power of experiencing formative events exactly when another person does is unique. As a twin, you are alone in nothing. You have a lifelong consultant for every rite of passage and milestone. When Christopher and I turned ten, we confided we were not excited to be big kids in middle school that fall. When we turned sixteen, we wished to win the high school basketball championship blowing out the candles on our joint birthday cake. On our twenty-first  birthday, we did what I thought was both of our first shots of cheap tequila. And at thirty, we wondered if we’d ever own a home.  

For our thirty-fifth birthday, I went to visit Christopher in California. We had each married a few years earlier, but our spouses were away at work. Decades had passed since it was just us. I returned to my childhood routine and responsibilities. I looked around my brother’s apartment for confirmation that he was well. Lights were on, so bills were paid. The refrigerator was full, so he had disposable money. He looked thin, but not too thin, so I thought his health was fine.

He put the grocery bag he was carrying on the kitchen counter. A 200-milliliter bottle of Jameson fell on its side.

“Oh, is that for tomorrow’s birthday festivities?” I inquired.

My brother didn’t look at me while answering. “No. That’s to get me through tonight.”

He said it so casually that I thought I had misheard him. 

I asked him to repeat himself. He did and added: he was an alcoholic, had been for 15 years, started binge drinking to cope with being racially profiled on his lily-white college campus, and never stopped.

We talked for a couple of hours while I peppered Christopher with questions. He answered them with the same nonchalance. No, he didn’t drink and drive. No, he didn’t drink at work. No, I didn’t need to stop drinking around him. No, he didn’t drink all day. Yes, he did drink from nine at night to one in the morning because it helped him sleep. Yes, he was going to keep drinking. No, he didn’t think that was a problem. 

I acted calm while sinking deep into my chair. 

I returned to Chicago feeling heavy. So much for a special twin connection. I’d failed at the first job I ever had. 

Without thinking, I switched into caretaker mode. Christopher claimed he didn’t want to get sober, but surely he didn’t mean it. I browsed articles with headlines like “How to Help An Alcoholic Stop Drinking,” but none of the advice seemed applicable. The reports described Christopher as high-functioning, a personality trait that would make quitting hard because drinking worked for him. He had a good job, owned a house, appeared happily married—why stop drinking when things were going well? 

So, I came up with the Words With Friends solution. Since bedtime was most acute, I stayed up with Christopher, hoping to keep him focused on something other than drinking for as much of the night as possible. Fewer hours and drinks remained between him and falling asleep. I didn’t need to sleep; I needed to ensure we reached the rest of life’s milestones together. I panicked, thinking of turning forty, fifty, or sixty alone. Every night I stayed up was another chance at another night in our old age together. 

Scientists love to study twins. Identical twins are the most coveted, but fraternal twins of different genders present a unique opportunity to tease out the influence of the environment on life outcomes. Christopher and I were a useful experiment. Besides gender, we shared everything else. I could see the future study: What happens to first-generation Black girl and boy twins brought up in the same immigrant household?

The Black girl develops the tenacity she sees in her mother. Her mother, very familiar with racism, taught her how to fight it. She thrives. She graduates high school as valedictorian. She attends Ivy League schools and, already used to defending herself, pushes against racism at every turn. At every school, in every job, in every relationship.

The Black boy doesn’t think his mother’s tenacity applies to him. He has no idea how to fight off racism. It bothers him, but he feels resigned, powerless to escape it. He graduates high school with okay grades and gets into an okay college. But the racism there intensifies and infuriates him. To his fortune, the college’s binge drinking culture is the perfect coping mechanism. Most nights, he disappears at dorm room parties into a boozy nirvana. Soon, he measures his days not from waking to sleep but from yesterday’s drink to tonight’s. He marries his high school crush, who didn’t balk at his disclosure that he’s an alcoholic. She was raised by alcoholic, high-functioning parents and is accustomed to living with substance abuse. She doesn’t enable Christopher, but she doesn’t encourage him to seek recovery on his own, either. He gets a sales job where he can’t ignore the racism; he just takes it. Then he drinks every night to forget.

One weekday several months after our birthday, I called Christopher. It was part of our new routine. We talked once a week for two to three hours. I liked to keep Christopher talking, hoping he’d offer some clues about how to help him stop drinking. But he usually didn’t talk about his substance abuse.

Two and a half hours into this phone conversation, Christopher asked, “How come you’re not like me?”

I didn’t understand.

“Like, why aren’t you an alcoholic?” He sniffled. “We had the same childhood. How come I’m the only one who’s like this?” His speech was slurred as he choked up. “I don’t deserve to be happy. I’m an alcoholic who deserves to suffer.”

I hadn’t seen or heard my brother cry since we were small. I didn’t even recognize it until his sniffling became sobs.

I wasn’t prepared for this to be the entrée into talking about Christopher’s alcoholism. There was no time to pull up the websites on how to respond. I spoke from the heart. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re doing your best with what you’ve got,” I said. 

Truth was, I didn’t know why I didn’t abuse alcohol or some other substance. My best guess was that I was fortunate enough to not be a Black man in the U.S. I’d never had to appear less scary or threatening. I’d never been asked why I was in this store, this car, this neighborhood. I didn’t have to drink away those indignities to make it to the next day.

We got off the phone. Hours later, we did our bedtime routine. I struggled to stay awake to play one more word, to keep one more sip at bay. At midnight Central and 10 p.m. Pacific, I drifted to sleep. 

My mother told me recently that she’d had a separate conversation with Christopher that afternoon when our second-grade teacher called her to school. 

She asked him if he was having trouble in class. My brother said he wasn’t. Then why did his sister have to turn the pages in the poem book for him? Did he have a difficult time finding the poems?

“No,” my brother had told her. “I know how to do it myself. But Sister likes doing it for me. I want to make her happy.”

It all became clear.

In Yoruba culture, the second twin is considered the elder twin. According to the Yoruba, the second sends the first twin to judge if the world is fit and beautiful before the second twin descends.  

Here I thought I was the elder twin responsible for the caretaking. But Christopher was the older one, and he’d also been taking care of me.

I called Christopher back right away. “You deserve happiness, whether that’s sobriety or something else for you. I won’t try to do it for you—not like I could, anyway. You are capable on your own.”

That night, I fell asleep earlier than usual and missed the bedtime routine. 

I dreamt Christopher and I were on a tropical beach. We looked older. Christopher’s salt and pepper beard matched the strands of silver at the roots of my hairline.

Christopher dipped his toe in the crystal blue water. He flinched at its warmness. He was used to the cold, choppy waters of addiction. He’d been treading water for so long that he didn’t realize how much it took to keep from drowning. At least he was alive.  

He walked farther and farther into the water, mesmerized by its glorious warmth on his skin. He’d thought there existed only chilly, turbulent seas. 

He’d never experienced anything like the balm of the ocean. He kept walking until the water reached his neck. His feet ceased to touch the ground. He didn’t struggle to stay up. He was buoyant. 

I followed him out into the water, a few feet behind him, and yelled, “Lead the way.”

The post Every Night I Stay Awake To Keep My Brother From Drinking appeared first on Electric Literature.

It’s not just that you had pain in your hips, a years-long discomfort that had suddenly surged: simmering water erupting into a boil. The pain didn’t resolve with stretching and resting and warm baths and active disregard, making it hard to sleep since you could no longer lay on your side, the ball-and-socket joint wincing at the weight of your body. Instead, you were forced to sleep on your back and the alteration, the reorientation, unsettled something in your psyche, like facing the wrong way in an elevator. 

It’s not just that the hip issue made sex with your husband uncomfortable, that you struggled to find a position which didn’t exacerbate the pain, that it took ample effort on both your parts for pleasure to prevail resulting in less sex, less happiness. You suspected your hip condition had something to do with childbirth since twice you had labored and delivered healthy babies, your body rearranging itself in visible and invisible ways, ligaments and joints distending, pelvis widening so a human—two humans, a few years apart—could grow and thrive and pass through you. 

It’s not just that when you decided to call a doctor, you had to research what kind of doctor treated hip pain and who had a clinic near your apartment and who accepted your insurance and that merely scheduling it, committing to seeing a specialist, an anatomical authority, created immeasurable relief.

It’s not just that in the doctor’s waiting room you had to fill out a thousand forms crammed onto a clipboard and that while you obliged, a newscaster on a TV on the wall declared that after weeks of infighting in the American government, there was a newly elected Speaker of the House, and when the Speaker was asked his worldview, he held up the Holy Bible. In the video of the Speaker speaking, he decried mass shootings, proclaimed that violence derived from amorality, that America had become an amoral society, that a society permissive of same-sex marriage and pregnancy-termination and feminism fosters amorality, that amorality breeds depravity, that depravity begets violence. In omitting that nearly every mass shooting is committed by a man, in associating women’s rights with male rage, he suggested something other than amorality, something worse. 

It’s not just that, right before your name was called, the reporter switched to coverage of a horrible, faraway war.

The medical technician who read your forms said you needed an X-ray, a standard procedure, and led you to an imaging room where you did not recline or even sit, but instead remained upright, the machine cocked and aimed at your middle. It’s not just that you did not receive a heavy lead shield because, the technologist said, that wasn’t standard for an upright X-ray, meaning that your torso absorbed the full blast of radiation. Though impossible, you swore you felt it in your cells. 

It’s not just that you were placed in a tiny exam room where an X-ray image on a wall monitor revealed the bones of you: hips and pelvis, and some vertebrae on your spine but also, to your surprise, your clearly delineated thighs and the folds of your ass and your bikini-style underwear, bright and undeniable, as though a facsimile of your skeleton had been superimposed upon a black and white photo of your rear. The doctor with whom you made the appointment was not the doctor who entered your tiny exam room; this man, a young blonde in a white coat, blushed when he shook your hand and also when he scanned the image of your ass on the wall, asked questions about your pain, its location and duration. He suspected bursitis, an inflammation of fluid-filled sacks meant to provide lubrication, he said, meant to ease what he called the bump and grind, meant to support the cartilage between bones. 

It’s not just that he used his fists to demonstrate or that he smiled at the image of your ass on the wall then turned and stared at you for a beat too long and winked. 

It’s not just that he left and returned with the primary doctor and also another man, even younger, whose role you did not know, and that all three men were crammed into the very small exam room, four bodies including yours, prone on the table, plus the image of your ass on the wall, and that the heat from their breath made you sweat.

It’s not just that the primary doctor—big nose, about your age—stepped in front, asked you to shimmy lower on the table for a physical exam, a movement that caused your shirt to rise up and your belly to show, or how he leaned over you, stared down at you, pressed his fingers into the sides of your hips whereupon a pain shot down your legs and you moaned and the very young man, whose role you did not know, watched all of this with his mouth ajar, his lower lip wet, as though he wished to eat you. 

It’s not just that the primary doctor, who concurred with the initial doctor, couldn’t say what caused your affliction but could tell you how to treat it—physical therapy, ibuprofen, steroid shots directly into the joint, though the issue might be hard to cure—or that all three men looked at you expectantly, as though you were in a play and had forgotten your lines, until one of them muttered something inaudible and all of them guffawed, a raucous explosion, while you, legs crossed, pondered their politics, their histories. You felt very small in that very small exam room.

It’s not just that when the doctors left, the very young man, whose role you did not know, stayed behind to say there were exercises you could do at home via an app, that it had videos on it, instructions, that he could show you how to download it or that when you slid off the exam table and stood next to him on the floor—shoulder to shoulder, the phone between you, your ass still mounted on the wall to your left, your blouse a bit loose, a V-neck, and as you followed his instructions, tapping things on the screen—he stared shamelessly down your shirt.

It’s not just that when you checked out, wondered what you owed, the anchor on TV was discussing the war, how weeks before in the Middle East, militant assailants had crossed a border into a neighboring country where some of your loved ones live; that they had mutilated civilians, gouged out eyes, cut off breasts, kidnapped a nine-month-old and a Holocaust survivor, that the men were religious extremists and at least one of them called his father to boast about his crimes. 

