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Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
How does a parent answer a child’s questions about school shootings? For instance: Why does this keep happening? Will it happen to me? If it does, will I be OK? Writer Meg Conley, a mother of three, describes the agony of not having all the answers:
After the second shooting at East High School, we started talking about homeschooling. It’s not the first time we’ve had the conversation. But my kids love lunchtime, talking in the halls, learning new things from new teachers, school plays and after-school clubs. Being separated from those things during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic affected them in ways I still find frightening to contemplate. Forming community with people who are not part of their household is a vital part of their lives. There are just some things that can’t be replicated in the home.
One night in New York City, I sat in between my two oldest daughters as they watched their first Broadway play, Funny Girl. The play opened with Fanny Brice, played by Julie Benko, sitting in front of a mirror, looking at herself before she says, “Hello, gorgeous.” When she said those words, most of the audience knew what was coming, so they cheered. But my girls didn’t, so they politely clapped. I watched them watch the play, with wide eyes. By the end of the show, they loved Brice. They loved Benko. When she started to sing the reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the girls understood what had been and what was coming. They cheered with everyone else. They became part of the community in that room.
We were wandering through the Met museum when my daughter got a text from another friend. It was just a link to a news story. Her middle school principal had gone to the media. There is a child at her school that was recently charged with attempted first-degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm. That child doesn’t need incarceration; the child needs help. But teachers are not trained to give that help. The district rejected the school’s request that the student be moved to online schooling. Instead, the child goes to school every day and receives a daily pat down from untrained school staff before going to class. This student is on the same safety plan as the student who shot two deans before spring break. My daughter showed me the text and asked again, “What are we going to do?”
My two oldest girls went to see a preview of the new musical New York, New York with their dad that night. I stayed behind with their youngest sister. She’s too young for Broadway, but nearly old enough to be killed at school.
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Susanna Forrest | Longreads | March 23, 2023 | 3,474 words (12 minutes)
Twelve years ago, I lived alone in Berlin and the crows knew me. My particular murder kept watch in the park nearest my flat, a long green strip marking the course of the demolished Wall. The neighborhood was part of the former East, and at the weekends the park filled with locals and tourists browsing the flea market for GDR cookware, furniture, and ratty old fur coats. I once found an entire stuffed dog there, lying rigidly over a pile of the flotsam and jetsam of 20th-century German domestic life — porcelain sugar bins with gingham prints, brass tea warmers, and musty albums of abandoned family photographs. The Wall had fallen years before I moved there in 2006, and Berlin had not yet hatched its Silicon Allee of slick startups. When I first arrived the air still reeked of coal stoves in the winter, and a friend lived in a dingy unrenovated apartment that had heavy velvet curtains over the doors and dusty black coal pucks piled in the corridor. You reached it via the ruin of another apartment with ’80s posters still hanging.
For a long time, I told myself that I moved to Berlin in my late 20s on an unusually long-lasting whim after visiting a friend and picturing myself writing books in a spacious old tenement building. I was part of the cheap-flights generation of casual British EU migrants who sampled new cities and countries without thinking too hard. We didn’t need to. Our path was greased by budget airlines, a strong pound, low rent, and the internet, which let us work on our laptops in cafés that still served milchkaffee, iced Ovaltine, and rhubarb schorle rather than the later hipster homogeneities of avocado toast and flat whites. Earlier waves had immersed themselves in the city like a baptism, learning German, living in shared apartments with terrifying hippie rules, and getting jobs doing anything from teaching English to cleaning kebab grills. I and my fellow travelers hovered at the edge of the city, gazing at our screens. Many didn’t last long.
But five years on, in my crow-courting period, I was still there, and it was becoming less clear why. I had made an uncharacteristically bold move and left behind a functional if eccentric career in London because that trajectory of escalating job responsibilities, a mortgage, and a daily rattle on the Tube was suddenly not what I wanted. It had never seemed exactly real in any case — a fluke of luck, not something you could turn into a life. I was now writing books, which is what I did want to do, but there was no particular reason why I had to do that in Berlin. I still lived alone and worked from home alone and stuck to a handful of neighborhoods. I had hazily wanted an expanded life — living in different places, learning new languages — but that life turned out to require more of me than I could give.
I gradually learned enough German for my work and writing, but froze and stumbled when I was spoken to (or at). The state-run language courses were not designed to launch you into a German social life. Instead, we new migrants — from Bulgaria, America, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, and North Korea — gathered three nights a week and chewed over the language, which was presented to us in a series of “realistic scenarios” we might experience, such as traveling or trying to get a job like a good immigrant. Germans appeared in textbooks as Johanns and Marias driving their cars, eating bockwurst, and going to the cinema, rather than as three-dimensional people whom we could approach. The books told us about the German way of doing things, and German beliefs about citizenship and private lives, contrasted wordlessly against a great missing Other — us.
We had the outsiders’ shorthand mythology for these creatures, a mashup of quaint archetypes and international urban wisdoms passed from one to another: “Germans aren’t efficient, they are thorough.” “Germans don’t like to use credit cards.” “Germans eat cake and buy flowers on Sundays.” There was also a submythology for Berliners, who were said to be blisteringly sarcastic — one account advised trying to imagine Cockneys who’d gone through the German 20th century. Berliners, and especially East Berliners, who had gone through even more of that century, let you know exactly what they thought of you. If you couldn’t understand their Schnauze or “Snout” dialect (a mashup of German and linguistic pickings from the city’s history, including French and Yiddish), then it was maybe for the best. When an elderly lady shouted at me for standing on the pavement and looking up at a flat I was viewing, the submythology told me to take it as a rite of passage. Berlin says “Du Alta!” and fuck off.
Instead I met new friends via our blog RSS feeds and took to internet dating, but the connections I made were mostly with fellow migrants or people who lived elsewhere but wanted to imagine they could live in Berlin. I made a few German friends, although they often had one foot out of the city too. Largely I was alone. When the dates lasted more than one meeting, I chose men who were pulling the same avoidant trick as me. We flew in the same direction an impeccable distance apart, like birds in a murmuration. Hypothetically, each relationship came with a future Berlin life together, and I dipped mentally into these as though they were outfits I might try on without buying. It was safe to do this, because of course, none of these relationships went anywhere or required any kind of commitment to a life that was fixed. I hadn’t yet realized that this was my choice. I thought maybe I was bad at reading signs, but actually, I was very good at reading them. The problem was that I felt safer alone.
I staged this repetitive personal drama carelessly on the cracking, rumbling crust of a city trying to absorb a surfeit of history while sunk in its own recession. Unemployment was high, and public housing was being hurled overboard, thousands of units at a time. I read my British and American news online and ripped up the free local papers I found in my mailbox and stuffed the shreds in my wet shoes. I was waiting for something, aware that the city was changing underneath my own holding pattern.
