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This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on April 30, 2017.
Sophomore year of college, on my school’s monthly blood drive day, I was seduced by a sign outside of a Big Red Bus that decreed, “You can be a hero! Donate blood and save three lives today!” The sign was written with hot pink dry eraser marker in cheery, swirly letters as if advertising today’s lunch special: Destiny. Of course. I have always known that I’m destined for greatness—a triumph so epic you could hear my name drifting in the winds if you simply stood still and tuned your ears to history: Edgar Gomez is a hero. Or maybe: Edgar Gomez, the hero. Whichever is easier on the winds.
I had skipped breakfast that morning and wondered if they were offering anything more substantial. On the back, in case being a hero three times over wasn’t enough of a draw, the sign continued: “Free small pizza and movie ticket with every donation.” A small price to pay to save three lives.
Giddy at the arrival of my big break, I climbed aboard the bloodmobile, vibrating with the knowledge that this was finally my chance to prove to everyone what has been so obvious to me my whole life. I had been waiting for a sign for so long, and here it was at last, so satisfyingly literal. Inside, I was promptly greeted by the check-in nurse in the customary heroic way.
“We don’t have time for you,” she said, shifting her eyes to the packed bench where a queue of students sat waiting to be harvested. I stared at her blankly, my mouth struggling to find the words that would communicate to her how vital it was that I be allowed in, that this wasn’t just about donating blood, that this was larger than the both of us, her rejection could very well likely forever alter the fabric of history and space and time.
“I have time,” I said.
“Okay,” she shrugged. “You can wait if you want.” At that, she turned and disappeared behind a thin screen door. Another nurse motioned to a rack on the wall stacked with clipboards.
“Fill out one of those,” she said, gesturing with a Ziploc bag stuffed with a foam rubber ducky. “Try to be as honest as possible. Oh, and fill the boxes out completely,” she added as an afterthought. “The machine doesn’t recognize partially filled out boxes.”
On a nearby donor bed, a pale woman nodded off with her hand raised like she was asking a question in her sleep, a dark purple spot bleeding through the gauze where the needle had punctured her skin.
*
To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club. If you are under seventeen years old, depending on the state, you must have your parents’ permission. There are cruel limitations as to where and when you may have travelled. For example, you may not have spent more than five years at the Sorbonne in Paris getting your doctorate degree about French movies about trains. You may not have had a tattoo done within the past twelve months, even of a really tough looking anchor on your chest. You must weigh a minimum of 110 lbs. As per American Red Cross eligibility requirements, there is no upper weight limit for donors “as long as your weight is not higher than the weight limit of the donor bed/lounge you are using.” To give blood, you must be able to fit on a donor bed. Add to the reasons you might be denied at a blood donor center: the summer you spent in Ireland in 1993 looking for Bono, the lip piercing you got after your last break up two months ago because you desperately needed change, the pill you took this morning.
I scanned through my donor questionnaire, making sure to answer each question as honestly as possible.
“Feeling healthy and well today?” There was no box for “Sometimes I feel like I died 400 years ago and every now and then my right arm has a strange spasm which makes me suspect that I may be a demon who took over some poor kid’s body and he’s desperately trying to get out one limb at a time,” so I shaded in the box for “Yes.”
“Have you taken anything with aspirin in it within the last twenty-four hours?” No. Demons don’t need medicine.
These requirements are not particularly stringent, yet still only an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate. Of that, less than ten percent actually do, and that is in part because to give blood in the United States today, you must answer the question: “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?”
I was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an extra small plain white tee that bordered dangerously with crop top territory, and dollar store glittery nail polish chipping at the edges. No, I decided, my pencil carefully outlining the box, thoroughly shading it in so the machine would have no trouble understanding. Not even once.
*
On paper, I know why gay men are not eligible to donate blood. The rationale for these regulations is straightforward. Aside from making sure we don’t find thumbs in our chicken nuggets, it is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to minimize the threat of the public contracting through blood transfusions infectious diseases such as human deficiency viruses or hepatitis. Men who have sex with men are the population most heavily affected by HIV infection. Among the nearly 50,000 new cases of FDA reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, more than 30,000 were transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact. In order to keep as few contaminated donations from entering the national blood supply as possible, several safeguards have been set in place, from rigorously testing donations for everything from syphilis to West Nile Virus, and beginning with the initial donor screening process, which takes the form of a mini-physical and a questionnaire that is designed to weed out potential risks.