It’s not just that the head of state in the country where the crimes occurred, a religious supremacist of a different stripe, retaliated full force, rockets and missiles and tanks, white phosphorus for third-degree burns, that he commanded the killing of over eleven thousand innocents, unfathomable carnage, and the displacement of millions more; that he shut off water and power, a whole country trembling in the dark, while you wondered about the infants being born, whether they were dead or alive—any mother’s dread. It’s not just that these civilians had already been subjugated for years, exploited by the men who govern them, dehumanized and denied by the government of the neighboring country where some of your loved ones live. Nobody will say how much death is too much death. The healthcare system is collapsing.

It’s not just that a war on terror is unwinnable and that the president you voted for is financing it anyway. It’s not just that hostages are still hidden in the earth.

It’s not just that everyone on TV, no matter their side, says women and children, women and children, and you want to ask, Why aren’t we talking about the men? What they’re doing? What they’ve done? It’s not just that the militant assailants and their fathers and their supreme leaders and the prime minister and his cabinet and your president and the new Speaker of the House share something conspicuous in common.

It’s not just what you didn’t tell the doctors: that you have been having nightmares, unrepeatable dreams about flesh wounds and shaved heads, about ancestral ghosts and future ghosts, that in each of these dreams you’re wandering around looking for something you cannot find because maybe it doesn’t exist. It’s not just that you didn’t tell the doctors that the pain has grown every day since the war began, that the pain is in your hips, yes, but it’s also in your uterus and your chest, that it’s in your hands, that it’s in your womanhood and motherhood and Americanness and Jewishness. That you know why he can’t tell you its origins: its origins are diasporic. This pain is in your lineage. This is a pain that you will bear even when you’re gone. It’s not just that you will pass it on to your children.

It’s not just that as you walked home, achy and tender from the doctors’ thumbs, you considered the vulnerability of bodies. That you contemplated sovereignty, autonomy, power. It’s not just that you wondered whose God was pleased. No. It’s that you were seeking treatment for the wrong thing. It’s that you wanted proof pain could be assuaged. It’s that you wanted to know problems could have solutions. You wanted to diagnose a savage cycle. You wanted to know a body at peace.

The post You Will Bear This Pain Long After You’re Gone appeared first on Electric Literature.

Every time I see this clip, I swipe past it before I have time to face it. I’m 29 today, I’ll be 30 on January 22nd, now only 3 short months away, and I have beetles crawling through my veins at just the thought of it. I know this isn’t a revolutionary thought, this dread I feel as I inch closer to thirty, to three-zero, further away from my days binge-drinking out of a vodka handle and making out with men who certainly will not be my husband (but that’s okay! It doesn’t matter! because I’m too young to care!). But this feeling is universal. It’s shoved down my throat every day with glazed-donut skincare and girlies in low-rise jeans who are rolling their eyes at how “cheugy” I am. 

Today, I am the nearly 30-something woman who flies home from Los Angeles every few months and tries to talk to her college sister about blow jobs. The woman who is seriously and not so seriously talking to her boyfriend about a wedding ring and children and also still asking herself if that’s what she wants, really, while googling how soon she’d have to freeze her eggs for it to all still be worth it. Simultaneously, I am as grounded as I’ve ever been. As sure of how I want to spend my days, as certain about what fills me and as I am about what doesn’t. Still, I get a sense from the internet, and my darkest thoughts by proxy, that I should be willing to trade in my stability and peace of mind for my youth, that both things can’t exist at once. That once I’m settled I’ll be boring, and monotone, and wearing skinny jeans for the rest of my life. 

When I share these thoughts, conflicting and confusing, with my best friend, Ellie, who floats around the world with a child-like wonder I envy, she tells me that I need to lighten up. “You’ve been saying you’re thirty since we were like, twenty-five,” she jokes. And she’s right, I do need to lighten up. But I can’t figure out how to make what everyone tells me is the end of my youth easy to swallow. 

Maybe that’s because, from an early age, I’ve been taught that staying small was the secret sauce to life. That the only thing that would give me what I wanted was to be forever young. I was 13 and performing in The Lion King on Broadway when the director told me my contract wouldn’t be renewed because, in just 6 months, I had grown 2 inches, the exact right amount to make me “too tall” to be young Nala anymore. Even the New York Times reported my failure, quoting that “For Natalie there will be no renewal of the six-month contract(…) the girl was clearly “taller than Simba, and that’s not a good thing, probably.” I was mortified, seeing the shame of my growth in print like that. 

From that day on, I remember spreading my legs wide around the producers to make myself look shorter, bending my knees ever so slightly when they came around with hopes they wouldn’t notice how I’d sprouted up. But unfortunately for me, I couldn’t hide from the way I was growing, from my maturation, from the budding tits that stuck out just enough to make the audience wonder if I was innocent enough to be up there, dancing around on a stage like that. And once that was said and done, and I bowed my last curtain call, I carried it with me, this idea that for a woman in the world, it’s better to be smaller, shorter, younger. 

From then on, every birthday to me has felt like a death sentence. I over-exaggerate my love for it, forcing days-long celebrations from my loved ones. But somewhere deep down, the anticipation of it all kills me, makes me lean over with grief and guilt that I haven’t achieved enough to earn my way to another year on this planet. What a sight it must be for the fly on the wall, watching me on the eve of my birthday at 23, 24, and 25, pacing the room and staying up all night asking myself who will I be once the clock strikes 12, asking myself what my worth will be if not the most impressive young person in the room. 

In her novel, Writers and Lovers, Lily King has this line about not being the youngest kind of adult anymore. “These BU students, they’re too young to have ridden a banana bike. It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore.” And I think that’s who I am now – the girl, or woman, in the room who remembers the banana bike. Not so young that you’re staring at me wide-eyed and spitting game about all the possibilities of my life. Not so old that you’ve totally disregarded me. In some sort of purgatory hell nearing an expiration date. I’m the milk in the fridge that you’re sniffing before you swallow down. Or at least I’m telling myself I am. 

So here I am at almost thirty, trying to kick my body back into feeling 22. I’m waking up an extra hour early to get to Pilates because I can finally start to feel my body changing, the way it bloats in the morning if I eat after 9 p.m. The way I can’t stay up past 11 without feeling it behind my eyes in the morning. The way I can’t drink more than two glasses of champagne without feeling at least a little bit queasy the next day, and the way I certainly can’t forget to stretch without my lower back feeling like it’s on fire. 

Beyond the physical though, I’m hyper-aware that the choices I make today will impact what’s possible for my tomorrow. Or as my little brother would say, I’m like “really an adult now. I have to get my taxes right and everything. I just can’t hide from it anymore.” I read that in America, the average age to buy a house is Thirty-Three. Every day I’m checking my bank account to see if that math will add up for me. So far, I don’t think it will. I’m stuck in this cycle of iced coffee or home ownership, and my younger self keeps slurping down that cold caffeine while the 30-year-old in me beats her to a pulp at night. 

What scares me about the way I’m aging the most though, more than wrinkles or morning bloat, is how deeply I am part of the problem. How I am the spitting image of these 25-year-old girls I hate so much on the internet, gagging at the thought of myself, despite the fact that it’s a privilege to get older. I’ve read that many indigenous cultures have holistic views of time and aging, one that aligns more with a circular or cyclical understanding of life. Western thought tends to think of it in a more linear fashion. The beginning is sharp, full of possibility, full of questions, and full of people who are A-okay with you saying you’re still figuring it all out. In the end, we all pay our respects. We look at the people lying on their deathbeds and we say things like—they were the kindest, the greatest, the most special soul who was full of life until the day they died. It’s in the middle when we are cruel to ourselves and to each other. It’s in the middle, at age (almost) thirty that we start coming to terms with our mortality and hating ourselves for it. 

I know what you’re going to say, or at least what I wish you’d say, what I’m probably writing this piece begging you to tell me—that I’m so young, that I still have my whole life ahead of me, that I need to calm down. 

But do you believe that, really? And if your answer is still a resounding yes, then why does it feel like I’m soon going to be drowning in a whirlpool of ghost souls without pigment, all wrinkled up and soulless like that scene in the animated Hercules movie? Regardless of your response though, according to all these kids on the internet, I’m running out of time. To them, I’m officially in the age of cement, and so it feels like one way or another, I better decide what kind of sculpture I’m meant to be.

The post When Turning Thirty Becomes an Existential Crisis appeared first on Electric Literature.

I can’t stop thinking, now, five months after the fact, about the murder of another college freshman, December 2019. For a few weeks everyone knew her name and the same bright photograph in news stories across the country. Beloved and talented, in her first term at a storied college in a storied city.

There should be a different word for the love you have for your child, and a word that erases the world if you lose them.

It was not a mystery for long, though. A thirteen-year-old boy, living in a nearby public housing development, was arrested the following week; later, his two fourteen-year-old friends, who wielded the knife, were arrested and charged as adults. How many would imagine themselves into this grief? To love a child who has done and can never undo the worst thing. 

The act took place in a park wedged between Central Harlem, which twenty years ago was still half-gutted from the crack epidemic and began gentrifying in earnest only about ten years earlier, and Morningside Heights, the neighborhood of Columbia University and Barnard, several seminaries, a music school, and plenty of fresh produce. This park is built beside a cliff running north to south between the two neighborhoods, the physical manifestation of the city’s historical and evolving economic and racial divides. It is also the city’s most beautiful park, with tiers, boulder promontories, and many flights of Olmstead marble stairs. A waterfall, a grotto, flowering everything in springtime. 

This park was our neighbor for thirteen years. We have since moved away, but my sharp-sweet memories of it hail from this later period of earnest gentrification when we had a child and the need for lawn equivalents. It was the park where my son spilled his first blood, forehead on rough asphalt. Parents came running with the ointment and bandages I never packed. I carried him, both of us crying, back up the cliff and north to our stoop. Little divot, still, near his hairline.  

We held imprecise games of soccer on the south end after kindergarten pick up. One day, a boy—six or seven—joined us, played with gusto, gathered in for the snacks. And when we began the northward walk home, he walked with us. He was walking himself home, he said, as he always did. He said he hoped he’d see us again. We said we hoped so, too.  

For years we gravitated with my son’s friend Sasha to the rocky promontories to the north where the teenagers often hung out. I brushed the most obvious glass from the boulders so they could stage plays. The plays were like dreams, intricate and unhinged. They both loved to die. They took turns dying and being brought back to life.

Sasha is alive, I thought five months ago. My son, alive. His friends Rafi and Maya and Naomi—they have all played in that park and they are all alive. Their families, alive. And I miss and love them. 

The park was a known danger. The cliff that runs its length maintains the natural barrier between neighborhoods, the good air and water and schools always on high. Despite the divide, Columbia had seen in the park a potential land grab. After an outgoing president of the university urged the board of trustees in 1945 to “protect ourselves against invasion from Harlem or from the North” by buying land east and north of campus, another president successfully proposed building a large gymnasium for students and community members in the park itself.

The plans designated the top floors and an entrance at the top of the cliff solely for the predominantly white Columbia affiliates and another entrance to the bottom two floors in the park for the Harlem residents. Protests—among student and community groups—flared. A man climbed into the giant shovel of an excavator, a Columbia board member was burned in effigy. Eventually, the plans and a giant crater they’d dug into the park were abandoned (which crater later became the pond and waterfall). 

But by the aughts, though the longtime Harlem residents might remember, the perpetual newcomers to Morningside Heights knew only that it came with a warning: it was both beautiful and dangerous, a borderland caught between dereliction and revival. The stairs, for example, five or six flights that bridge the highlands and the low had been recently restored. But people were still wounded and died in this borderland, in robberies, drug deals, and arguments. For the seven years I taught there, I received Columbia’s neighborhood crime alerts: almost every week there was a reported robbery or assault and many of these occurred on the Morningside border or just inside this park, usually past midnight. The power of the Ivy League did not grant residents immunity beyond its spiked walls. I walked the avenue two blocks over at all times of day and night but gave the borderland a wide berth at night. In the daylight, though, I walked that beautiful park, with thrills of fear and joy tangled in me.  Not at home, likely not welcome, but alert and alive. 