You cannot skim the surface of a place and expect to belong to it.
Gentrification had been underway when I got there. What had been crammed tenements in the early 20th century and then crumbling, war-damaged flats under the GDR were now saniert and interspersed with independent latte outlets. The shoddy, shrapnel-chipped brickwork within the circling Ringbahn was covered with fresh plaster and paint and nobody had to pee in a closet toilet on the staircase anymore. The old tiled stoves were ripped out and replaced with central heating; the smell of coal smoke retreated further from the center. Once I found myself in an expensively renovated living room where the new architects had preserved the old bullet holes under glass as a conversation point. It was just across the road from my friend’s former flat with the velvet curtains, now a building site for new luxury apartments.
At weekends I walked the same neighborhoods for hours and thought in suffocating spirals about the avoidant men and whether I should go home and get a proper job. I let the city spool by unheeded in the background. The crows’ park was just five minutes away, so I was there often. It was a lung of sorts, but not an escape.
I started feeding the crows because I’d read that they could recognize individual human faces, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could train them to know me by sight. I bought bags of peanuts in the shell and began distributing them in the park. I always took the same messenger bag, which had a print of crow silhouettes on it. The crows could make this out from quite some distance. I didn’t think about why I wanted these creatures, so busy in their own very different but overlapping Berlin, to acknowledge me.
They were not inky carrion crows but hooded or “fog” crows with powdery gray bodies, black heads, bibs, wings, and tail tips and the same elegant butcher beak as their cousins. Some were pied with white feathers, which were either a genetic quirk or a result of malnutrition — I tried to make sure that these birds got extra nuts. When I got close, I could see a fine lacy pattern where their bodies met their tails, an unexpected refinement. If I looked up at one in a tree, I found the same pattern on the underside of their stern. (I only had to have my coat dry-cleaned once.) In the spring they were glossy. They were always beady. They were the native Berliners with whom I interacted most.
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At first, I went every weekday morning, because at weekends the park filled up with the flea market, outdoor karaoke, and tourists who distracted the crows, but then I went on an irregular basis, once a week at most, and they all knew me. We had a routine of sorts, and soon it was unclear who was training whom. I kept buying peanuts. I kept going back. I kept responding to their cues. When I walked into the park a pair who were picking at beer-bottle tops in the grass would spot me and run and hop over like a couple of chickens, eyes bright and feathers ruffled by the wind, looking at my face and at my bag and back again. They would stop a few feet away and wait for me to reach under the flap of the bag and produce the goods.
Sometimes a few outlier crows found me as I was halfway down the road to the park and swooped down to perch near me on the barriers by the roadworks or waited overhead on the tram wires. I learned to recognize the sound of a crow’s feet landing on the metal top of a GDR-era streetlamp. Sometimes I was in the park before they clocked me. Once I found a row of crows and young rooks waiting on the fence of the dog run for me to pass. They seemed both readable and unfathomable to me, just like my experience of the city as I trudged along its pavements, but they were also company, and glad to see me without asking more of me than the peanuts.
When the dates lasted more than one meeting, I chose men who were pulling the same avoidant trick as me. We flew in the same direction an impeccable distance apart, like birds in a murmuration.
A new wall had been erected at the top of a man-made hill in the park for graffiti artists to attack, and the air was often thick with aerosol and paint particles. Some days I could climb to the top of the hill before I heard the birds calling all over, and watched as they appeared — black specks in the distance over the blocky West German flats half a kilometer away, turning to black and gray bird shapes who circled me and landed in the poplars or skimmed up the slope to my feet, their bellies inches clear of the balding grass. Windy days were best: The currents of air made it hard for them to get close, but they soared like small, sooty eagles, their pinions spread. Once they arrived, the crow ethnography began.
They operated in pairs but also as a larger flock that seemed to my human eyes to have a strict hierarchy: I saw a crow leave a peanut right in front of its feet so that a senior bird could have it. I also once saw a large crow attack and roll over a young bird and pin it on its back, its chest exposed, and five or six other crows raced over and stood in a circle around them, cawing what sounded like disapproval. The large crow released its prisoner. One evening at twilight I discovered that they roosted en masse on the floodlights of the football stadium, putting in a performance of looping aerobatics and abrupt plunges before they turned in for the night.
In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me. But while they lived in a murder that was tight-knit and full of drama, my lack of connection had not led to some kind of fluid and expansive lifestyle, but instead, stagnation and solitude. Some friends peeled away from the city, returning home for careers and family. My own roost was starting to feel precarious as the gentrification around my flat intensified and cobblers and cafés were replaced with boutiques selling designer pastel-gray baby bowls and Scandinavian cookware. I had an old rental contract that remained low but all around me the housing market was contracting and my building was growing scruffier, edging us closer to another renovation that would turf me out. I didn’t really want to think about whether I loved my Berlin existence enough to live “beyond the ring,” as people put it, as though the neighborhoods outside the Ringbahn were cold rocks of planets that rarely glimpsed the sun. This was not a hypothetical future I had tried out. If I did live there, away from my friends, what would the rest of my life look like? What would change?
I was heading home one Monday when I heard a great squawking behind me and turned to see a kestrel flying low, a vole dangling from its beak and three hooded crows on its tail, angling and twisting like TIE fighters. They all vanished into the trees. Shortly after that a woman walking her dog came up to me and asked if I fed the crows. I was surrounded by a dozen crows at the time. I said no. “You should not feed them,” she said, not fooled, “because there are many of them and the kestrel is all alone.” I saw her point. For a beat we stood facing each other off, crazy crow lady meets crazy kestrel lady.
After the birds had found me at the foot of the graffiti wall, we would go on a 10-minute walk around the park, with them following me. At first to overtake me and keep up they flew arcs to either side of me. Then they realized that they could take a shortcut and fly over my head. One afternoon I was walking down the steps cut into the hill when I bent over to pick up a stray peanut, and a crow flew so low over my back that had I stood up suddenly it would have crashed into me. Then they flew so close that my hair lifted in the draft of their wings.
In spring they were nesting, and crammed peanut after peanut down their bulging throats to regurgitate later. The pair at the park entrance collected a nut each from me and then swiftly buried them before coming back for more. In the summer the barbecuers returned to the park and there were leftover chicken wings abandoned on disposable grills, congealing pizza slices on the benches, and bratwurst ends in the bins — fat times for corvids. In the winter they were a little too intense and we started to get all Hitchcock.
I once saw one — which looked a little embarrassed — picking at a heap of sick on the pavement, and it occurred to me that it was right that crows should thrive in Berlin. Their coloring was camouflage for a place of gray skies and ingrained coal dust. The city’s emblem is a bear, and back then there was still a mumbly old brown bear in an actual pit in the city center. But it seemed to me that the fog crows were the city’s real objective correlatives: tough, savvy, garrulous, snouty, and cynical — an urban species that thrived on cold currywurst, vomit, and warm football-stadium lights. They might have no concept of Berlin but were inseparable from it, hanging over the buildings and streets and memorials, making their own territories and marking the seasons.