Despite the dozens of tests performed on each unit of donated blood—to establish blood type and test for infectious diseases—the FDA stresses that these tests are not foolproof. However, to put your potential exposure into perspective, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), “your risk of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is lower than your risk of getting killed by lightning. Only about one in two million donations might carry HIV and transmit HIV if given to a patient.” Though the source of these infections are not always linked to gay men, it is the policy of blood centers, under current FDA regulation, to place all gay men who admit on their questionnaire to having had sexual contact with other men within the past twelve months on a one-year deferral list, which is a way to soften the reality that gay men are simply not permitted to donate. While ostensibly this is an improvement on their previous ban on gay men, it’s still less “come back next Wednesday,” more, “we’ll call you when you decide to move to the Andes, shave your head, and take a vow of celibacy.”
Besides the FDA’s implicit verdict that two gay men in a monogamous relationship pose the same threat to the national blood supply as a heroin addict, or the propaganda ingrained in children at birth that only gay people contract HIV when, according to the Center for Disease Control, most new HIV diagnoses in women are attributed to heterosexual sex, not to mention the outright homophobic logic couched in the idea that the nation cannot trust gay men to know their own status, the FDA fails to account for one crucial fact: I am a hero. I am special. I am destined for greatness.
*
How my greatness will manifest itself is unknown to me, a mystery that has filled every moment with a sense of sweet, mouthwatering opportunity. Even as a kid I knew the world needed me. Whenever I was out in public, I would openly exhibit my karate skills, demonstrating perfect horse stance for the passersby outside of the mall JC Penney’s, waiting for my choice sensei to pluck me from obscurity and launch my career as the martial arts champion of the galaxy. In my fantasy, I told myself he had only planned to stop by Yankee Candle to shop for candles for his dojo, a quiet masculine scent like Motor Oil or Sports Tears, yet seeing me and my ability to stand with my legs splayed and bent at the knees, my arms akimbo, my fists locked tight at my waist for over fifteen minutes while my mom perused the clearance racks inside, he would instinctively know, like a mother penguin can pick out her chick in a colony of thousands, that we were lost kin.
“Is it really you?” he would ask, recognizing something ancient and powerful within me. Without waiting for my answer he would sweep me away to someplace majestic where he would rededicate his life to teaching me how to snap two by fours in half with my palm. Initially, my mother would be devastated by my disappearance, throwing herself completely into her job at Starbucks where she would make crude drawings of my face with the foam in her customer’s lattes, but over time she would grow to accept it, knowing deep down that I was out there being the hero the world needed of me.
As a teen, I would stalk the aisles at my local bookstore with my eyes opened as wide as I could hoping that something would irritate them and I would be reduced to tears. Sobbing, I would sink myself into the nearest seat with an intellectual looking book, something like The Diary of Malcom X, and squint my eyes, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, imagining that an agent would see how emotionally raw and unguarded I am and, unable to control himself, yell, “Look everyone! It’s the next Nick Jonas! I have to sign him immediately!” I would be plucked from my humdrum life and become an overnight celebrity and an ambassador for UNICEF, traveling around the globe teaching children the value of environmental sustainability through interpretive dance.
“Life on land is finite!” I would shout into the crowd of kids gathered around to watch one of my performances in a remote village in Nicaragua. “Return to the sea is inevitable!” My work done, I would hop into the back seat of my Hummer limo and speed away to my next humanitarian destination, listening as the chorus of applause trailed off in the distance.
*
My blood pressure was too high. Classic superhero—always overachieving.
“It needs to be below one hundred for you to be eligible to donate,” reported the nurse taking my vitals. She had her hand wrapped around my thumb, squeezing it in a python grip so that my blood dripped onto a glass slide.
“One hundred and seventeen,” she droned, holding my limp hand like a jaded psychic fed up with telling her clients how old they would grow to be. I imagined her tracing her sage fingers down my palm, stopping dramatically to investigate a fine line.
“Just as I suspected!” she would announce, pulling me in with an all-knowing squint. “You were really good at basketball in a past life!” Then, rolling her eyes to the back of her head in a state of supernatural bliss: “Oh, and you’re totally gay.”