I was rarely unaware of race and class, living as we did on the less visible northern border that separates Morningside Heights and Harlem, a border to which Columbia has since taken a wrecking ball, erecting behemoths on the land it accrued over the line. We had smudged that line minutely years before the construction, though, stumbling into a dirt-cheap apartment ahead of the curve. We were gentrifiers, for certain. But when you don’t have or make much money, when your bathroom floor is a cracked pastiche of linoleum, tile, and puddle of concrete, you might occasionally forget that you are changing the tone and the viability of the neighborhood. 

Still, we lived there. And we had to understand how to be both a person and a demographic in the neighborhood. We worked at a blend of self-and-other awareness: how we are perceived in these streets, in our own building, a building sold to its residents in the 1980s for a few hundred dollars per apartment. What harm are we seeding, what harm might we shutter down? Could we imagine our way across the street (literally crossing under the elevated train to the other side of the tracks) into the ten towers of the Grant public housing: what was it like to grow up there, to parent there, to get good news, to save up for something, spiral into something, to be lonely there? Our imaginations were not always as vigilant as our bodies, though—they churned and faltered, revived and faltered again. Like that, on and on.

I come to know a place largely by walking, and a map of my long and varied routes would not include the many paths crisscrossing the fifteen acres of public housing grounds. A lacunae, it didn’t exist. Otherwise, I wore out many pairs of shoes walking everywhere, fast, with real or invented purpose. Or trying to slip through without taking up much space, an unasked for apology for my presence.

Aside from cat callers. Aside from a stolen bike and car, and car windows in two smash-and-grabs, which we thought an acceptable urban tax. I called the police exactly once in these years. A white man I’d never seen before had plastered our stoop with porn mags and was himself spread-eagle on the steps, masturbating. He was gone by the time the cops arrived.  

Rare were the occasions when all of this subtext was made text, but we could count on one: the yearly “Anti-Gentrification Fair” on our block, which closed the street to traffic and produced a rummage sale, dj, a stickball game, even a bouncy castle once. We steeped in the dissonance of enjoying the music, feeling that we “supported the cause” (which meant, materially, what?), being cash strapped (for the first years, at least), and knowing that the fair on our block was a message exactly, precisely for us. Over the years—a new Starbucks on the corner, a juice bar, kombucha on tap—it dwindled to a boombox and a few dishes for sale on a blanket. Gentrifiers never want a fight, but they win nonetheless.

It did become my home, particularly after having a child, seven years later. I was no longer a ghost consciousness floating through the neighborhood, but the chaperone of a fluffy, squishy creature who drew advice and squeezes and so many admiring comments about his blue eyes that I began to think there should be copies of The Bluest Eye available on every corner. Having a child is a test of your self-erasure, as well, because you want things on their behalf, all the things you think you can do without for yourself. And then the contest over resources begins. Rather, the contest that has been there all along becomes manifest in the shape of your child darting for one of the two available swings, the single open subway seat, one of fifteen available preschool spots, one of thousands of applications for twenty kindergarten seats.

Morningside Park kept the fixed fight over resources in focus. And, in the playground at the top of the park, it heated up one day. What we called Bear playground was completed in 2010, the year our child was born—an elaborate play space in an area of the park that previously had been left mostly to drug users and the unhoused. It’s wedged between a public middle school built on a rocky promontory that, with its caged windows and prodigious concrete, looks like a wing of Alcatraz; the Grant towers to the north, and, to the east, unceasing construction on a boutique hotel and apartment buildings, one of which made the bold move of building around and over a shabby brownstone that clearly could not be bought and demolished. 

My three-year-old with his dandelion puff of hair was under a playground structure with several other children, Black and White. The details are hazy to me now, but they were hazy to me at the time, as well. I was in the perimeter of adults. In a panopticon, you can see but not necessarily hear. I saw him speaking to an African-American girl, perhaps a little younger. She had a toy and he was empty-handed. They seemed amicable. I’m pretty sure that the toy wasn’t in the ball or vehicle category, as my son had no interest in these, but in the toy weapon category—a Nerf or water gun. But a toy gun feels too outrageously symbolic, given the gun violence in the housing towers, given the death of Tamir Rice, and all of the invented weapons that have been the pretext for police and “stand your ground” shootings. But I feel certain it was because we didn’t allow gun toys (one of several confused prohibitions that are now half-intact or crumbled) and that would have made it irresistible. 

A parent I knew later told me my son had asked to play with it. I assume she said no. He must have reached for it. Then someone was cursing and shouting and it took me an excessive number of beats to register that my son was the object of the shouting and that this was probably her father.

What I had read at first as a standard toddler toy negotiation, he saw as one of a portfolio of threats against his daughter’s well-being and self-determination. My son was another blond boy acting like everything in the m*****f**king world was his. 

Though I regularly railed against such boys and their adult and historical counterparts, I hadn’t seen my child as a threat. My dandelion-headed three-year-old. I felt misunderstood and ashamed and guilty, and we left as quickly as possible, shaken. Babyhood had functioned mostly as a meeting ground until then, I had thought. I was shaken because I didn’t know we were that far away from the people around us, from our neighbors. More precisely, I was shaken because I couldn’t count on everyone to pretend we weren’t so far away, to conform to the gentrifier’s interface of benign optimism.  The newcomers weren’t shouting and threatening children. Weren’t threatening anyone at all. We were volunteers for neighborhood beautification, and community gardens, and programs called “Everybody Wins.” Gentrification was unaccountable, agentless—ghosts rearranging the neighborhood as the human residents slept. 

But of course we were threatening his child, with the silent, steady rise in grocery bills and rents and property values and taxes, and the din of demolition and construction. Their housing, the streets, the park, now we wanted the toy from her hands? 

Gentrifiers are constitutionally unable to see themselves as violent, as perpetrators. But I would like to see how an infrared camera might capture the fear a gentrifier spreads as she walks. As I walked north to south with my baby strapped to my chest, I was not a ghost at all but a tower of fire, sending out ripples of icy blue and white: She’s here. There are more on the way, a flickering army that will take and take and never understand what they’ve taken.

Five months later and her death and the middle-schoolers’ lives are turning in my mind—the human pain radiating from Morningside Park, through bedrooms and classrooms and juvenile detention facilities, across neighborhoods, across the country. Pain that makes it impossible to keep the lights on, impossible to turn them off. Pain that stops time, even while construction grinds on. Fearing “invasion,” Columbia preemptively invaded Harlem to the north. They evicted sweat equity tenants and have now nearly completed a 7 billion dollar glass-and-metal campus, a space they promised would be welcoming to residents—no gates. You can belong if you have $17 for “avotoast” and a coffee or $115/month for a climbing gym membership. A residential building still under construction will tower over Grant Housing across the street, on the other side of the tracks. According to a 2013 watchlist, Grant is most neglected public housing project in New York. The public housing authority now needs almost 80 billion just to repair existing homes across the city.  

I know at least a handful of people who knew her, I had taught students like her in the same rooms where she must have studied. In thirteen years of living across from the Grant housing projects, I know not one person who knew the three boys. So, it’s not my place to talk about her or to talk about the boys. The story would be rigged. The way their tragedies were hundreds of years in the making when they collided at the base of an ancient geological upheaval. Perhaps I can note simply that our culture takes a cliff and turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The post Gentrifiers Never Want a Fight, but They Win Nonetheless appeared first on Electric Literature.

R Bar is the first place I think of when I hear about Club Q. R Bar and the cat I need to go feed. 

The R Bar and Lounge is a small venue in Fort Collins, Colorado. Situated in the corner of a university town, yet mostly ignored by students, the events hosted by the town’s LGBT+ bar are largely patronized by folks in their mid twenties and over.

When I took a gal there last month for a comedy show, the crowd of thirty did a pretty good job of filling up the space. I did my part in closing the distance between her shoulders and mine, and the laughter did the rest.  

The acts were bawdy, explicit, exuberant. Tall tales of threesomes gone sideways and blowjobs gone backwards had the audience cackling, rollicking in our seats. The headliner was bombastic, bisexual chaos incarnate. 

After the show, the two of us went up to the bar to close out our tab. The bartender complimented my date’s necklace. She beamed and fawned, though I knew that she had spent the show annoyed by the way her braids kept catching on the clasp of the statement piece she wore. She told me on the walk back to her car that she wears the jewelry anyways, that after quarantine she needed all the positive attention she could get. I hoped fervently in that moment for the chance to give her everything she needs.

We made sure to thank the headliner on the way out, complimenting his set. He was endearingly bashful, peddling his poetry books to the patrons, doling out only the softest of “thank you’s” to the appreciative audience members. 

I learn about Club Q in my kitchen, from my roommate and one of his partners. They are brewing coffee, and I am brewing tea. Or I am brewing them coffee, and they are brewing me tea. It never seems to matter. It’s been cold for weeks now, and we are always heating up water and passing around mugs. 

I keep switching to decaf to push the jitters away. I don’t know how I keep switching to decaf.

My kitchen is about two hours from Club Q, or one hour, or an hour and a half, depending on if I, my roommate, or one of his partners is driving. We all have vastly different relationships with the speed limit. 

My phone buzzes, again and again and again. I hear about Club Q in my bedroom, in my living room, in my office, back in the kitchen. My community wakes up, brews coffee and tea and decaf, and reaches out. 

The gal I took to the comedy show texts me minutes after the coffee’s gone stale. Hi. Just checking in. There is rarely time to complete mourning one event before another. 

I sit with that thought and it fills me with unease. The mourning for the pandemic still roils in my gut, an unfinished plague still ripping through hospitals, still bringing a crumbling nation to its knees for a third winter. The grief I carry for my own losses hangs unfinished in my chest, a draft I’ll get around to writing an ending for eventually. 

But she’s absolutely right. The magnitude of the endless cycle of loss faced by my community as we suffer mass violence time and time again, the threat of it ceaselessly pressed to our throats, must be neutered in time for work on Monday. 

In September, my friends back in Illinois made a splash across national right wing news outlets for hosting a Youth Drag Show. The event had to be canceled as threats of violence poured in from across the country. I watched from afar as my loved ones from back home had to prioritize the safety of the teenagers we once fostered and mentored together. That was six weeks ago. 

That was six fucking weeks ago.

I get more texts about Club Q. 

We heard the news. 

I hope you’re okay. 

Sending love from back home. 

Do you need anything?

Others just say I love you.

I turn off the notifications from The Transgender Center of the Rockies altogether, the avalanche of grief I can’t handle on top of my own. I delete a handful of messaging apps off my phone for good measure, then seek out a handful of trusted voices. 

Rumors swirl, the grapevine shakes, we try to pass down information, try to understand what’s going on, what just happened to our community down the street before the national news seizes hold of what’s happened. 

It was a drag show.

It was a Transgender Day of Remembrance Event.

It was a murder at a funeral.

In the days to follow, the news will learn that the culprit was a Mormon man. I look, bleakly, at the plastic tackle boxes where I’ve stored my valuables since middle school. Nestled between suede necklaces from summer camps and cheap charms from dollar store bracelets lay Joseph Smith Jr. themed jewelry from my late grandmother. 

I carefully lift out my Young Womanhood Medallion, an award painstakingly earned over hundreds of hours of work in the Mormon church. I consider, for the thousandth time, throwing it away. Or perhaps burning it, like I did my carefully annotated Book of Mormon. Like I did my photographs of my parents. 

I hooked up with a fellow ex-Mormon last month. They kept trying to talk about Mormonism in bed. Every time they did, I threatened to walk out and leave them cold. We didn’t sleep together again, but I did bring them home to meet my roommates, to smoke joints on our porch to the chagrin of our neighbors with the yappy dog. 

Their glasses hung crooked on their face the last time they came over, and we offered to take them to the eye doctor. They shrugged and said they’d think about it. Sure enough a few days later I got a text that their glasses had fallen apart. 