In some ways, the crows and I were similar. They changed only when disrupted. I thought I should change my life but let inertia cradle me.
My own territories were still fixed, but something was shifting. I felt I had made the wrong choices, that I should have wanted something more conventional, more easily understood, more boxes ticked. My life had little structure and few limits, and, unlike the crows, I was not thriving on the surface of Berlin. When I walked home alone in the dark the city seemed to expand overwhelmingly into the night. The ends of side streets faded into soft but profound darkness. Apartment windows were lit with red-shaded lamps that barely disturbed the black. Familiar neighborhoods gave way to unfathomable streets and then to suburbs, extending infinitely away from my feet on the pavement. The longer I lived alone, the nearer the fading point came to the edge of my world.
One bright morning I walked down the park in a cloud of 20 crows. A wild-eyed man, still unraveling from a heavy night in some club, came running up to me to say that what I was doing was incredible, and I stammered that it was only peanuts. Shortly after that, a young crow misjudged things and flew into the back of my head. I scaled back my activities.
I can’t remember the date when I stopped the performance altogether — or broke whatever mesmerism they had me under. I had tried feeding crows from my balcony too, watching them carry off the peanuts to bury in my neighbors’ window boxes. Then they learned how to untie the mass of knots I’d used to attach the metal bird feeder to the railing and dropped it into the courtyard, three stories down, so I gave up before they injured someone. I thought they had the same callous intelligence as orcas. I had not formed some kind of magical connection with these Berliners; I had just bought a lot of peanuts.
The real end, though, was when I paused halfway up one of those shady, yellow-painted Berlin stairwells and saw a crow on a branch outside slowly and methodically breaking a pigeon’s neck peck by peck.
I left Berlin two years ago. I don’t have a neat turning point for you — there was no self-help book or revelation or moment when the crows made me understand I had been doing everything wrong. I simply met someone and, for once, it felt safer to be together than alone, and when I took that leap toward connection, my life started to change rapidly and concretely. I left my old flat as my landlord finally tried to raise the rent and I moved in with the new boyfriend; I got pregnant; I happily moved to another country for his new job — still a migratory bird after all. I landed somewhere between convention and that expansive, restless life I had hoped for.
Meanwhile, the door to Berlin shut behind us. The housing market was finally in crisis, and it felt as though Berliners had gone to ground in the pandemic, clinging and retreating into their dingy, L-shaped living rooms like hermit crabs as rents rose and the queues outside apartment viewings stretched into the thousands.
You cannot skim the surface of a place and expect to belong to it. You cannot skim the surface of your life and inhabit it fully. To stay in Berlin alone I would have needed to strike out into that darkness at the ends of the streets and grasp what it meant to take root, grow old, and die in a place. The crows were not little harbingers of this mortality; they were just busy being corvids — my uncanny Berliners, my unfamiliar familiars. They stayed in place and lived according to the seasons, but it was the murder that animated their lives.
A year after that moment on the Berlin staircase, I walked to the park with the crow bag without thinking. One lithe, smallish crow found me and followed me. I walked up the hill and along the foot of the graffiti wall, inhaling the spray paint that taggers were busily dispersing into the atmosphere. The crow came with me. I walked down the steps to the pavement that ran where the Berlin Wall used to stand. It hopped over the flagstones. I walked down the scarred grass toward the exit, and the crow kept me company. I crossed the road and it winged over and landed on a power box next to me with a metallic click of talons. I apologized to it and went into the nearest shop to buy peanuts.
It was still waiting when I came out.
Susanna Forrest is the author of The Age of the Horse (Grove Atlantic, 2017) and If Wishes Were Horses (Atlantic Books, 2012). She writes a Substack newsletter called Amazons of Paris about women who were stars of the 19th-century circus and lives with her family in Sweden, where there are rooks instead of fog crows.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens
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On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
For Lit Hub in 2021, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón considers her gender in “Preparing the Body for a Reopened World.”
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Maria Zorn | Longreads | March 7, 2023 | 3,373 words (12 minutes)
In middle school, I would hide behind a giant oleander bush when it was time for the bus to leave for track and field meets and then, once it left without me, I’d walk to Panda Express and eat chow mein in blissful peace. This was also my strategy for grieving you. I thought I could, like a rapacious vole, burrow myself into the branches of the quotidian and the bus of mourning would pass me by altogether.
This is not to say that I didn’t ever experience a sense of loss. It was always there, a constant drip. Sometimes I’d think about the scene Mom came upon when the locksmith finally got your apartment door open and feel as though my kneecaps were going to crumble into ash beneath me. I wondered if there were claw marks on the floor from where you tried to stay as you felt your heart stop beating, or if you slid easily away like a clump of lint and dog hair into a Roomba. In these moments I wished to be vacuumed whole.
* Name and location have been changed for privacy.
Sophie works at the post office in Saanichton, British Columbia.* She is tall and sinewy with thin, bony shoulders. Her body could be drawn using only straight lines, just like yours. Her hair is jet black and always pulled back into a low ponytail that nestles into the nape of her neck. She appears to be more at ease when she is behind the counter than when she is in front of it, exposed. Her voice is low and quiet and when she gets flustered she holds her elbows close to her rib cage and her hands near her shoulders like an adorable T. rex. Her mannerisms are what initially drew Mom to her, what first reminded her of you. But then she saw her protruding clavicle and her thick top lip and her round doe eyes and she couldn’t unsee the physical resemblance. She wants me to help her think of a way to befriend Sophie that doesn’t begin with: You remind me of my dead son and I would do anything to spend time with you. I just don’t know what to tell her.
Perhaps the better metaphor is that my grief for you stalked me like those ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man. I was chasing dots with my mouth wide open, trying to outrun you. The dots were moments I still felt some semblance of myself in a world without you in it, they were anyone and anything that could drain me of all of my energy and attention, they were being able to feel light enough to giggle, they were attempting to Irish dance while waiting for my tea kettle to whistle. The ghosts were you, at 8, declining to go on a playdate because you were afraid I wouldn’t have anyone to play with; you, at 16, threatening to hit the boy who broke my heart with your car; you, at 22, telling me we were soulmates with tears in your eyes at the Molly Wee pub; the ghosts were you, you, you, you with pastel sheets over your head, cutouts for your big Bambi eyes.
Mom gets butterflies in her stomach before she goes to the post office. She’s glad for once that she has a P.O. box, that the mail carrier doesn’t come to her mossy, rural strip of the Saanich Peninsula. She blow-dries her light blonde hair until it falls in cascading curls around her face and blinks on mascara. She pulls on her stylish brown leather boots and steals one last look at herself in the mirror. She takes a deep inhale that tickles the pain in her chest. Mom wants to be more than friends with Sophie, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. These loves are fluid, these loves are nonbinary.