“Wait a little while and we’ll test you again,” she interrupted, throwing a glass of ice water on my fantasy and forcing me back to reality. Five minutes later, she tested my other thumb, pricking my finger with a medical tool that resembled a mechanical pencil. She squeezed more of my blood onto a fresh slide. Now it was too low, meaning that my blood pressure is in a constant state of flux between extremes.
“You can go ahead and donate,” she concluded, then turned around to tune her radio dial until she landed on a breezy R&B station. She hovered there for a minute, mouthed along to a few words, and gave me a this-is-my–song look. Maybe my blood pressure would just even out.
*
According to the official American Red Cross website, the average process of giving blood, from arriving at your local Big Red Bus blood drive to stepping off with your complimentary cranberry juice cocktail and sugar cookie, takes approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. They also maintain that every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, meaning that for the national blood supply to remain sustainable, in the amount of time it takes for one person to give blood, enough of the stuff must be collected nationwide to meet the demands of over one thousand people. The most alarming aspect of these figures? They get it. In a year, the American Red Cross and similar organizations collect 15.7 million donations in the US, over 700,000 more donations than needed. I imagine a nurse splayed out in a blood bank vault making blood snow angels with the amazing surplus of donations she collected that day, which is to say, they are very good at their jobs.
Why, then, are stories such as “The Nation Has a Major Blood Shortage” being relayed on major news outlets like ABC? One ominous headline from Wisconsin Public Radio’s website alerts: “Urgent Donations Encouraged As Nation Faces Looming Blood Shortage.” Another, from Georgia’s Albany Herald, reads: “American Red Cross facing possible emergency blood shortage.” These headlines stand in stark contrast to the Food and Drug Administration’s claims that “the blood supply in the US has been very stable.” So, which is it?
Technically, the FDA is not incorrect. The US blood supply is indeed stable. The catch: the blood supply is just about the only national resource that is, in fact, stable. With decreasing mortality rates, a rapidly growing population, and a rise in complex therapies such as cancer treatments and heart surgeries that require large amounts of blood, the public doesn’t need the blood supply to be stable, it needs it to flourish. This is because the national blood supply is constantly, literally, hemorrhaging. Not only are approximately 41,000 blood donations used every day, but donations are expiring. Red cell donations, for one, have a shelf life of forty-two days, so they must be perpetually collected for the supply to remain “stable,” which leaves the nation’s blood banks playing something like blood whack-a-mole. Every time they block one hole—the 41,000 donations needed each day, a new natural disaster that requires the acquisition and distribution of thousands of new donations—another emergency threatens to deplete their resources, which brings us to not-too-optimistic headlines like U-T San Diego’s “Local blood shortage worsens,” a close cousin of “Blood Good, Supply Bad.”
*
One by one, the donors in line in front of me were escorted to beds, plugged into blood sucking machines, and ejected back into the wild with a soft drink and their free loot. When it was finally my turn, I asked my nurse if I could have a juice.
“We have apple and orange,” she said, then, in a sudden, manic twist, added: “But we just got Pepsi and Mountain Dew!” She plugged me into her blood-bot and I lay back and drank my Pepsi in a napkin cozy, watching my blood travel through a silly straw into a bag on the floor as she explained the new donating procedure I had volunteered for.
“All we’re taking is your platelets,” she said.
I nodded in understanding. Of course. My platelets! Who needs those? I pictured a cabinet in my dining room full of fancy dishes, my platelets, withering away unused.
“The blood we extract today goes into this machine,” she continued. With her foot, she tapped what looked like a miniature crib on the floor rocking my blood back and forth, lulling it to sleep. “Once the machine is done separating your platelets, the rest of your blood will be returned back to you.”
I tried to hide my horror at this new revelation with my impression of an easygoing, I’m-not-freaking-out-at-all smile. Inside, I tried to process what she meant by your blood will be returned back to you. They were taking my blood out, sending it to a bag on the floor, then shoving it back in where it would touch all my important inside parts. This had to break the three-second rule.
Passing me my very own rubber ducky in a Ziploc bag, she instructed me to squeeze it every five seconds and left to help out other donors. Every few minutes she would come back, look at the bag that was slowly filling up with my blood, and ask, “ARE YOU OKAY?” as if she’d seen a spider crawl out of my veins, or just discovered that instead of blood, I was running on red Jello.
“I’m fine.”