I know it’s the holidays, so no rush, they said. I’ll be fine for a while. 

Don’t be stupid, you teach reading to babies. You need glasses. I said. I got a sympathetic migraine just thinking about trying to introduce literacy to a six year old, let alone doing it while squinting. Let’s do it Monday. I’d just feed the cat after we got back. 

But I had forgotten about the snowstorm from last week, and the date I had to reschedule for the day I had off, Monday. And like hell was I going to reschedule with the stunning ginger entomologist again, and risk them thinking me flaky. So circles my mind on Transgender Day of Remembrance; tragedy, eye doctor, tragedy, feed the cat, tragedy, date night, tragedy.

I wind up mourning backwards. The names and faces of the deceased won’t start to circulate social media for another few days, so my mind latches onto a known quantity, the number of victims that passed—five. Five fewer of us. 

My mind obligingly fills in the rest, neatly. A pair of crooked glasses, a cat in an empty apartment, coffee gone stale on the counter. All the days those people should’ve had, all the nights they deserved to live. I look ahead at my calendar. My high school friend is flying in for Thanksgiving, and we’re having people over for hot pot. I try to wrap my head around that table standing empty. 

I used to live in Illinois, both in the suburbs of Chicago and in a handful of the rural cities in the central region of the state. 

As an out trans person in rural Illinois, I got a decent handle on what hate looks like. It was hurled at me from lifted trucks, spat at me from coworkers chapped lips. It found me on a walk around my neighborhood, once with a small mob forming to chase me home, a group of grown men screaming “mangirl” after a single young adult.

It was explicit, loud, and visible.

I moved to Colorado, in large part, to be safer. For the most part, it’s worked. I’ve even been able to dye my hair bright yellow since moving here, something I would’ve never dreamed of trying back home.

Sure, the hatred of Colorado is much quieter. Until, of course, an explosion like the one at Club Q. 

That ex-Mormon friend and I wind up getting boba tea and spam musubi a couple days after the shooting. A massive flatscreen TV dominates the cafe, blaring tragedy directly into our wide eyes. 

“Musket fire,” they mutter. I sigh, and know exactly what they mean. 

Just about 14 months ago, a prominent Mormon leader released a statement, held in as high regard as scripture to believers, infamously known ever since as the ‘muskets talk’. Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland told devotees at Mormon college Brigham Young University to, literally, take up muskets against LGBTQ+ people. While there have been other, subtler condemnations of what Mormons so lovingly designate ‘the lifestyle’, this call to violence was direct and clear. Ever since the muskets talk, any gay person who knows Mormons has been holding their breath and bracing themself.

Barely a year later, a Mormon enacts a mass shooting at a gay club. 

“Musket fire,” I spit. It wasn’t the first piece of indoctrination the cult of our youth hurled at impressionable people. But any good ex-Mormon knows the leading cause of death of teenagers in Utah. Any good ex-Mormon knows the rates of PTSD in LGBTQ+ Mormon survivors. And any ex-Mormon worth their salt knows that for every time something’s said out loud, there’s a thousand times it’s been whispered. 

Hate lives in the glares of the public. I catch it on walks, in stores, at the library and the pharmacy and the post office. I’ve developed a litmus test, my own passive aggressive coping mechanism. I beam my widest smile at a suspected ‘phobe. If they scowl back, I’ve got confirmation that their day has been ruined by my continued existence in this Starbucks. My Denver high score is eight scowls over lunch, but I’ve got friends who can rack up over a dozen in an hour.

It’s gratifying to exist with trans people at your side and share that moment of knowing that you are unwanted, rather than shouldering it alone. Still, there lurks that unshakeable feeling that  congregation creates danger, that togetherness is a folly.

Even in a university town like Fort Collins, groups of four or more of us have tugged hats over dyed hair, pulled coats on over blouses, pulled mittens on over painted nails before quick walks down the block after one too many adverse incidents threatened safety.

The persecution quietly pursues us into our workplaces. This summer I worked at a daycare for school aged children. My boss called me in to relay a parent complaint about me. One of the children had gone home and reported that one of their teachers was “not a boy or a girl.” 

Children ask me constantly what I am. In public, in line at the grocery store, on park benches, when I substitute teach, and most certainly when I worked at daycare. As a nonbinary person, I’ve perfected my delivery of the same simple answer. “I’m not a boy or a girl, I’m just a Kaia.”

My boss told me never to say that again and that I was not allowed to reference my gender at work. A flurry of emails, sobbing into my roommates’ shoulders, and discussions with human resources later and we may possibly, eventually, see a revision to a policy someday. Still, I kept telling the kids the same answer, and my boss just spent the rest of the summer avoiding eye contact with me. 

This fall, I received a near identical phone call from a high school administrator. He had received a parent complaint that I had introduced myself to a class of high schoolers with… the administrator struggled here.

“You use they/them pronouns?”

I confirmed that I did.

He continued haltingly. “The parent wasn’t…clear what the.. issue…was…” When it became clear that I was not going to confess to any overt acts of indoctrination, the conversation was apparently over. 

An educator friend of mine in a nearby town also got called in to several meetings with their boss this fall about pronouns in the classroom, including an attempt to forbid them entirely. Many local administrators, emboldened by legislature in other states, have been pushing for trans students, employees, and educators to, as the catchy saying goes, “Don’t Say Gay.” 

We get it constantly, the push and pull of staring and looking away in disgust. The awkwardly invasive questions glaringly paired with the silence on using our actual pronouns and correct terms.

That quiet dismissal is not harmless, and not just because it contributes to an eventual explosion. It’s dangerous in the present as well. 

Colorado, you need to look at transgender people. Not just visit us when you’re comfortable for the occasional outings to our safe spaces, not just marvel at us when we choose to perform for your entertainment. It’s not enough for you to gawk at your televisions. You need to look around you, and listen, and start asking questions. Question yourself, question one another, and then, finally, question what you actually know about us.

You already know a transgender person. I constantly correct well-meaning coworkers, peers, and allies when they effusively thank me for being the first trans person they’ve ever met. 

“No, that’s nowhere near the truth. I’m just the first one who came out to you. And, there’s even a chance that there were others before me who tried to tell you as well. I could just be the first one you noticed.” Even I, with a rotating wardrobe of They/Them t-shirts, nametags, and witty reminders still manage to slip under the radars of those who desperately want to avoid perceiving me. 

Transgender people have two holidays. One, mentioned earlier, is Transgender Day of Remembrance, occurring annually on November 20th since 1999.  Transgender Day of Remembrance was spurred by an overwhelming community response to the homicide of black transgender woman Rita Hester in early December 1998. 

Ever since, the transgender community and our allies have used late November as a time to honor those lost to the extreme violence and health issues that plague the trans community. 

The other transgender holiday, created in 2009 by trans woman Rachel Crandall-Crocker, is Transgender Day of Visibility, celebrated annually on March 31st. 

I include the dates as vital context; Transgender Day of Visibility was created a decade later as a response to Transgender Day of Remembrance. A spring celebration to contrast an autumnal memorial. Together they form twin pleas, twin prayers. See Us and Remember Us.

Transgender Day of Remembrance exists because violence against us is normalized and violence against us is normalized because we are not. We are hidden, we are othered, we are eradicated and erased. 

We are invisible.

When we are seen, we are in danger. We know this long before we step foot onto the dance floor at Q, long before we push past protesters at Planned Parenthoods. 

So notice us before we’re on national news. Look at us before we’re in body bags. As the trans adage goes, give us flowers while we’re here. Do you even know what a trans person is?

Look, Colorado, at the heroine of Club Q, storming a gunman down with her heels, ensuring that he would not leave unscathed, that he would not go forward unchallenged. 

I’ve sat at countless tables, in countless meetings, drowning in countless terrified group chats hand wringing over the possibility of a night like the one that happened at Club Q. Back when I lived in Illinois, preparations for the community Pride festival had me shoulder to shoulder with my trans brothers, sisters, and siblings preparing our contingency plans for gun violence at the headlining drag show. 

In rural Illinois, violent threats constituted a nigh reliable component of our lives as LGBTQ+ community organizers. We weighed threats against realities, possibilities against certainties, darkly joked about stoning kevlar. Some of the weekend’s performers were sandwiched between us, exhausted by their own preparations for the events, the phone calls to the city, the weight of these conversations happening again and again clear on their shoulders and in their eyes. 

Look, Colorado, at the caretaker coddling your babies at the daycares. Their glasses are askew. Their haircut is short and uneven, like their favorite attachment on their clippers finally snapped off halfway through the trim. They always dress in layers, the dragging side of the loose overshirts often serving as makeshift kerchiefs for your children’s messes. 

I know trans teachers and trans caretakers, trans nannies and trans tutors. 

We are wiping the dribble off your babies’ chins, and cleaning gravel from skinned knees. We are teaching them stage presence and decimals, we are teaching them sign language and Shakespeare.

Look, Colorado, at the healthcare worker, buckled beneath the weight of a pandemic. Her partners wait at home for her, hoping the roads are clear by the time of her commute, hoping that her mask staves off the worst from the air.

Do you see us as the nurses at your bedside, the scientists in your labs, the lifeblood of your hospitals? 

Transgender technicians process your blood tests, carefully settle out the sediment into neat little lines. Transgender researchers design safety protocols, keep the hospitals running years deep into a plague. Transgender scientists run your COVID tests, hour after thankless hour. I was one of them. Now I sneak leftover fortune cookies into my roommate’s lunchbox on her way to her shift at the lab, hoping that it bolsters my quiet wishes that she ‘stay safe’. 

Look, Colorado, at the grad student, at the barista, at the engineer. Look at the blue hair, at the statement necklace, at the cat food. Look at the ginger entomologist and I giggling over the heart shaped rice at the Thai restaurant, splitting the meal and splitting the check and splitting our precious time with each other.

Look, Colorado, at my loved ones gathered over hot pot for Thanksgiving. We exchange pronouns as easily as we trade pork belly and bok choy. One of us, squinting, still waiting for their new glasses to come in, asks to go by a new name for the night. It slides into our vocabulary as easily as the enoki mushrooms my roommate dumps into the pot for us to share. 

Our transgender lives include rallies and parades and vigils. We go to protests and courtrooms and clinics. In the past year, between the eight of us we’ve protested the overturning of Roe v Wade, faced down transphobic bosses, come out at workplaces, marched in Pride parades, demanded fair treatment for ourselves over and over again. In the weeks to come we’ll mingle with our community as we process the tragedy of Club Q, candles cupped in fingers gone numb from the cold. 

And the rest of the time, our transgender lives find us breaking bread, going to work, and finding time in between to be human.

Colorado, you need to get used to transgender people, now. Not as a concept, not as a political belief. We are not something to grieve in the theoretical space. You need to know of the existence of transgender people as solidly as you know the earth. You need to understand our existence as fact. 

Transgender people are not a thought experiment, not a gotcha, not a talking point. We are not a demographic for cisgender people to show off their inclusivity, not a vocabulary term to include in a list. 

We are a simple fact of existence. Allyship is not theoretical tolerance for the concept of transgenderism.

What are you doing to engage with us? To feature us? To hear us? In the most well-meaning of spaces, to the most well-meaning of people, I am constantly having to explain who and what I am.

If you fly a progress pride flag, if you have a trans flag on your lapel or on a sticker on your office window, then can you define ‘transgender’? Can you define ‘nonbinary’? Do you understand the unique challenges that people with those identities face in your field?

Do you understand why the tragedy at Club Q happened? Do you understand what it will take to prevent the next one?

Come to our events. I know you’re probably scared to do so, but understand what we’ve been doing for decades, what civil rights activists for all groups have had to do for centuries now. We are gathering at vigils, at protests, knowing the risks, knowing the danger. Stand in solidarity with us.  

Do your kids know their pronouns? Do you know yours? Do you introduce yourself with your pronouns? 