* Name has been changed for privacy.
The dots I chased were Chris, because every emotion I felt with him was neon.* We slept glued together like spider monkeys, and when I woke up before him I would be completely still and study him worshipfully — his toffee-colored skin that was softer than a kitten’s ear, his charcoal ringlets. We watched videos of Thom Yorke dancing for hours at a time, we did a special little jig when we bought a bottle of puttanesca sauce. When I was sad, he’d get out a Japanese sword that was left at the bar where he worked and throw watermelons in the air for me to slice like a fruit ninja. He could make anything fun, could make anything a game — but he was always the team captain. I was never certain whether it was our 14-year age gap or simply his personality, but he felt as much like a coach as he did a boyfriend. I thought he shut me down when I disagreed with him and I knew he blew his nose in our dirty laundry, and these things both made me furious. Two years passed and we morphed into ever uglier versions of ourselves. We yelled at each other outside of Joe’s Pizza by the Slice, he was a gargoyle and I was a swamp lizard and then we were two terribly sad people who didn’t talk anymore. For months after we broke up, I lay in bed every night, crusty with dried tears and snot, and my ribs felt loose. I imagined Chris playing Radiohead songs on them like they were piano keys while I tried and failed to fall asleep. I was convinced that if I concentrated hard enough on my heartache for him that I would not notice how hollow I felt from your goneness.
You wore six-inch platform creepers and voluptuous shaggy Mongolian lamb coats, Rick Owens pencil skirts and black leather fingerless gloves. You ordered a floor-length sheer dressing gown with sleeves trimmed in feathers. When Mom said she liked it but it looked like something one would wear over a négligée, you earnestly replied: But I don’t have a négligée yet! Before I moved to New York with you, I came to visit and had to use my tube top as a pillowcase since you owned only one. I cleaned your apartment while you scoured town for a fake ID for me, an even trade. After sweeping the 600-square-foot space I had a chinchilla-sized pile of dust and boa fragments and sequins and dirt and I felt like Cruella de Vil’s housekeeper. You made a fool of the words “feminine” and “masculine” — you were neither, you were both. You called yourself an alien frequently, and even got one tattooed on your right arm. You felt like you were so different from other humans that you were extraterrestrial. No one we knew used they/them pronouns, no one we knew used terms like “nonbinary,” like “gender-fluid.” You knew you didn’t identify with other men, but you also knew you didn’t feel like other women. I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose. I wonder if you would have tried snorting heroin that night if you didn’t feel like such an alien.
My dots were my budding career at a tech startup that I thought was so much more impressive than it actually was. I worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. then came home, ate noodles, propped my laptop on the pudge of my lower belly, and kept working in bed until I fell asleep. I tried dating during this phase, but I got more pleasure from telling men I was busy and then later breaking things off than I did from going to dinner with them.
My eyes began to tolerate all of the computer work I was doing less and less until it felt like all that occupied my sockets were two purple bruises covered in fire ants. After trips to six different ophthalmologists, I was diagnosed with non-length dependent small fiber polyneuropathy and ocular rosacea and told that a career that involved “excessive screen time” was probably not in the cards for me. The doctor looked at me with a very serious expression that was made less serious by a small piece of avocado that clung to his mustache. I was such a people pleaser that in this moment all I could think of was making this a smooth experience for him so that he didn’t go look in the mirror after our conversation and feel like an idiot for having a dirty ’stache. This was a time in my life when if someone gave me a ride, I’d offer them a kidney. I jammed the shock and anguish I felt into the depths of my pockets alongside pennies and crescent-shaped nail fragments, I arranged my face into an awkward smile and said: No worries!
I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose.
I quit my job and the online college courses I was taking and returned to bartending with the enthusiasm of a wet tube sock. An overly cheerful woman with a hair growing from the mole on her chin asked me to surprise her with a drink and I poured well rum and apple juice into a pint glass with no ice then charged her $13 for it. I didn’t talk to my friends who were graduating and starting careers, I stopped dating. I closed in on myself and got smaller and smaller until, like a Shrinky Dink, I could be pierced and worn on a string as a hideous pendant.
I had moved back home to Arizona after you died because I couldn’t stay in New York City without you. The ghosts were too speedy there, but the dots were too far apart in Phoenix. I needed to get out. I applied for a sales position in Denver that promised not to involve the computer, packed my belongings into my beat-up red hatchback and took myself to Colorado. Driving through mountain passes, I felt an indelible sense of hope that this change of scenery would make me better, whatever that meant.
I watched the video you recorded six months before you died yesterday, the one where you’re drinking Veuve with your friend Michelle and explaining what you want done with your ashes if anything ever happens to you. You throw your head back to cackle between your outlandish requests and I stare at your pale throat. Some ashes stored in a Ming vase, some made into diamonds, some shot out of a cannon with glitter. Mom and I looked into the cannon, but all we could find was some silly handheld thing called the “Loved One Launcher” that appeared to be used primarily at memorial services held next to creeks and swamps, judging from their marketing material. It definitely wasn’t the right fit.
We didn’t know how to “memorialize” someone who felt as essential as a limb. In our indecision, we landed on taking a trip someplace beautiful every year on the anniversary of your death. We’ve been to Cabo San Lucas, Aspen, Copenhagen, Sooke. We split a bottle of rosé and hold hands and your absence is outlined in chalk on the picnic blanket we sit on. Once, we hiked 13 miles to a beautiful alpine lake to scatter some of your ashes and I carried them on my back. I had only your remains and a bottle of wine in my pack but the straps dug into my shoulders until they were pink as salmon. We sang “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies and laughed and cried at the same time. When we dumped your ashes in the water they shimmered in the sun like the glitter you wore on your eyelids and cheeks during your teen raver years. I wanted so badly to look up at the sky that was the same blue as your eyes and feel unadulterated solace, but instead I felt nothing at all.
This year on May 30, I think Mom is going to take me to the post office.
My dots were jobs, jobs, new jobs every few months. I worked as a kiosk wench for HelloFresh, a sales manager for StretchLab, a preschool teacher at a country day school, a fitness instructor at Life Time, at a physical therapy clinic, at a Pilates studio. I went back to school to become an art teacher, then quit that and took a yearlong nutrition course, then decided I never actually want to talk to anyone about what they eat. I remembered once hearing the phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks” and I imagined myself doing parkour off the furniture at each of my jobs, shooting noodles and marinara out of my fingertips and watching the pasta bounce off of the reformers, the little children, the clinic walls like rubber. I had eaten all of the dots in the maze and was left aimlessly bumping into its corners with a jaw ache, desperately trying to avoid a ghost pileup.