Ten minutes would go by and again I would be pulled out of my phone’s trance by a shadow hovering over me.
“YOU STILL OKAY?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I thought she might call an ambulance, but then I remembered that I was already in one.
*
After the procedure, I called my best friend, Arthur, and we drove to the pizza place twenty minutes away to redeem my free voucher. Over cheese slices and Coke, we played “Would You Rather?” It was the middle of the day so we had the restaurant all to ourselves, him in his Christina Aguilera t-shirt and me picking at my nail polish. A vaguely Italian song chimed in through the speakers. Would you rather have spaghetti fingers or always look like you just came back from a long, grueling run? Would you rather only be able to bathe in soup or be Osmosis from Osmosis Jones? Arthur phoned his in: Would you rather be an octopus or a squid?
“If I choose squid, is someone hunting me?” I asked, attempting to add drama to his scenario.
“Why would someone be hunting you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a monster?”
He told me that when people are cremated, most of the ashes they give to the families belong to someone else. I told him that when I die, I want my ashes scattered over an ant-hill. I confessed that I lied on the questionnaire.
“It’s so weird that they make you choose,” he said. “You can either save someone’s life or you can check that you’ve had gay sex and let them die.”
“I kind of wish I was cool enough to tell them I’m gay,” I told him. “Like, as an act of revolt?”
I wondered what that might look like. Putting myself first.
A little boy named something devastatingly cute, a name only a kid can pull off: Max. As an adult, he will go by Maxwell, but for now, he’s just Max. He has a gap tooth and freckles, the kind of kid you can see on the cover of an off-brand box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He has a rare cancer, so rare his parents are considering an experimental treatment that requires huge amounts of blood. We share a blood type.
“Sorry Max,” activist me would say. “I can’t donate. I’m making a political statement.”
*
Back on campus, it was still too early for my night class, so I made my way to my favorite quiet spot on the third floor of the cafeteria to read. Usually I have no trouble lugging my body up three flights of stairs, but this time I felt nauseated, so I gave up my original plan and saddled myself into the nearest seat I could find. At the table next to mine, an athletic couple studied silently from a mess of books and papers laid out before them, the man pausing every few minutes to take a gulp from a Herculean gallon of water.
I looked down to the first floor where I could see hundreds of students dashing in and out, a few daring ones riding their skateboards right through the cafeteria, late to class again. Another hurried student stepped on a corner of the Pegasus insignia printed on the floor. University legend warns that stepping on the Pegasus ensures that you will never graduate from the school, which is why it’s usually partitioned off by velvet ropes. An icy shiver passed through me. Rubbing my hands for warmth, I noticed that they were a shade lighter than usual, and suddenly they shifted into a blur and I couldn’t discern what color they were at all. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping I could make it to a stall before throwing up.
Sometime later, I woke up on the floor crumpled up in a ball and blind. I could hear two girls exchanging feverish words next to me, but we were separated by a wall of black.
First one told the other: “He’s waking up.”
Then, to me: “You passed out. Are you okay?”
I closed my eyes, figuring it wouldn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t see with them open anyway.
“Don’t go to sleep!” a voice ordered, shaking my arm back into existence.
“You’re probably dehydrated,” someone speculated. A red-headed blob gradually came into focus.
“Can you bring me water?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.
Was I being too demanding?
I once heard on the radio that people regularly die choking alone in restaurants. Instead of asking anyone for help, they rush to the bathroom not wanting to bother anyone. They pretend they’re just having a run-of-the-mill teary-eyed, claw-at-your-neck coughing fit, and once inside they choke quietly by themselves.
People don’t want heroes. We want to be able to save ourselves. I closed my eyes again.
You’re not going to die in such a wimpy away, I told myself. If you’re going to die, it better be being hunted as a squid.
A third girl came up to me with water. I snatched it from her hands, but within seconds she took it back.
“Actually, if you’re dehydrated, you shouldn’t be drinking water,” she said.
I now saw that I was surrounded by a swarm of white girls. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, or in limbo: an infinite series of white girls bringing me water and taking it away.
“Are you sure?” I wanted to ask, gazing longingly at the cup of water in her hands, but I was too confused and out of it to reason with her. Instead I just curled back into my ball. Maybe she’s pre-med or something.
Soon, the paramedics arrived. They measured my blood pressure and told me I was dehydrated. They told me I needed water.