Introduce your kids to trans media. Check out books and other materials from the library on trans people, and ask the librarians to help you find ones you may not have heard of. Purchase what you can, give them away as gifts. Spread the good word. 

If you want to call yourself an ally, then start acting like it. If you’re appalled by this tragedy, then start acting like it. You’ve thought. You’ve prayed. We need action. 

The Colorado LGBTQ+ community spent Transgender Day of Remembrance 2022 mourning even more than the expected losses of the past year. These losses are untenable. 

Transgender mourning and transgender joy are two sides of the same coin. As a community, we suffer the depths of mourning for our lost transgender siblings when we recognize the joy they have been robbed of. So many of us already start living life as our true selves at a later age, taking on our true names and identities long after our cisgendered counterparts. Then violence continually cuts our lives even shorter.

We deserve so much more than to be censored, to be truncated, to be invisible. 

We deserve the full abolition of all legal precedent for discrimination against us. The law takes so many ugly shapes, especially against transgender people of color. From reproductive rights to prison abolition, almost all activist issues massively impact transgender lives. Laws that seek to kneecap our community outright are only the beginning of our oppression at the hands of the state. Allyship is directly confronting and challenging local, state, and federal legislation that threatens trans lives and championing the unambiguous guaranteeing of full civil rights for all. 

We deserve to move unimpeded through life, with fully guaranteed healthcare for all ages, including trans youth receiving the medical intervention that they desire. 

We deserve to exist safely in our communities, unthreatened by the hate and fear of those who seek to destroy our peace. 

We deserve to be seen as fully realized human beings, with lives worth fighting for. 

Colorado, what you do not see are the children who sidle up to me and whisper secret names. They bequeath these treasures to me, a stranger, ask me about binders and hormones and how I got to be so tall. A young man, barely coming to my hip, tells me that he’s going to get a suit someday. A high schooler, dangly and lean, twists their hair nervously as they admit that they’ve never met a grown-up who uses pronouns like their own. A kindergartner, brash and bright, declares that she knew I was a boy-girl, that she could tell I was a boy-girl from my voice and my necktie, and that she’ll be a boy-girl tomorrow, probably, if her mom says that it’s okay.

Sounds good, I tell her. See you tomorrow. 

The new glasses will be here soon. The cat’s owner has returned to town. R Bar is holding their vigils and fundraisers. The hot pot has been washed and put away for next year. We brewed more coffee. Relit candles. Woke up again. 

I have given you, allies, your task. You have witnessed here a version of us, one of our stories, one single example out of millions. Make the choice to keep watching. Make the choice to not look away.

To my siblings, I offer this promise, prayer, and pledge: someday, we will not be defined by our invisibility and our grieving. We will be seen, and we will be known for our joy. 

The post Colorado, You Need to Look at Transgender People appeared first on Electric Literature.

Years ago, when my son was in preschool, I found myself in the human resources of big Harry Potter rich publishing house. I’d crossed the bridge from the New Jersey suburbs we’d found ourselves in. At the time, my husband and I were renting the top floor of a house in one of the toniest suburbs in the county. I didn’t have health insurance, but my husband and children did—through my husband’s home country. We’d just come from there, flown overseas, where things had been easier and cheaper. Childcare was subsidized and my son was happy and I was researching my first novel. But my husband’s green card had been denied and we were broke.

To save money a friend of ours lived in the dining room and we had one car. In this tony suburb full of backyard structures and moms who lived in their perfectly manicured fiefdoms, where the only people in the streets were lawn care workers, we stuck out. I didn’t have a Gucci bag. Our car was not German. The roommate in our dining room gave everyone pause. Even if staying at home had been my thing—and it wasn’t—we didn’t have the money to do the things other stay at home moms did. For my son there were no camps, no mommy and me, no enrichment activities like the ones the kids around us took advantage of. I didn’t have money for pilates or yoga or Botox. We didn’t even have money for a proper flat for just the three of us. It was time to I went back to work.

The HR person scrutinized my resume. She asked why I’d changed jobs so frequently, not staying more than a year in any one publishing job. Because I needed to make more money, I told her. I almost rolled my eyes. She knew as well as anyone how low the publishing salaries were. Her eyes narrowed: Are you only interested in the money? My face flushed. Of course I was interested in the money. It goes without saying—the need for money is why one works. I told her that I’d gotten into publishing because of my love of books and the industry. Publishing had been my first real job, my only real job, I told her. I’d taken a few years off to have my son and we’d moved overseas so we’d have family help. But now I was back and I wanted to work.

I didn’t get the job, which was for the best, financially speaking. I’d done the math. My pay would hardly cover the child care costs and travel into the city. In the end, I left publishing. I took a job close to home where I worked as a nurse recruiter. My hours were flexible and no one cared that I hadn’t worked in a couple of years. I made commission. I talked to nurses all day and I did this until my daughter was born. There I was never shamed for working because I needed money.

When I started out in New York City publishing I made 19k a year, 25 years ago. This was a standard salary for editorial assistants and here’s a fact that won’t shock you—it wasn’t a living wage, even then. During that period, I lost my apartment. I squatted in an abandoned building in an apartment that was open to all who wished to enter. I starved. My mother had offered to send me a plane ticket home but refused to help me stay—I decided on my own to do so.

I had one room with a door I could lock. I showered at the Y. There were weeks before my next paycheck where I lived off the dry oatmeal in the office kitchen, learned to order soup and ask for extra bread on dates. I never passed a payphone without checking the coin release for abandoned change. I pushed aside washing machines at the laundromat for stray quarters so I could afford a bagel, a phone call, a subway ride. When a man at a street fair asked me to be a call girl I had a big long think on it before I finally said no.

I wanted to live in New York, wanted to work in publishing. I wanted to be a writer. I lived close to the bone, and I had no social life. Getting cheated by a cashier meant the difference between eating a hot dog off the street or starving that night. After some time, I left that publishing house for another and made a few thousand more. But when I left that first job, I also left editorial acquisitions—the sort of job that decides what books get published. I worked for managing ed, copy editing those already acquired manuscripts. Managing editorial departments, production departments, publicity—these jobs generally pay more than acquisitions—which are generally more prestigious and which might explain the sorts of books that we’ve always seen published, continuing to get published. With the extra money, I got out of my squat. I had managed to save the prerequisite first and last month’s rent and some extra money for a bit of furniture, and moved to a room downtown. This was the late 90s when there were still cheap rooms to be had in Manhattan. Then I jumped off to a dotcom that was short lived, but where I finally was paid a living wage. My last boss in publishing asked me how much I would make at the dot com and when I told her, she laughed. “You wouldn’t make that in ten years here,” she said. She might have laughed, but to me it was serious.

The big five publishing houses are owned by huge conglomerate companies. Harper Collins, recently on strike, is owned by News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s company. They pay these wages because they have always paid these wages—not because they can’t afford to pay better. Publishing is the sort of job that wealthy white people historically did, no one else need apply. Coming from greater Detroit (and not the parts that typically wound up in places like New York City), I had not understood any of this. If I had, I’m not sure I would have come at all. I was willing to pay the enormous price of moving to New York City because I’d been too ignorant to understand the price that would be exacted of me.

My father and mother had followed their calling. Both believed there was something noble in their professions. My father was a reporter who refused any editor or management position he was promoted to. His union job was safe and he was a union man until he retired. My mom was a Detroit public school teacher. When my mother had stage four cancer when I was 10, we were not financially ruined. Her union job protected her. Moving to New York City I hadn’t realized that my dream job was a job for people who had trust funds, or, at the very least, a parent or spouse who helped with rent or paid off credit cards. Not for people with parents who would not, or could not, help them.

Here is a fact: if a person cannot make a living wage in their job, even living as frugally and close to the bone as I was, then the wage is too low.  It’s unconscionable that publishing—especially those with big umbrella corporations like News Corp or the late Sumner Redstone’s company, Paramount Global, continues to pay their publishing employees so little. When I looked at starting salaries of publishing positions today, I was shocked to see they are exactly as low now as they were then, adjusted for inflation. Only now things are much harder. I lived without cable television or a cell phone back then. It would be impossible, especially during the past three years of remote pandemic working, for anyone to live without internet.

It’s especially unconscionable in light of what we know now—and let’s be real, we knew it then—that low wages keep out those with less means, and those from marginalized communities, in particular. This kind of gate-keeping is deeply problematic, and the exact opposite of what publishing should be doing.

Ever an optimist, I believe publishing can change. It’s heartening to watch social media support for these young, underpaid workers. There was no such thing all those years back when I was broke and struggling. We were told that all editorial assistants had it hard; we were told we were paying our dues. And we were told that it was necessary.

I’d love it if we left that line of thought behind. No one deserves to be underpaid and unsupported. I am now on the other side of the publishing equation, as an author. My life is far more comfortable than it was then thanks to circumstances that had nothing at all to do with the publishing industry. But since those years, every interaction I’ve had in the publishing world has reminded me of the difficulties I faced. I wouldn’t wish those difficulties on anyone. Junior publishing has banded together because the low salaries and workloads were untenable and because rather than leave the industry, as I and so many others did, they’re organizing unions and spreading the word. One publishing house has settled with its striking workers and a few others have committed to raising starting salaries. These are small, but good, steps.

But here is another fact:

People work for money. They go to jobs in order to get paid. Unless they are wealthy, our society demands this from them. A passion alone for literature and books does not pay the rent. It might be easy for publishing executives to forget that reality once they’ve reached a certain income bracket, but it makes it no less a reality. I sat in the HR department of that publishing house because my family needed money, not because I loved books so much. I took that nurse recruiting job because my family needed that money. It goes without saying that nearly everyone in publishing loves books—it should also go without saying that everyone in publishing deserves a living wage.

The post I Never Made a Living Wage When I Worked in Publishing appeared first on Electric Literature.

One week after posting the article, I found out I was pregnant. 

I had initially written the piece in early August, when Alejandro and I were still in the will-we-won’t-we throes of removing my IUD and playing pregnancy roulette. Writing the piece felt like finding solid ground after trudging through a steaming, buggy, couples-therapy swamp. After finishing it, I knew I would be okay without kids, even if a twinge of sadness remained. Still, in September, that very twinge led me to remove the IUD and roll the dice. We decided we would try for six months, a year at most, and then pat ourselves on the backs. 

When I posted the article, a week before Christmas, I was smarting from all the photos of young families on Facebook, and what I knew would be the inevitable round of questions about my childbearing desires at holiday parties. I captioned each post as a semi-manifesto. On Instagram, I wrote “As a childless woman at 41, I’m constantly fielding inappropriate questions from total strangers about having kids. It was healing to find my truth on the page instead of stammering something at a cocktail party.” On Facebook: “There’s a lot of pressure on women to not just have kids but to unequivocally want to be a mother. In this time of holiday cards and families posing together, I’m sending love out to those women who are on the fence and whose photos might look way different.” And on Twitter, I leaned even more provocative: “When a woman feels new life stirring inside, does it always have to be a baby?”

I felt like I had made some sort of declaration, that I had finally side-stepped the pitying looks from mothers when I said I didn’t have kids. But what had I declared, exactly? By claiming temporary childlessness (which is so often treated as temporary insanity), I had simply admitted that I didn’t know what I wanted, but I was tired of feeling ashamed. In the days after posting, I basked in the glow of my friends’ praise and congratulations, for another creature I had birthed: my essay. I made plans with an acquaintance I met in Spanish lessons to grab a drink in the new year and talk more about the subject. She, too, had huge doubts about having kids, even though she was ten years younger, and had been relieved to find companionship in my essay.

But holding the positive pregnancy test in the bathroom a few days later, even before going down to tell Alejandro, among the waves of excitement, fear, dread, and joy, I felt that old stand-by, shame. I had just gone on the record as (probably) not having kids. Now I was switching sides? And, indeed, the first person we told, Ale’s sister, after shrieking and congratulating him, asked: But what about the article?

What about the article? 