I had a dream that I was walking around a city map, but the map wasn’t made of paper — it was a black iPhone, the glass so shattered it looked like it was filled with streets and boulevards. All the roads filled with white powder until I couldn’t move my legs anymore. The phone was yours, and it sat next to a full pour of wine, murky reddish-black like blood. You died sitting up — bony ass on the floor, back against the side of your bed, pale slim fingers wrapped around your glass. How did you manage not to spill one drop? Why did you think heroin was a suitable nightcap after cocaine, Adderall, alcohol?
I remember sitting on the back porch of Mom’s house with you every night one summer, talking and smoking hookah for hours until the metal patio chairs branded the back of our sweaty legs with checkers. Even at 10 p.m. it was over 100 degrees in Phoenix. I’d feel droplets of sweat crawl from my armpits down my sides and settle into the waistband of my boxer shorts. We’d put a splash of milk in the water pipe because you were convinced that would make the smoke cloudier, more fun to blow O rings with. You confessed one of these nights to smoking black tar heroin once during your sophomore year of high school, when you were a self-proclaimed “mall goth.” I whapped you with the wooden hookah mouthpiece, hard, right in the solar plexus. I thought about the time we gobbled up so many of Dad’s prescription drugs and drank so much prosecco that we blacked out an entire journey from Amsterdam to Phoenix, including a three-hour layover that was apparently in Detroit, judging from the translucent blue lighter we bought that said Motown City and the greasy Little Caesar’s receipt that sat cross-legged in the bottom of my purse. I was not prudish about getting fucked up, but with this anecdote you crossed a threshold into territory that scared me. You took a sharp inhale and raised your dark eyebrows, fighting back a laugh. You said: Obviously that was dumb and I’ll never try it again. I made you promise with a pinkie, even though you were 19 and I was 17. Your recklessness with your life produced in me a worry that sat like a small, hard stone in my belly.
You’d hate the way dying from a heroin overdose sounds. You’d have me let everyone know that you were “trying to buy opium.” That you were supposed to go to a wedding in Greece in two months, New York Fashion Week in three. That you didn’t mean for it to happen this way.
The dots were gone, but I became so adroit at ghost evasion I no longer needed them — I was eating strawberries, oranges, bananas, cherries. I found a drug that makes my eye condition more tolerable, a job I like well enough, a dog who constantly wants to shake my hand. I found a partner with Reptar green and caramel eyes who gives me grace like a daily train ticket, who calls you Tomm, not “your brother,” whose calm demeanor lowers my blood pressure and provides a certitude that life is allowed to feel good. I thought Jack’s love was a fuzzy sweater I could don and become whole. I saw no portents of a more substantial ghost, one that could swallow me entirely. I fell into the mouth of a ghost as though it was a shoddy manhole cover; it took me by surprise and then devoured me until I was wholly in its maw and could not see a single shred of light through its incisors. My grief developed its own physical presence, its own pulse. I feared that it was going to burst through my bones like the Kool-Aid man at any moment and take me over completely. My first instinct was to wrestle it to the ground, to mash my teeth into its ears and give it a noogie, since I was always the brute of the family. I knew you’d try to reason with it, to write it a letter using your shiniest vocabulary like the ones you’d send to Mom and Dad to convince them to raise our allowance, to get a pet sugar glider, to let you get your ears pierced, to legally change the “Jr.” that follows your name to the more sophisticated and chic “II.” You’d arrange all of your best arguments like toy soldiers followed by rebuttals of anticipated counter-arguments, then sign: Please don’t be mad at me. As a card-carrying atheist I didn’t know who to write a letter to. The universe? You?
I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase.
My therapist recommended I try ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and I had my first session this week. I thought of you because the first time I heard the word “ketamine” was when you snorted it in ninth grade and then came out to Mom, and the first time I heard the term “treatment-resistant depression” was after I talked about you to my therapist, seven years after you died. I filled out a questionnaire that tests for suicidality and it was only then that I realized my sadness had become life-threatening. I had a primordial urge to go wherever it is that you are. I’d sign my note to Mom and Jack: Please don’t be mad at me.
The nurse anesthetist injected the drug into my shoulder and it felt like a gentle bee sting. There were colors and textures and sounds that I can’t explain, but what I remember most of all was you. Your hair was dyed platinum blonde and a thin white shirt hugged your angular frame. You were resplendent. You were laughing and reaching out for my hand, and I chased you across tiles that lit up under our feet as we stepped on them. We knew you were not alive but we also knew that you were not gone. Looking at you, for the first time in seven years, didn’t feel like gazing directly into a car’s headlights at night; you didn’t singe my delicate eyes with your brightness. You hugged me the way you always did, so tightly that your upper ribs jabbed into my torso with a titty-puncturing ferocity, like you were holding on for dear life, and I felt an ineffable sense of something inside me being cauterized. Later I’d recall a mathematical concept from high school in which two lines get very, very close together but never actually end up touching and wonder if, for me, this would be the closest I’d ever get to feeling peace about your death. As I began to regain consciousness, your face became pixelated and the crinkles around your eyes started to smoothen and fade. The first part of my body that woke up was my mouth, and I could feel my chapped lips pressing together with alacrity to form a small smile. Before you disappeared completely, you said: What if it’s all true at once? You held those words up like a trophy and I unzipped my chest and put them inside.
Maria Zorn is a writer and visual artist currently living in Denver, Colorado.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Cassidy Randall | Longreads | February 16, 2023 | 4,141 words (15 minutes)
Ben carries a Pulaski ax filched from the cabin’s woodshed as we walk the trail along the Canadian border. Half a mile back, we stepped over a mountain lion’s broad track imprinted fresh on the damp banks of the river, her cub’s pocket-sized paw laid just behind it. Claw marks score the aspens at heights above my head, tufts of fur from the enormous bears who left them snagged by the peeling bark. Yesterday we heard a wolf howl far off in the forest.
The ax is less for protection from these predators — Ben couldn’t bear to kill any of them, even hoping the cabin’s resident pack rat outsmarts the trap he half-heartedly set for it — and more to intimidate any poachers we might come across in this remote corner of Glacier National Park. He’s been coming to the old ranger station here every fall for 20 years in solitary soul-searching rituals, under the pretext of performing this antiquated patrol for illegal hunters. He’s never brought anyone else in for such a long stint. And never someone so important to him, he says. It makes him more fearful of everything that can go wrong in the deep wild out here. Another reason he carries the ax.
It still boggles my mind that I could be important like that to someone.
To the north of this border trail lies Revelstoke, British Columbia: the mountain mecca that’s now my home. To the east and south rises the jagged expanse of the rest of Glacier, where Ben and I first met so many years ago — back when I called Montana home, when I wrote him off as another failed relationship in a lifelong string of them. Back when I hitched my self-worth and happiness to being loved by a man.