“Have you had any water?” one asked. I looked at the cup the girl brought me, still full on a table too far for me to reach.
“No.”
They plugged me into an IV. An Evil-Dead quantity of blood squirted out of my arm. The paramedic wiped it with a tissue.
“Why did you donate blood? For the movie tickets?” he asked straightaway, maybe not his first time doing this.
Partly. But don’t forget that I’m a selfless hero.
“Was it worth it?” he asked, not waiting for a response to his first questions.
I leaned my head against the wall and felt the cool liquid from the IV travel through my veins, a million microscopic glasses of ice water splashing along the insides of my limbs, gradually waking my body up.
“You have two options,” he went on. “You can go to the hospital or you can stay here and drink a lot of water.”
I am asked to monetize my life. I could probably survive if I stay, I calculated half-conscious. This wasn’t my first time fainting. A few months before, while staying at my mother’s house, I sliced my thumb trying to open a can of tuna. I woke up a few hours later in her bed. I had passed out. Not sure what to do, she had simply dragged my body to her bedroom and resumed cooking dinner.
“I’m really poor and have really bad insurance, so I think I’ll just stay here,” I said.
“You will almost definitely pass out again if you stay,” he countered, more stern.
Then why even give me the option? Is this some kind of fun game paramedics play: put the patient in a life or death situation, ask them to choose death, then force them to live anyway? Still, I thought I had a shot at making it on my own. There was a water fountain a few feet away. I was lucid. I said out loud, “I’m lucid,” figuring that anyone who can remember the word lucid must be it. Besides, if I couldn’t afford breakfast, I sure as hell didn’t have money for an emergency room.
“I think I’ll stay,” I repeated.
“We’re taking you to the hospital.”
*
In the ambulance, I discovered that my phone’s flashlight feature would not turn off. Thank God: I had broken my fall with my new cellphone I’d saved up for months for. I turned it around in my hands, not really sure what I was looking for. A hidden magical switch that would help me in exactly this kind of situation? I didn’t care about the phone. I was worried the battery would die and I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to pick me up from the hospital. I had twelve percent battery left. I called my mom. No answer. Eleven percent. Again. No answer. I called my brother and went straight to voicemail. Nine percent. I called Arthur. He’s coming.
Later, I will find out that after my call, he rushed out of bed and ran out of his parent’s house, frantic to see that I was okay. His mom was maneuvering into the driveway, coming home from work, and parked an inch from the driver’s seat of his car thinking it would be funny if she made it hard for him to get inside. Assuming he was overreacting over her innocent joke, she roared into her steering wheel laughing hysterically as he flailed his arms and shouted at her to cut it out. Meanwhile, I was in the back of an ambulance plugged into an IV with a computer printing out a series of zig-zag lines quantifying my life. I still think she’s funny.
I went back to trying to fix the light.
“You trying to take a selfie in an ambulance?” the new, younger paramedic riding with me asked, disapproval thick in his voice.
My eyes jumped from the tribal tattoo on his arm to the hurricane of wires coming out of mine. I didn’t answer, not wanting to explain myself to him.
“You got a girlfriend?”
Again, I looked down at my cut-offs and painted nails to what I thought was an obvious declaration of what type of boy I am.
“There’s lots of girls around here,” he continued.
I folded and told him that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not really a lie. A part of me worried that if I told him I’m gay he would purposely mess something up. I was plugged into a lot of tubes and they all presented an opportunity for an “accident.”
“Is my water level thing better now?” I asked him.
“Your water level thing?”
“I don’t know what it’s called,” I said, “but the first paramedic told me I was dehydrated and needed water and he kept looking at a measurement I think might have been my blood pressure. I’m not sure though.”
“Are you pre-med?” he asked.
“No.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, how is it?” I asked, caring less and less about the possibility of an accident now.
“It’s fine.”
“What kind of tests will they do on me at the hospital?” I went on, running up the tab in my head.
“Are you anxious?” he asked.
“Only when I’m in an ambulance.”
*
It had been over an hour since I had fainted. Even so, the paramedics insisted that I be wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. A nurse behind the reception desk looked up at me.
“There’s my sixty-three,” she smiled.
“I’m your sixty-three,” I said back, then turned to the young paramedic. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re her sixty-third patient today. You win a prize.”