In the weeks since, as I’ve found myself repeating my justification, which is nothing but a shrug, it’s made me think about the nature of personal essays as both truth-seeking and deeply contemporary: they land somewhere, for a moment. Perhaps, for the writer, that moment will stretch to the end of their life. Perhaps, as with me, the truth of that moment will be disrupted by another emerging truth, one week later. I’ve avoided setting up that meeting with my Instagram friend, worried she’ll see me as a hypocrite, a lost ally. I’ve felt similarly disheartened when childless female friends have changed their minds. It can look, from the outside — and feel, from the inside — like you caved. 

But what if truth is always carving its way in us, rather than blowing us up like a balloon? So far, my seven and a half weeks of pregnancy have been horrible. Constant nausea and exhaustion, among other digestive mishaps I won’t gross you out with. Yesterday, at my first ob-gyn appointment, the ultrasound revealed that one reason for my extreme discomfort is that I am carrying twins—but one appears to be vanishing, a smaller sibling with a slower heartbeat that will likely not survive.

Having lost my only younger sister, staring at those two pulsing sacks on the screen felt like a grotesque parallel to my own tragedy, nearly thirty years ago. It’s called “vanishing twin syndrome,” and most women don’t even know that they are carrying another twin, which is absorbed into the placenta. Next week, I will go back for another ultrasound, to check the viability of both embryos.

What do I want now? I don’t know. Part of me yearns for the smaller one to make it, even though I am terrified by the idea of twins. I will also be relieved to see that the healthy embryo is newly solitary there, blinking its heartbeat at me. And, wrenching as it is to say, I will also be okay if I emerge from pregnancy without a child, even though I know I will still grieve. I am still that woman who wrote that essay about her ambivalence, and her more extreme inner sister, the one who never wanted children. In America, as a pregnant woman who has decided to go through with the pregnancy, it doesn’t feel like you’re allowed to say that a miscarriage may come, in some small manner, as a relief. Especially when you have that thought in Texas. 

For the next week, and the next weeks, I will not know what fate has in store for the scant beings within. That, too, is like the truth. It emerges and recedes. It dawns and dreams and dims, just like consciousness. Personal essays are the ultrasounds of our psyches, a blurry image that is both illuminating and limited in what it can promise and predict. My thoughts and my heart and my embryos are where they are right now. Next week, we will be somewhere entirely new.

The post I Learned I Was Pregnant Right After Publishing An Essay About Not Having Kids appeared first on Electric Literature.

Adina Talve-Goodman had the kind of exuberant, playful, perfectly weird personality that made you want to be in cahoots, to follow her around town and maybe start a comedy duo or do a low-stakes heist. For me, that mostly manifested as attaching myself to her at literary parties. I remember a particular evening spent in the basement of some bar in Williamsburg listening to her tell me about the Cadillac she drove around St. Louis as a teenager. She’d named the car; I wish I could remember what. The story was hilarious and somehow bordered on physical comedy, even though she was only talking. I had met Adina many times prior—she was the managing editor of One Story—but on that night I left the bar gobsmacked, thinking, we must become great friends. (Then: maybe we already are?) We had dinner a few weeks later at a magical restaurant in the West Village, that you approached via a cobblestone alleyway strewn with fairy lights. Could it be real? Adina chose it, and I’m sure I could find it again, but I don’t want to. I prefer to think Adina conjured that enchanted place.

When we had dinner, I knew nothing about Adina’s medical history: the heart transplant she had at nineteen, which she writes about in her posthumously published essay collection, Your Hearts, Your Scars. Under romantic lighting she told me she was leaving New York to get her MFA in nonfiction at Iowa, and I thought, Damn. We were just getting started.

Adina passed due to lymphoma, an indirect complication of her transplant, in 2018. I still knew very little about her medical tribulations. We weren’t yet the great confidants I hoped we would become. At times, I’ve felt hesitation in joining her inner circle in mourning her, and honoring the enduring imprint she left on this world. Reading this essay, and the others in the collection, witnessing her enormous wisdom and talent, I again had the feeling that we were just getting started—this time with me as her reader. And I realized that even those much closer to her must have felt the same—whether they worked together every day or knew her from the moment she was born—like they were only at the beginning of something, full of joyous potential.

I wish this wasn’t the first and last book by Adina Talve-Goodman, but I am so grateful for it. Convention is such that we discuss written works in the present tense. Not, “Adina wrote.” Adina writes. Adina writes about love. Adina writes about courage. Adina writes about family. Adina writes about surviving. Adina writes. 

– Halimah Marcus,
Executive Director, Electric Literature

“You Should Hold Me Down (Go On Take It)” by Adina Talve-Goodman

Will I feel it?” I ask the doctor as I do a slight hop onto the operating table. He turns to me while pulling on his gloves. “Latex allergy,” I say, lifting my wrist to show him my plastic bracelet that says just that.

“What happens when you come into contact with latex?”

My eyes meet the resident’s gaze and he quickly looks away, blushing. He’s about my age, I guess, and suddenly I’m conscious of the sheerness of my hospital gown and the outline of my breasts. If he looks closely enough, he might be able to see my new heart pounding, my chest rising and falling from the beat, my skin pulled tight like a drum over the new instrument. I think about telling the doctor the truth: If I take it in my mouth, nothing happens, but if I have sex with latex condoms, it burns for days. Instead, I look at the floor and say, “Rash.”

The doctor switches his gloves and tells me to “lay down.” It’s lie, I think.

Instruments start moving, metal-on-metal sounds, and I whip my head from one direction to another, trying to see. The nurse pulls my hair back into a shower cap and tells me that I’m so pretty, she didn’t think I was a patient when she came out to call my name in the waiting room. I smile at her and resist the urge to ask what other patients look like. She means it as a kindness, I know. But pretty is the wrong word, I want to tell her. The truth is, we don’t really have a word to describe a woman who comes through something a lot like death and remains light. We don’t have it for boys, either, so we say strong for them. We say pretty when we mean you look a lot like life.

I thank her and ask, “Do you strap me in? Should you hold me down?”

“Haven’t you had a lot of these?” the doctor asks.

“I was always asleep.” 

“Why?”

“Because I was a kid, I guess. Because I might try to run, maybe.” I smile at my small attempt at a joke. I smile and make jokes in these situations because I think that people, doctors, are more likely to want to keep funny people alive. The doctor laughs as he holds up the catheter, the small needle he plans to insert into the base of my neck, and then cast a thin line down into my heart. The nurse stands to my right and strokes my hair. I take a deep breath to slow my heart and I think about how biopsies used to be for me when I was younger. The walls of the lab at St. Louis Children’s Hospital were painted with stars. Maybe because it was comforting to think of something like this happening in the dead of night, when a kid could sleep through it, wake up six hours later still a little drugged, saying, And you were there, and you, and you. But inevitably, that kid would reach her hand up to the sore spot at the base of her neck and realize it had all been real, in some way, those minutes when someone was taking pieces of her heart.

Here, in this new hospital, the nurse tells me that during the procedure I should pick a spot on the wall to focus on. I search the wall for stars, but there are only patches of more white and less white. I choose less, just above my head.

The nurse tells me that she’s going to insert the IV now. “Better you don’t look, sweetheart,” she says.

“I’m a really difficult stick,” I say. “But this vein, this vein is good.” I point to a spot in the crook of my arm, to the veins that have held IVs successfully in the past and still retain just the faintest mark of tiny blue dots. I want to ask the nurse to count to three, to make sure I’m ready so that I can breathe deeply to try to stay relaxed to prevent the vein from contracting, and to please not dig, because, truly, it’s not the sticks that I mind; it’s only the digging around, the rooting for the vein in my skin, that sometimes makes me cry, because I had this nurse once and she shoved a needle in my arm and she wouldn’t pull it out even after I screamed, Stop. I want to give her that speech, the speech I always give nurses before IVs, but they don’t count to three here and I feel silly asking. I just point to the crook of my right arm.

“That’s the best spot,” I say. “And, if it’s okay, can I have a twenty-four needle?”

“That’s too small,” the doctor says.

“I know it’s for babies,” I say. “But anything bigger usually blows the vein.”

“I’d like to try a twenty first,” the doctor says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but I’d really prefer the twenty-four. You’re not giving me much, right? I’m going to be awake the whole time, right?”

The nurse laughs. “Wow, somebody’s an expert. I think a twenty-four is fine. I pulled one anyway when I saw how tiny you are.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Are you ready, sweetheart?” she asks. I nod and the IV is inserted. I want to close my eyes, but I don’t because I’m not sure if that might be rude, and I feel like I’ve gained some clout with the needle talk. Once it’s in, I thank the nurse and tell her it wasn’t so bad.

The doctor tells me that first he’ll numb my neck using a shot. “It might burn,” he says.

The nurse holds my head firmly to the right and says, “Got your point?”

I smile and say yes, though, really, I can’t find one and all I can think is, Why did I need an IV if you’re going to give me a shot in my neck and no drugs to put me to sleep?

The shot burns and I try to concentrate on not moving, not looking around, not thinking about the size of the needle in my neck. I focus on my breathing and think that maybe this counts as going to yoga.

“I’m going to start now,” the doctor says, “threading the catheter to your heart. You might feel it skip a few beats. You might feel it, y’know, react. Inhale deep and hold it.”

I inhale. I close my eyes.

Summer. The windows are open in the attic, where our friends decide to recreate their childhood game of turning off the lights and running around the room, leaping over furniture, and avoiding whoever is “it.” I guess it’s tag, just in the dark, and slightly more erotic because you seem to grab at one another, tackle one another to the ground, and then cry out when you’ve lost. But we’re older now and drunk, and I’d rather be out driving with you on our favorite streets with the windows down and the smells of honeysuckle, humidity, and sweat filling the space between us. Instead, we’re in this attic, trapped with other people. The sky is clear, and light from the stars comes in through the window, so that it’s not quite pitch-black. I’m by the open window, just sitting because I think this game is sort of dumb. But then you find me under the window, in the dark. You grab my ankle, wrapping your whole hand around its smallness. You drag my body down beneath yours on the carpet and I reach up to find your curls, to make sure it’s you. I know you by the way you take my fingers in your mouth when I reach up to find your face. I laugh and turn my neck to the right. I cover my mouth to stay quiet. You start to kiss a line down my neck to my clavicle. I imagine you’re drawing a clear path to my heart with the wetness of your kisses. Someone cries out that they’ve been found, and you move across the room in three strides as the lights come on. I can feel your spit drying on my skin and a faint pulse at the base of my neck from where you lingered before the lights came on. Let’s play again, I say. You look down at the dirty shag carpet and blush, your cheeks turning a pink I’ve never found so pretty.

“I’m in now,” the doctor says. “Okay?” the nurse asks.

“I thought it would be more painful,” I say. 

“Nah. I’ll take a few pieces. You’ll feel a tug, though, when they come out,” the doctor says.

The nurse asks if I’m comfortable, because she’s noticed that my cheeks are warm and flushed.

“Yes,” I say, “it’s just different.”

“Think of something else, sweetheart,” she says.

In the empty bedroom in your basement, I watch you remove each piece of your mother’s clothing drying atop towels on the unmade twin bed. I mock you as you fold the clothes meticulously because you think that one tank top out of place, one wrinkled pair of Jockeys, and she might know that we had sex. When you finish, you sit on the bed. I close the door and the windowless room is pitch-black. I open it again, just a crack, so the light can get in. You hold out your hands and pull me to your chest.

We’ve already been up all night kissing, and usually it stops there, on the couch, but I want to have sex at least once with you before the transplant. My eyelids are heavy and my lips are chapped. We take off each other’s clothes with surprising ease. We lie down together, and with my arm draped across your chest and my head in the crook of your shoulder, I understand how this works so well: your bigness and my smallness, how we fit like a puzzle.