To the west, my Montana-bought truck with its British Columbia license plates sits in the sagebrush waiting for our return. For me to decide which direction to drive it: Back to Canada, where I’ve chosen me, and the mountains, over men. Or south into Montana with Ben, and everything I’ve already left behind.
The truck didn’t come until later. The little sedan that carried me to Montana came first.
In 2005, I piloted that gold Ford Focus from Los Angeles up to Missoula one November, looking to spend the winter there during my off-season from teaching outdoor education in my native California. A child of salt water and dusty ponderosa forests, I’d never “spent a winter” anywhere with actual winter. I was looking for a novel three or four months before going back to teaching.
If I’m honest with myself, I was really looking for something else.
Inside my head then, I was still the awkward, nerdy girl of my youth. Growing up, I was unaware I was a nerd. I was proud of my intelligence. I rushed to shoot my hand up first in class. I thought it was cool to bury my nose in Lord of the Rings books during free time, and when someone interrupted me, cry out, “Hold on! I’m in the middle of a battle scene!” I was both chubby and the tallest girl in the class, looming in both directions over most of the boys. I had crooked teeth and bad eyes, necessitating glasses and braces, although not, thanks to my parents’ foresight on this, at the same time.
High school brought no transformative hero(ine)’s arc, the type in the ’90s movies of my youth where the mousy loner girl ends up being gorgeous under those glasses, saved from the hell of social rejection by the coolest, hottest guy on campus. I recall vividly when the neighbor boy called to tell me my friends, with whom I’d been inseparable for years, didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. The following day, I stood horrifically alone on the quad at lunch hour, everyone witness to my fresh status as a total loser. Only one or two boys asked me out over those years. I went to my senior prom stag, trailing a group of, by then, painstakingly won girlfriends and their dates.
So driving north to Missoula at 24, I couldn’t shake the idea that if I hadn’t had a real boyfriend by then, something was wrong with me. I know there were good times in high school, but we are so hardwired for negativity that underlined in bold in my mind was the conviction that I wasn’t attractive enough, fun enough, athletic enough, thin enough, good enough for a man to love me back.
But in Montana, virtually no one knew me. It would be a clean slate. When I drove my little sedan on the tail of a fierce wind into Missoula, what I was really looking for was salvation. In the form of a Prince Charming mountain man.
The little ski hill outside town, I heard, was the best place to meet guys. Plus, learning to ski would be something to do in the long, dark cold season. Despite the fact that I grew up at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, home to the gritty ski resorts of Snow Summit and Big Bear, winter was not in my family’s wheelhouse. In junior high, when I heard people start telling stories about learning to ski and snowboard, I cornered my father.
“Dad, why don’t we ever go skiing?”
A lifelong product of orange groves and waves himself, he replied, only half joking, “You can stand in a cold shower and rip up $20 bills for the same effect.”
I figured skiing, then, would be a trial, a task that must be accomplished toward an end goal. But, shockingly, I turned out to be good at it. Learning what my body could do in harmony with a certain angle of slope or a particular pattern of snow-robed pine trees made me forget for a while about that uncoordinated little girl. I’d been praying to winter to offer up a romance, was ready to make sacrifices to this new god if it asked for them. And perhaps it did, and I delivered unknowingly and without question, as snow edged out the desert heat from my bones. It fell in my dreams and in drifts behind my eyes. I didn’t find any princes there. But I did find my own power awakening.
I dreamed of bigger mountains, deeper forests, and people to explore them with, as all my friends got married, had children, and insulated themselves.
Spring came, the outdoor education season started in California, and my little sedan stayed parked in Montana.
The landscape seeded in my skin. Creeks and rivers rearranged and settled into my blood vessels, trail dust tattooed my ankles. The landscape blurred something, too: the primary geographical feature of my college years. That three-story sorority house in West L.A., packed with 50 young women and full-length mirrors on every landing and at the end of every hallway, mercilessly insisted on what my body was supposed to look like, how the right clothes were supposed to hang on my breasts, which weren’t big enough, and my stomach, which wasn’t flat enough. Surely if I could fit the right mold then I would be worthy of love and the men would flock. I ran the perimeter of campus every other day. I counted calories. The energy it took exhausted me. And I wasn’t the only one in that house. All those bodies that held staggering intelligence and ambition and promise reduced to the pursuit of an unattainable image at the bid of West L.A.
But here. Here my body began to transmute into what it could do, not what it looked like, rinsing away what Los Angeles had taught me about image and self-worth and the dubious merit of a thin pair of thighs. It was in the midst of that transcendence that romance finally materialized.
At 25 years old, I was saved. For a few years, I was part of something. As in, partner. As in, love, reciprocal. As in, half of a whole. With him, I was whole. I don’t believe I ever told him he was my first boyfriend. I never wanted him to think of me as flawed, to be repulsed by my past incapacity for inspiring attraction. And I did love him, but perhaps it was secondary to finally achieving what so much of Western culture had taught my generation of girls, insidiously and thoroughly, about what “complete” means.
Then he left for me another woman. One “more capable outdoors,” “more spiritually connected to the woods,” more enough of basically everything that I wasn’t. I walked the trails and swam the rivers in an attempt to wash away the pronouncement of my lacking, asked the gilded sun that kaleidoscoped through the cottonwoods and larch to evaporate it from my skin into the wide Montana sky.
I never stopped to think whether he had ever been enough for me.
Some years after, I drove through the long light of a July night to West Glacier. Headed for a date. By then I’d been on many. Some stuck, and I’d be madly in love for a few months until my switch inexplicably flipped and I’d wonder what the hell I’d been thinking. But most hadn’t stuck, and second dates were a rarity. I always figured it was my fault.
This one was an epic blind date. A mutual friend had introduced me to a man named Ben, who was stationed in Glacier doing trail work. He invited me to summit a peak in the park, if I didn’t mind staying the night on his couch for an early start in the morning. It was a spectacular act of faith for a first date. But I knew about faith. It was one of the things my friends said they liked best about me: how I put my heart on the chopping block again and again.
I recall certain scenes, particular details, of those 24 hours. Him walking down the steps of his little cabin with a beer in each hand before I even turned off the ignition, a couple tattoos snaking up his arms to disappear under rolled-up sleeves. How I couldn’t decide if his eyes were hazel or green. Pulling a scratchy blanket up to my chin on the too-small couch. The dark before dawn when he made us gigantic sandwiches of bacon and runny eggs.
I remember, perhaps because it was embarrassing, that as we passed the long stretch of Lake McDonald on the way up Going-to-the-Sun Road, I said without thinking: “Do you know that one of my favorite things in the whole world is jumping naked into a lake after a long hike?”
I hadn’t meant it flirtatiously. It was just a fact about myself, like, “I am not a morning person,” or, “Actually, runny eggs really gross me out.”