“Like an Olive Garden gift card?” I asked, or free healthcare?
Her eyes flashed to my hands as I fumbled with my phone.
“Need a charger?” she asked.
“Yes! Please!”
“I’ll go get one for you,” she said, getting up from her station. She pushed through a set of double-doors and moved into the room next door. I never saw her again.
Classic hospital prank.
From there, I was wheeled into an emergency room about the size of a walk-in closet.
“Do I have to do these tests?” I asked my doctor. “I feel perfectly fine. There’s no way I
can afford this.”
“You look fine,” he said. “I’ll just give you another IV and you can go.”
My mind flashed back to the water fountain that was only a few feet away, the cup of water probably still on the table. Arthur arrived just as my doctor was about to go, his curly hair still matted down in the back from his nap. On his way out, the doctor warned me, “Watch out. The person you least want to see is on her way.” Minutes later, an Ursula-like woman entered the room pushing a laptop on a cart.
“Name?” she asked by way of introduction. Date of birth. Social Security number. Religion? At this, I felt myself losing my temper. Why did it matter what my religion was? In case you die, a voice whispered in my ear. The winds were betraying me. What do they do for agnostics? I wanted to ask. Throw their ashes on ant-hills?
“None.”
“Health insurance card?”
“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, digging through the several-month-old receipts and expired coupons stashed in my wallet.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You’ll get a bill in the mail.”
But I’m right here. Let’s skip the middle man.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, I can tell you your health insurance kicks in after $900. After $900, you pay ten percent.”
After $900? Ten percent of what?
“Don’t worry, though,” she said. “You’re on your mom’s insurance. She’ll pay for it!” I smiled politely, again doing my impression of someone who’s got it all under control. Of course, my mom will just hock one of the diamonds she bought with her glamorous, high-paying gig at Starbucks. No worries.
“It’s fine! I’ll just sell some more of my blood for money!” I yelled, but she was already out of the room.
Arthur, who has had cancer and been through the hospital bureaucracy before, explained: “Your health insurance only kicks in after the first $900. Anything before that, you have to pay.”
We waited ten minutes. Twenty. I could hear the nurses in the reception area talking about Game of Thrones. A main character had died, apparently. They were distraught. Thirty minutes. The monotonous beeps prompted by the wire connected to my finger started alternating their rhythm. Beep. Three seconds. Beep. Sometimes two consecutive beep, beeps—no intermission. I tore the wire off, feeling like a bad-ass action movie star, except twenty-two and puny. The same tired, limping woman walked back and forth down the hallway. There was a glitch in the Matrix.
“If you don’t go to the reception area and bring me a doctor, I’m going to get primal,” I told Arthur. He hurried out.
*
Driving out of the hospital, it was finally okay for me to be gay. Arthur blasted our best friend song on his CD player, B*Witched’s “Blame it on the Weatherman.” We listened to it when he was first diagnosed with cancer, now when I was released from the hospital, and years later driving by our old club, Pulse. Each time, we blamed it all on the weatherman, pleading at the top of our lungs for him to leave us alone. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water, my total coming out to a little over two dollars. I winced at the idea of paying for water. A week later, my bill would arrive notifying me that I owe $3,412.67 to the hospital for donating blood. A measly sum to a hero.
We talked about boys. I slowly came back to life describing Zac Efron on the cover of whatever magazine was in the checkout line, laughing in hindsight at the paramedic’s girlfriend comment.
“I asked the paramedics to let me stay,” I told Arthur, taking a massive swig from my water. “Even if it meant I would die.”
“Well, now neither of us can donate,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“In high school, on our blood drive day, I tried to donate,” he said. “But when the nurse handed me my questionnaire, I didn’t really know any better, so I marked that I wasn’t a virgin.”
He told me she informed him he would not be able to donate. When he asked why, she explained that it was because his blood wasn’t safe. The bus was packed with other high school students, jocks who agreed to be heroes so long as they could get out of fourth-period Biology.
“Everyone heard,” he said. “So I hid in a bathroom stall until the end of the blood drive so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.”
I watched as his grip on the steering wheel tensed, his knuckles white.
“Did you notice how all the guys that worked at that hospital were beautiful Aerie models?” I asked.
We played Would You Rather all the way to the university parking lot where he offered to drive behind me till I made it home. I accepted, letting him be the hero this time. I didn’t want to choke alone in the bathroom.