You prop yourself on top of me. You kiss my eyelids. Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, you say. You continue to kiss your way down my neck to my breasts and finally to the jagged scar in the center of my chest. You trace the scar with your fingers. I like to think that your touch, your saliva, takes it all away, this boundary between my left and right breast. This part of myself I spend away from you in the hospital. You trace the line with your tongue, soft at first and then almost lapping, as if you really could lick it clean. I curl my fingers in your hair and tell you how I used to dream that a man would kiss my scars and how I never imagined licking would be better. You laugh and say, I’ll lick the new one, too.

The nurse strokes my hair. “Are you having any pain?” she asks.

“No,” I say, “not pain, exactly.” 

“Can you feel it?” the nurse asks.

“Yes. When the pieces come out,” I say. “There’s a tug. It’s incredible.”

“I’ll need six or seven pieces,” the doctor says. “For accuracy.”

The nurse reminds me to breathe.

On the Thanksgiving following the transplant, after the turkey, after everyone goes around the table and says they’re grateful I’m still there, after the guests leave, I call you and ask if you’d like to come see my heart. When you arrive, I kiss you on the stoop. You swipe your thumb over my cheek. Pink, you say. I guide you inside to the kitchen. The rest of my family sits around the table, the wooden box in the center, a screwdriver beside it. My mother has covered the table in old newspapers, as if we’ve all gathered to decoupage. You give quick hugs to everyone and sit in the one empty chair. I start unscrewing the bottom of the box. One of the screws sticks and my brother asks if I want help. He finishes the rest and the bottom comes off. Inside, there’s a plastic container not unlike what soup from a take-out restaurant might come in. My mother tells me to wait, that we all need gloves if we’re going to touch it. The non-latex gloves appear on the table very quickly. The gloves are big on my hands, small on yours. Everyone holds their hands just above the table, as if they all need to stay sterile, as if the surgery has yet to come. I pop the top of the container and, to my surprise, there’s no smell. I smile and say, It’s in pieces. My mother explains that they biopsied it first. They sliced my heart up. Everyone nods as if yes, of course, of course they would slice it up. I pick up the biggest piece with my right hand, and it’s bigger than my fist. Maybe even bigger than yours. And it’s yellow, like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and pieces of what look like wet tissue paper coat the unclean thing. I wonder why it’s yellow, if it’s maybe from being exposed to the air, or if it was that color inside of me. My mother reminds me that the doctors had said it was done working, and I was lucky it came out when it did. That’s the color of a dead heart, she says. I pass the heart around the table, and when it comes to you, you set it on your palm and bend your neck to see inside.

“When you take the pieces,” I ask the doctor, “do they grow back?”

The silent resident furrows his brow and looks to the doctor as if, maybe, he’s just not sure.

“No,” the doctor answers to the whole room. “They don’t grow back.”

“Oh,” I say. “Just wondering.”

You call me one night, walking around your cold mountain college town, and ask if we can talk. You tell me that you miss me every day but that you’re feeling lost and it’s me, maybe, how I’ve always been beautiful and you’re only now realizing your own curly hair, your own strength, your own perfect hands. You say, Maybe we should see other people. You say, I just want to be sure. You tell me that you don’t want to call each other mine anymore but that if anyone else ever did, you would die. You say, I would die lightly, as if I didn’t come so close, as if it was more than just six months ago that you sat on the edge of your college XL bed, searching for a plane ticket home at any cost while I lay in surgery. I can hear it in your voice: You’re the least likely to go and the most likely to be left behind. We hang up and a moment later my phone vibrates with your text. Please don’t forget to take your pills.

“Don’t worry,” the doctor says. “This heart is plenty big. Looks healthy, too. How old is it?”

“I guess it’s six years old,” I say. “Or, rather, I’ve had it for six years.”

“Still young,” the doctor says.

He tells me to take a big breath and hold it as he pulls the catheter away from my heart, through my chest, up out of my neck. I assume it’s safe to exhale now, but no one has told me so, and the feeling of the catheter coming out of my neck has left me breathless. The nurse is ready with gauze and presses firmly on the entry site.

End of summer. Outside of my house, we sit in the car, listening to the radio. I notice that your smell has changed. It’s been good, this time away from each other. I’ve been traveling. I’ve been happy. I think about the times I was too sick to walk up the stairs and you carried me to bed. When we were grateful just for my health. I ask how your summer was; I ask about our friends. You tell me that your summer was fine and that maybe we’ve outgrown each other. You tell me that maybe I’m just not the kind of woman you’d ever want to marry. That you hope we can still be friends. I think about all the times you’ve held me in this car with the radio playing, all the times I needed you and you carried me. I put my hand on the door handle and warn you that I’m going, the way I used to do when we were first together and I wanted you to kiss me. I’m barely breathing but ask if you’re okay. I’m fine, you say, it’s just not you. I open the door of your car. I have nothing left to say because you’re not really here. I give you one last chance to tell me that you still love me more than anything and that you’d like to lick me clean again or, rather, you’d like to try. But instead, you watch me walk inside my house, see my mother there ready to receive me with a hug, and, as you drive away, you call that girl from the summer. The girl who didn’t make you feel that when she wasn’t around, the world was fine and fun and lacking only her; the girl who didn’t make you think of all that you lack.

“Would you like to see them?” the doctor asks. “The little pieces of your heart?”

I’m surprised he asks. Maybe, like the nurse said, I’m so small and I must’ve been even smaller before the surgery (yes, I told her, eighty-six pounds), yet still such a pretty patient, and, somehow, that makes it—the scars, the flaws, the imperfections written on my body—all the more unfortunate.

I press the gauze to my neck to help the blood clot as the doctor hands me a small container with six floating pink flecks. He shakes it a bit, like a snow globe, so that the pieces of my heart flitter about in the liquid. Ho, ho, ho, little girl, I think.

“Wow,” I say. “They’re so pink.” The doctor laughs and asks what color I thought they’d be.

“It’s just that my old heart was yellow,” I say.

A silence spreads through the room. I don’t bother looking up to comfort them.

“How do you know that?” the doctor asks. 

“I kept it,” I say.

I turn the plastic over in my hands and remember the old heart, how it worked so hard to be enough, how it gave all it could, how I’d held it in my hands after it was out and had planned to thank it for all it had given me, but it was yellow and I resented it for not letting me know sooner that it was cooked.

“Pink,” I say again, almost in a trance.

“If you laugh today,” the nurse says, “keep pressure on your neck so that you don’t bleed.”

I thank the doctor, I hug the nurse, and I shake the resident’s hand, all while holding on to the container.

“I’ll need that back.” The doctor laughs. “Unless you plan on keeping everything that comes out of your body.”

I give the little container one last shake and watch the pieces float to the bottom as I hand it to the doctor. The nurse starts to escort me back to the waiting area. I remind myself: This heart is plenty big.

“Did you feel the tug?” the doctor asks as I walk out the door.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Did it make you feel good?”

Excerpt from Your Hearts, Your Scars. Copyright © 2023 by the Estate of Adina Talve-Goodman. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

The post I Saw The Pink Pieces of My Little Heart appeared first on Electric Literature.

 For the performance, which was to be called In Preparation, Ostap would prepare the kind of emergency kit that is now second nature for Ukrainians: a change of underwear, a few sweaters, a keepsake, toiletries, pills. The performance involved Ostap counting out pills as if for a prolonged absence, but also as a kind of meditative act—“just to concentrate, just to find balance,” Ostap told me. “One, two, three, four, five.”

 Ostap rehearsed for weeks, but the performance in Donetsk never happened. In 2014, after an uprising overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Russian-backed separatists took over Donetsk. The vibrant arts center, made of recycled building materials, is today a notorious prison.

Earlier this year, Ostap’s composer friend contacted him again to see if he would like to resurrect their collaboration. Ostap was no longer interested. Too much time had passed. He could no longer relate to the mood of anxiety that had inspired it. “I said ‘No, I don’t feel it any more—it’s not actual for me’.” He cracks a wry, weary smile. “Who could predict?” he said. A few weeks later, as the first air raid sirens pierced the morning silence in Lviv, Ostap was completely unprepared. He had not, as advised on countless TV channels and in newspapers, packed an emergency kit. On February 24, he found himself jostling for an ATM machine to see if he could still access his savings. He was able to withdraw 2000 hryvnia, or about $68. “I was so happy to have money in my hands,” he said.

Ostap told me this story as we were sitting in Black Honey, a cramped, noisy coffee shop on Halytska Street near the center of Lviv. Outside a slow river of people drifted by in the pale winter sun. We were entering the second month of a war but, on the surface, it wasn’t immediately obvious. There were buskers in the street, balloon sellers, a woman with angel wings who let people take her photograph for tips. But you didn’t have to rub too hard at the surface to see what lay beneath. 

On TV, images of war are visceral by necessity. Collapsed buildings, bombed out tanks, an endless parade of hollow-eyed refugees peering through the windows of buses, of trains, of cars. The rescued cat, the forlorn dog. But when you are in a city like Lviv, the images that linger are quieter, less graphic. For me it was a mug in a public bathroom of a small art gallery on a quiet street in Lviv. The mug held random toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste. A box of tampons sat nearby. 

A young Ukranian novelist, Vadym, had taken me to the gallery one afternoon. He was keen to see an exhibition of drawings depicting Russian violence. They were raw and furious and filled with splayed limbs and blood, and I didn’t much like them, but what struck me was the rooms in which the art was projected on a wall. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could pick out the outlines of abandoned sleeping bags, pillows with soft indentations. Someone slept there last night. A lot of someones. The toothbrushes, of course, were theirs. Later I would see the same makeshift dorms in other public spaces—a yoga studio, a waiting room at the station, a library. A parallel universe, as in a children’s story—on one side the art gallery; on the other, the scrambled lives of refugees unsure if they would ever get home; unsure if home even still existed. Private lives made public.

In a small adjoining courtyard, I sat at a small bistro table with a coffee and watched a young man and his friends fussing over a puppy. They talked in soft voices, smiling, at ease. Would they be sleeping in the gallery tonight?

For Ostap, an intense literature professor in a hoodie, the first few weeks of war interrupted what he considered his writing rhythm. Too much heightened tension, too much adrenaline. What he could do, he discovered, was collect the stories of other people while he assisted refugees at Lviv train station. He was a fan of Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz who had spent the Second World War in Warsaw and translated most of Shakespeare’s plays during the Nazi occupation. Milosz also wrote a series of fragmentary poems, conjuring scenes of his childhood—roosters on fences, fog like a river flood. At the train station, it was these ideas that floated into Ostap’s mind. “Each poem is a kind of definition of a very simple word, like street or house, or—for example—Europe, and how it looks from inside an occupied city,” said Ostap. “I thought it would be interesting to collect this kind of war vocabulary, but from the stories of other people.” 

My seventh or eighth coffee of the day had arrived—small, European coffees that I always finished too fast—and as I stirred in my sugar and tried to pace myself, Ostap read a few of his stories. For the letter “A,” a short anecdote about apples in which a woman, Anna recalled trying to sleep in a bathtub in Kyiv during a night of shelling. In the dark she began to imagine the shells as ripe apples falling from a tree, a memory drawn from her early life—a night in the Carpathian mountains, young and in love, in a bed not much more comfortable than that bathtub:

“Now, I was falling asleep to the explosions, and I heard those apples. I wanted so badly for it to be just those garden apples hitting the ground around us.”

On another day, volunteering at a shelter, Ostap watched a woman who had arrived alone, and had chosen not to share any stories. She was from Donetsk. What trauma had she gone through? “All of a sudden she took her phone,” said Ostap. “She called someone and said, ‘Hello, how are you, let’s count together,’ and she began to count.” 

Ostap counts above the high-pitched scream of the coffee machine, “One, two, three, four, five.” Then the woman from Donetsk interrupted whoever was at the end of the line. A child, perhaps? “Slower, slower, concentrate, don’t hurry.” She returns to the beginning. One, two, three, four, five.

Ostap thought of his show that never played in Donetsk, counting pills just for balance. One, two, three, four.