He grinned knowingly. “Well then. We’ll have to see if we can find any spots for you later.”
I also recall that at the trailhead, he took off nearly at a sprint. I kicked into gear to keep up, my attempt to carry on a conversation punctuated by gasping even as he pulled farther ahead. I remember thinking he was just another mountain man like all the others who demonstrated clearly that I possessed neither the speed nor strength required for their adventure pursuits, which were more important than me, who was perhaps just a hindrance out here, on second thought, so why don’t we just meet up for a beer and a shag later?
“Is this a test?” I said to his back. If I wasn’t tough enough or whatever this guy was looking for, I wanted to know it now. If I’d learned anything over the years, it was that I could cut off the hoping and go straight to the rejection and save myself some torture.
“What?” He slowed, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “No! I’m just used to trail work, and the faster you hike, the faster you get things done and get back to camp for dinner. We can slow down, for sure. I’m sorry.”
I was unused to apologies or the outside-the-self awareness required to issue them. I don’t remember whether the conversation was awkward or easy after that. I know that the summit was windy and we took a single photo, his dimple showing through strands of my hurricane hair. And that he got us miserably lost on the return after claiming he knew the trails in the park like his own bones. I handled it badly, we drove past Lake McDonald in the late afternoon without a word, and I folded myself into my Focus after a curt goodbye. And I remember the thought, as I drove back south: Another one bites the dust.
I left Montana shortly after. I dreamed of bigger mountains, deeper forests, and people to explore them with, as all my friends got married, had children, and insulated themselves. But the biggest reason was that I dreamed of falling in love for good. Montana had delivered only drought and dust and failure in that department.
I sold the sedan. I bought the truck — which fit who I had become, and would fit this next leg of the journey so much better. I drove, trying on landscapes where it took me. East, south, west. Eventually I drove north, clear through the border, extending the route I’d began when I left Los Angeles all those years ago. I finally turned off the engine in a tiny mountain town in British Columbia.
Revelstoke’s bladed ridgelines repeated themselves to the Yukon. These mountains were religion with prophets and fanatics and martyrs. The light through thick stands of hemlock and behemoth ancient cedar was harder to obtain, more gratifying to subsume because of it. This landscape was sharp, nearly impenetrable, and it would never even fit inside my body.
I began, if not to turn away from the mythical notion of a man to “complete” me, to accept that there was no love out there for me. I chose mountains instead.
One late October afternoon, I knelt in front of my truck with a screwdriver to loosen my Montana license plates. I’d been here long enough that it was time. The Revelstoke air chilled with the sharp northern tilt of the earth and I thought, fleetingly, of math equation word problems about narrowing angles of light between the southern California desert and a Canadian ski town: “X equals how far she has come, measured in angles and distance.” Up here, I’d discovered the depth of my own capabilities. I’d expanded my limits in adventure sports, blossomed into a writer, surrounded myself with a community that lifted me up in those things. I’d traveled so far from that nerdy, chubby, awkward girl and her erroneous convictions. But internal growth is mostly unquantifiable with simple equations.
I twisted the tool on a corner of the Montana plate. The aluminum was bent from where I’d hit a deer some years before. She ran impossibly away and out of sight, trailing blood from wounds from which I knew she couldn’t recover. The blood was long gone from the plate, but her imprint remained. I pulled off the worn rectangle and affixed the shiny panel of my new British Columbia plate. It hung straight on my bent bumper. I ran my hand over its clean white slate, satisfied.
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A few months later, a notification popped up on Facebook. It was Ben’s birthday. On a trip back down to Montana some years back to grab my things from storage, I’d bumped into him in an old watering hole in Missoula where he had relocated for graduate school, and my brain did an about-face. It forgot about the bad parts of that first date and focused clearly, instead, on the topography of his body perfectly fitting mine when he stood to hug me. On a whim, I wrote Happy birthday on his profile. He replied immediately on Messenger.
I want to apologize, again, for getting us lost on our hike all those years ago. I’ve felt bad about it ever since.
The chat window held the archived thread of our first communication, timestamped five years ago. Scrolling back I saw the past iteration of myself: a girl less confident, still so careful to present herself so as to be liked. I saw him: striding assuredly into the wild whether or not he knew where he was going.
The following month, at Ben’s invitation, I stopped in Whitefish, just south of the Canadian border where he lived now, to see him on my way to Missoula. My stomach dropped as I pulled into town, waking up butterflies that tickled my insides. I couldn’t figure out why the butterflies were having a party in there. I already knew Ben.
He sat on the porch steps of an antique two-story house on the corner, sleeves rolled up to reveal those tattoos, elbows on his knees, scanning the street. He rose when he saw my car and smiled. The dimple.
“How was the drive?” he asked. So many ways to respond. Instructive, I could say. Delivering. Redeeming. But he, asking only about this short leg of my long road to discovery, would be confused. I replied simply, “Good.”
His tiny living room smelled of incense and woodsmoke and aging paper from the books overflowing a shelf. I turned to sit on an ugly plaid loveseat by the door, and stopped to examine an enormous map above it, with penned lines drawn all over it.
“Is this Glacier?” I asked him.
He’d shut the door behind him, and was trying to find an innocuous place to stand in the small room with me in it. He settled for leaning against the wall. “Yeah. Those are all the trails I’ve hiked.”
I leaned toward it, peering at an inked spider web in the northwest corner, right on the Canadian border. It was nowhere I’d ever heard of.
“That’s Kishenehn,” he said. “An old ranger station. I stay there every fall to patrol for poachers. It’s not on any maps anymore, but park officials still like to have a presence there during hunting season.” He paused. “It’s a pretty special place.”
That afternoon, something between us flicked on like a light. I could close my eyes and point to where he stood in a crowded room. As we hiked up a local mountain to ski down it, he looked at me and smiled with that dimple deepening and a premonition struck me to my core with a singular clarity: This will be big.
Some months later, we sat on my tailgate sipping my favorite Montana beer that Ben had brought up to Revelstoke, watching the August sun sink below the mountains across from where my truck sat on the river bank. A lovely moment.
We argued through it.
“I don’t want to keep going like this, with two weeks or more between seeing you,” he said. “It’s hard to be away from you so much. I can’t wait until we live in the same town.”
“But what will that even look like?” I downed the rest of my beer. “You’ve said you don’t want to move up here, which I get. It’s hard to get residency, or even a work permit. Trust me, I know, I’ve been through it.”
“It would be easier for you to move back down there. Don’t you want to be back in Montana eventually? With all your best friends? And me?”
I went to work peeling the label off the bottle in my hands to keep them busy while I figured out how to articulate what I needed to say. We’d met in his place, in mine. I fed him my northern landscape, the big newness of it all, the dark rainforest with ancient trees and the snowblind ridges unfurling to the Arctic. He fanned the dying embers of cottonwood light in me. But the drive back north after my visits to Montana always felt more … right.