Through the window of Black Honey I could see the imposing statue of Danylo Romanovych, the 13th century warrior king of Galicia–Volhynia, and founder of Lviv (named for his son, Lev). It was Danylo who set the city, and the region, on a westward tilt—attracting immigrants from Poland and Germany, as well as Jews from Kyiv, that colors it to this day. A common refrain in Lviv is that its rich bohemian history has long made the city a target for Russian antagonism. 

“They always try to portray my city as a nationalist center,” the writer and poet Victoria Amelina told me one morning, over another cappuccino in a different coffee shop, this one tucked inside a bright, airy children’s bookstore. 

Of all the people I meet in Lviv, Victoria is the most indignant, the most scathing of Russia and Russians. She was born the year of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the year the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. “My parents were told that it was safe, and my mom recalls walking me in a stroller through radioactive clouds over Lviv.” Now she radiates quiet fury. While Putin talks about defending the Russian-speakers of Ukraine, Victoria remembers only that her parents made her speak Russian, out of fear. “They didn’t want their children to suffer as they had,” she said. “I’ve had to reclaim my Ukrainian language—it would be easier for me to write in Russian.” At home she has a library of Russian books, mostly classics. She will never read them again. “I can now read Dickens in English, why would I read him in Russian?” she says. How about Dostoevsky? Has reading Crime & Punishment become complicated? “No, it’s not complicated,” she said. “I just understand now that this mysterious Russian soul is not so mysterious: They want to suffer, they thrive on it, and they want us to suffer.”

Viktoria remembered watching the war in Chechnya on Russian TV, as a child in the 90s. “I thought that Chechnya was doing something wrong, not that Russia was killing Chechens,” she said. “So propaganda worked on me, too. I thought that Russians were saving Chechnya, like they are saving me now—thank you so much, but I don’t need to be saved.”This was how our conversation went for an hour. I thought of something Milan Kundera wrote in a 1984 essay for The New York Review of Books that the aspiration of Central Europe was to be a group of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. “How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?” Kundera wrote.

When war comes to a country, it is unequal in its attentions. During the time I’d been in Lviv, and despite daily air raid warnings, and a nightly curfew, and armed police, and monuments surrounded by sandbags or steel barriers, it was sometimes possible to believe you were in a normal city doing normal tourist things. One afternoon, I found myself buying bath salts for friends in a tiny shop near the ruins of the city’s great synagogue, destroyed during the Second World War. “Lviv Souvenir Soap Manufacture,” said a sign on the door. “No days off.” Another day, enjoying the sun, I browsed an outdoor book stall. Later I bought an ice cream.

But, of course, the city is no more normal than that jar of toothbrushes in the bathroom of an art gallery. “I’ve never seen the city more crowded,” Ostap remarked when we emerged one evening into the street. Those crowds are swollen by refugees, at least 200,000 of them. Many are renting, or have been absorbed into homes of families and friends. Many haven’t. You see them at donation centers, rummaging through random boxes of clothes, and you see them around the central station where a reception camp has sprung up to feed the hungry. And there are those moments, just for a second, when you wonder if the war is also coming for you. I was drinking coffee in another café, Kredens, when the lights went out and I found myself being ushered into a basement while the sirens launched into their familiar mewl. There I heard a loud American voice explaining to his companions, “I voted for Biden.” It turns out that even in a time of war, hearing a fellow traveler can still set your teeth on edge.

Like most of us, Ostap grew up thinking his home town was boring. Then he saw what had been before him all along. “One day I woke up and I understood how unexplored this city is, all these invisible ties between cultures,” he says. “It was an illumination.” He imagined Lviv as a series of layers, like an onion, with only the outermost layer visible to most people. But underneath lay the city’s ragged history, back and forth between empires, the vast movements of people, the overarching national narratives of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Soviets, princes, farmers. 

Nightmare. It’s the word people use again and again. As if language does not have any waking words to describe the texture of war. 

Kateryna Mikhalitsyna, a poet and author of children’s books, recalls celebrating her birthday on February 23. Just her husband, her dog, her three kids. “It seems to me now that it was so quiet, so nice, like a reward,” she says. “And then the next morning we wake up to the sirens, and ‘Mama, it’s war’.” Her children, alerted on their phones not to go to school that day, knew before their parents. Kateryna lets out a frustrated groan, clenching her fists as she does so. “It still seems like a nightmare,” she says.

The next day Kateryna began gathering things for refugees pouring west. She heard a story on the radio about people making hedgehogs, simple anti-tank devices composed of three intersecting girders, so she did the same. Driving from the border to Lviv, I’d been fascinated by them lining entrances to small towns and villages, so evocative of all the war movies I’d see, a throwback to the 20th century, like so much else about this war. 

Kateryna presented a watercolor she’d painted for me—a fox on a hillside, looking up to the sky. It was beautiful, vibrant with color. Although she has not been able to find her voice as a children’s writer since the invasion began, she says that poems come to her thick and fast. Shortly before the war, as the violence in Donbas escalated, she reached out to friend in the Ukrainian town of Niu-York, a city named by German Mennonites and the site of a literary festival Kateryna had attended. She wanted to know how they were managing. One of the festival volunteers wrote back, “Everything is usual, a little sun, a little rain.” For Kateryna it was the start of a poem. That was on 18 February, and she is still writing them, tapping stanzas into her phone as fast as they come to her. “They just keep banging into my head,” she said. One arrived shortly before I did, as she sat in the café, and I asked her to read it to me in Ukrainian. Near the end I recognized the same refrain repeated. Could she translate? “I am a target,” Kateryna replied. It is a poem about a shelling in a bread line. 

I wanted to know if Kateryna had Russian friends. Only one, she replied—an author that she had translated into Ukrainian. “But she has not been in Russia for many years, and lives in Costa Rica,” Kateryna added. “And she strongly supports Ukraine.” Those Russians in her Facebook feed, she added, were against the assault.

How did she feel about Russians? “Something between pity and disgust,” she said. “I don’t feel hate, that would destroy me. Disgust is the strongest feeling I ever had for another living person in life.” She told a now-familiar story. Her mother-in-law is originally from Russia, but when she speaks to her relatives there they refuse to believe her account of the war.

“Guys, you are bombing us.”

No, this is absolutely impossible.

“I am your sister and I have been in Ukraine for 40 years, and you are telling me what I see out of my own window?”

No, you have this nationalist running wild over there.

As we talk, Kateryna receives a call from her daughter, telling her that Russians are shelling Lviv. Neither of us had noticed the sirens. “It’s not so safe,” Kateryna says when she has ended her call. But we stay there, and finish our coffee. 

Like Ostap, Kateryna also found herself at the train station in the weeks immediately following the start of war. She recalls a woman and her ten-year-old son standing on the platform, visibly shaking. “She just kept saying, over and over, ‘I don’t want to sleep in the station, I don’t want to sleep in the station,’” Kateryna recalled. The woman had fled from Kharkhiv, one of the cities that had been most heavily shelled. “She asked to hug me and I kept her in my arms for a few minutes,” said Kateryna. “She calmed down, and I helped her figure out how to get to friends who lived outside the city. And then I gave her my number in case she couldn’t get to where she was going.” 

Kateryna didn’t see the woman again, but a few days later an unknown number popped up on her phone. “I don’t like unknown numbers but since the war started we are all getting calls from unknown numbers,” she said. It was a stranger who told her that he’d heard how she had helped a friend of his. Would she help his family—he was going to put his wife and three children on the train. Could she be there to meet them. Such is the way it goes in war. Every now and then she gets a call from a family in Germany, in Poland, in Slovakia whose path had intersected with hers. “Hello, we are safe, thank you—you are our angel.” 

Kateryna smiles ever so slightly. “No, not an angel,” she says. “I’m a human being, and I am a mother and I can imagine what it’s like to be in a strange city with small children and a single piece of baggage.”

This recalled a moment from my journey to the Ukrainian border. We had stopped to pick up a generator at a small Polish school which happened to be for deaf children. It was lunchtime, and the director insisted we have something to eat in the dining room where, perched on small chairs for children, we tucked into large bowls of borscht, pasta with mushrooms and cabbage, a soft drink of indeterminate flavor. The director was a jolly figure, and before we left he pressed ceramic angels made by the students into our hands. “Angels for angels,” he said in all seriousness, a sweetly sentimental gesture that we couldn’t turn down. Those three angels traveled the rest of the way with us, wedged in the front of our van, a strange trio alongside the baby formula and pasta and tins of pet food that slid lethally on every pothole. Those potholes had become so familiar to Marcin that he’d given them names. “These are the Addams Family,” he said on one particularly treacherous stretch.

Here’s a popular Ukrainian schoolyard taunt that Marcin had told me as we drove across the border. “Your mother is so old she learned Russian at school.” 

On my last night in Lviv, I made my way through the drizzle, and the now familiar wail of the air raid siren. My destination was a small dance studio, one of a few that has not become a dormitory for refugees. As I pushed open the door, the strains of a tango broke the damp silence. Inside, a small group of women were practicing their moves with two men too old to be on the front lines. Legs hooked around legs, hands settled in the soft indentations of the back. A lady in gold lamé heels was being led by a handsome gent with a ring in his left ear, a fine mustache, and a moon-shaped face. 

It was in Warsaw, en route to Ukraine, when I heard about Lviv’s rich tango scene, from an austere looking young man, on the train from the airport. His name was Joshua Von t’Hoff, and he was there from the Netherlands, to attend a tango event. As I was heading to Lviv, he suggested that I connect with the tango “community” there, one of the most vigorous tango scenes in Europe, he said. So I did, spending an afternoon in the back of an Italian restaurant with a group of seven women and a lone man who gathered regularly to drink wine, swap news, and talk shop. Among so many people, conversation was difficult and choppy and often had to be translated, but listening to my recording of that afternoon what I enjoy is the cross-talk, the laughter, the clang of silverware. There was something irrepressible about the dancers and their stories of the Remolino, Lviv’s annual tango contest—Europe’s largest—that had turned their city into a magnet for tango pilgrims. Ten days of non-stop dancing. Although none of those in the restaurant had danced since before the war, there was optimism that might soon change. “We believe we will dance again by summer,” one woman declared to much vigorous nodding. There were eyewitness reports that the dance stage outside Café Diana in Rynok Square was being built again. 

How did tango come to Lviv? The question seemed to have as many answers as there were dancers in that restaurant. I was told its roots go back a hundred years, to Jewish musicians between the wars, tango kings like Artur Gold and Jerzy Petersburski. You can hear Petersburski’s The Last Sunday, or the “suicide tango,” in Krzysztof Kie´slowski’s movie, White.

Europe’s Jewish tango scene expired in the flames of the Holocaust (Petersburski had the foresight to flee to Brazil; Artur Gold, tragically, did not), but it echoed after the war, on Polish radio, where the old melodies remained popular, and accessible to those living in Lviv. But what brought tango roaring back to the city was independence and tourism, and a man called Viktor Danyluk, an Argentinian professional dancer drawn to Lviv in search of his family roots. He stayed just one month, but it was long enough. Tango was back. Danyluk’s name is now invoked as something of a legend.

People react with surprise when I tell them that I met with tango dancers in Lviv, but is it so unusual? The Warsaw ghetto had a symphony orchestra, five theaters, chamber groups, choirs and cafés. During the Blitz in London, trains continued to operate, teashops were open. Milkmen made their rounds, blithely scrambling over collapsed houses to deliver milk. There were dances. These, of course, are the stories of resilience we need during war, the Blitz spirit that has an echo in Ukraine today. As it happens, the dancers in the restaurant didn’t have to wait until summer. In May, I received a text message from a friend with a short film she’d recorded on her phone. It shows tango dancers, back in Rynok Square, some in long winter coats, some wrapped in the Ukrainian flag. Two children, perhaps ten or eleven years old, swirl around the square in full evening dress. A small orchestra plays alongside a slow, sad tango with six or seven couples moving gracefully across the granite square as the trumpets unfurl. Then the  camera settles on a woman at the edge of the square, dancing solo with an invisible partner–three steps forward, one back, then forward again, a gesture of such tender poignancy that it took my breath away. 

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