“I don’t reach my full potential in Montana,” I said. “This is where I reach my full potential. It’s where I expand. And I’ve worked so hard to be here.”
I had finally become enough for myself — in fact, more than I ever thought I could be — and my hyper-independent, jaded heart was perhaps incapable of opening itself to the offer of big, complicated love. Real love, not that movie shit. And so then I said what I couldn’t take back: “I’m not ready to sacrifice everything for this.”
Hurt pooled in his eyes, reflecting a skyline so foreign to him where the sun had just been.
Later we lay wrapped around each other in my bed, surrendering to sleep in our last night together before we separated ourselves by hundreds of miles, again, when he whispered in my ear, “Will you come with me to Kishenehn this fall?”
His sacred place. He’d told me how that specific corner had mapped itself inside his young and unsure skin and grown into the man lying beside me. I knew about places like that.
At the center of a treed clearing, hidden from the wondrous skylines that defined Glacier, Kishenehn Ranger Station sat shrouded in seclusion. Elk and moose antlers hung over the cabin’s timber-frame porch. Ben toured me around the grounds, the few outbuildings that surrounded the cabin like satellites. At the old fire crew bunkhouse, Ben motioned me around a corner.
“See these depressions along the perimeter?” he said, pointing to the ground at a line of blurry craters the size of my head. “These are century tracks, where bears have walked in the same footsteps for generations. And these,” he gestured to a series of scores in the exterior log wall at chest height and higher, “are claw marks. We’ll probably find some fur around too — yep, here.” He picked a few light brown hairs off the wood and handed them to me. Then he adjusted the bear spray on the chest strap of his pack and led us toward the creek.
He pointed out every track, explained every sound, inhaled the sky, and breathed it into me. He was so in his element here that he appeared the most solid he’d ever looked. And I understood, as I followed him along these trails that had shaped him the way my long road north had shaped me, that he didn’t need me to complete him, either.
He’d told me how that specific corner had mapped itself inside his young and unsure skin and grown into the man lying beside me. I knew about places like that.
We woke the next morning to 10 degrees and frost on the grass. A good morning for lingering over coffee by the woodstove. We read by the windows to catch their light. Ben put down his book often to watch the fringe of trees outside, which is why he was the one who saw the doe as she edged into the clearing. He called me over softly. Two fawns emerged from the trees, keeping close to the doe as the little family made its way through the wide meadow and disappeared into the light on the other side.
Ben smiled and pulled me down into his lap to lay his head against my chest.
“What are we going to do?” I asked into the quiet.
“About what?”
“About us. Where are we going to live?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t ready to have that conversation.”
Before I could think too much about it, I said:
“I think you’re the love of my life.”
His eyes were green, then. “I know you’re the love of mine.”
Days later, with the temperature plunging, we trekked back to my truck in the sagebrush. The journey to a more fully formed iteration of the self looks like lines on a road atlas — or, for some, a wilderness trail map. Sometimes we must continually move forward to arrive. Sometimes, having charted the edges of ourselves, we are drawn to loop back, changed, to places we’ve already passed through, carrying acquired knowledge that lights up the landscape from new angles.
I had made no decisions about which direction to drive. But I had arrived at this: My full potential did not lie in a particular place. My worth did not reside in another person. And I finally realized, then, that enough had never been the right concept to attach to love. Complement, growth, faith, and yes, even independence, so hard-won for me — these fit better, but were still too simplistic to encompass the reality of what this love could be in all its layered complications. If I were willing to let it.
I opened my tailgate and shrugged off my heavy pack. Ben set his down next to it and pulled me into the landscape of his body that fit mine so well. “Thank you for coming with me,” he said.
We got into my truck and drove.
Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer telling stories on adventure, environment, and people expanding human potential. Her work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone, and her first book, The Hard Parts with Oksana Masters, is out February 2023.
“How do you quit troubleshooting yourself?” In this intimate personal essay, a queer writer with body dysmorphia contemplates their physical appearance and what it’s like to have a condition that prevents them from truly seeing their body.
I can’t tell you what my partner sees when they look at my body, nor what my coworkers see when I turn on my Zoom camera. I struggle to build my digital avatar. Yes, I have brown hair and brown eyes. No, I am not very tall. Beyond that—the shape of my face, the width of my hips and thighs—is a mystery to me. I’ve searched for myself in puddles and in bathwater, in dressing rooms and at golden hour. Pictures and videos show me someone brand new, so I look harder; not for beauty, not always, but for some consistent self-outline.
“DNA is the gift that keeps on giving, whether you’re ready or not,” writes Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Palmer and her half-brother, Don Doiron, were born a week apart in 1955, in the same hospital, to different mothers: Florence McLean and Ana Cifuentes. It took 62 years before they learned that they were half-siblings, and were adopted into very different families. Palmer pens a poignant personal essay about searching for the truth, their buried family history in a time when “silence ruled” and “adoption was never discussed,” and their birth father. It’s a moving story about finding one’s place in the world.
Even as adults, adoptees have long been treated like children who need to be protected from our own truths. When we came of age in the 1970s, Don and I had to apply for the scant details, called non-identifying information, the government then permitted us to know. We received sparse biographies of our birth mothers (age, birthplace, education and occupation) and next to nothing about our birth fathers. It wasn’t enough for either of us.
Today, Don and I are still piecing together our stories. Not everything we’ve learned has been happy. Some of our shared history is heart-rending. But we claim every bit of our lives as our truth, as the story we have every right to know, to celebrate and to mourn, to pass on to our children.
“I call my cousin who lives in Crosbyton to find out what it looks like now and if people still swim there,” writes Bobby Alemán. “I ask him if there are still waterfalls. He laughs.”
Silver Falls, once an idyllic swimming hole and recreation spot for families in Texas, no longer exists. But why did the waterfalls go dry? Alemán went back home to investigate why, and on the trip unexpectedly uncovers memories of his father, who died in 2005 at age 50.
She struggles to put words together to tell me about a separate incident involving my father. It turns out my dad once saved a drowning child at Silver Falls. He pulled a 6- or 7-year-old boy out of the water and performed CPR. The boy’s parents were hysterical. Screaming. “They were sure he was gone,” she says. “He just pulled the boy out, right?” I say, puzzled. “No! Your dad brought the boy back,” my aunt emphasizes. “He was as limp as can be.”
I’d never heard this story, but it didn’t surprise me. My grandfather tells me a similar story from many years ago about my dad spotting an injured hiker stranded on a ravine, most likely in the Guadalupe Mountains, when he and his girlfriend were on their way to Mexico for a trip. He was able to flag down help and get aid to the woman. My dad died in 2005 at the age of 50—too young. But since he’s been gone, his stories keep finding their way to me.
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