*
In the grand scheme of things, gay men donating blood might rank as a low-stakes issue, especially when compared to high publicity causes like marriage equality, the right to serve in the military, and LGBTQ bullying. After all, donating blood is inconvenient and time-consuming. Shouldn’t gay and bisexual men be grateful to have their hour and fifteen minutes spared? Why, that’s enough time to watch a couple episodes of Golden Girls and have a quick round of high-risk sex!
Amidst the controversy of whether gay men are too great a gamble to the nation’s blood supply, it’s the less overt threats that come with current discriminatory eligibility requirements that have largely gone ignored: that of supporting the false belief that heterosexual people who participate in high-risk behavior are at low risk for HIV infection, the danger that comes with reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay and bisexual people. When the American Red Cross cites that the two most common reasons people choose not to give blood are “never thought about it” and “I don’t like needles,” it suggests that gay and bisexual men are not interested in helping others and don’t particularly feel like being heroes, which is problematic, particularly when blood drives occur in workplaces, high schools, and colleges where donors may worry about the employment or social implications of not donating, all because needles hurt.
This battle isn’t Stonewall and the small victory that will come from gay men being eligible to donate blood will not drastically improve the lives of the LGBTQIA community. Yet, despite the near triviality of this issue, if anything, because of it, because lesbian and gay marriage is now a reality and because gay bullying is gradually becoming more of a taboo, it is the small battles that need to become a focus of the gay civil rights movement. It is the institutionalized homophobia, like that of a gay Iowa teenager who took his life and was not eligible to donate his eyeballs because his mother could not answer whether he was sexually active, that is the most insidious of all, because it hides under its apparent insignificance.
What’s most nefarious of all is that the FDA revising its policy on gay men to a one-year deferral as opposed to its previous lifetime ban is being heralded by many as a courageous move, as if the perception of equality is just as meaningful as equality itself.
***
Original art by Eva Azenaro-Acero, an artist, writer, and musician living in Chicago. Their work has appeared in Fanzine, Witchcraft Mag, The Parks Exhibition Center, and more. Find them on Instagram @birdlets or online at evaazenaroacero.squarespace.
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter to his first wife turned lifelong friend. “Kindness, kindness, kindness,” Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year’s Day in 1972. Half a century later, the Dalai Lama placed a single exhortation at the center of his ethical and ecological philosophy: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”
Nothing broadens the soul more than the touch of kindness, given or received, and nothing shrivels it more than a flinch of unkindness, given or received — something we have all been occasionally lashed with, and something of which we are all occasionally culpable, no matter how ethical our lives and how well-intentioned our conduct. Everyone loves the idea of kindness — loves thinking of themselves as a kind person — but somehow, the practice of it, the dailiness of it, has receded into the background in a culture rife with selfing and cynicism, a culture in which we have come to mistake the emotional porousness of kindness for a puncture in the armor of our hard individualism. And yet kindness remains our best antidote to the fundamental loneliness of being human.
Gathered here are two millennia of meditations on kindness — its challenges, its nuances, and its rippling rewards — from a posy of vast minds and vast spirits who have risen above the common tide of their times to give us the embers of timelessness.
Once a heartbroken queer teenager raised by a single mother, Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) was saved by Stoic philosophy, then tried to save a dying world with it when he came to rule Rome as the last of its Five Good Emperors. Across the epochs, he goes on saving us with the sonorous undertone of his entire philosophy — his humming insistence on kindness as the only effective antidote to all of life’s assaults. In his timeless Meditations (public library) — notes on life he had written largely to himself while learning how to live more nobly in an uncertain world that blindsides us as much with its beauty as with its brutality — he returns again and again to kindness and the importance of extending it to everyone equally at all times, because even at their cruelest, which is their most irrational, human beings are endowed with reason and dignity they can live up to.
Drawing on the other great refrain that carries his philosophy — the insistence that embracing our mortality is the key to living fully — he writes:
You should bear in mind constantly that death has come to men* of all kinds, men with varied occupations and various ethnicities… We too will inevitably end up where so many [of our heroes] have gone… Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates… brilliant intellectuals, high-minded men, hard workers, men of ingenuity, self-confident men, men… who mocked the very transience and impermanence of human life…. men… long dead and buried… Only one thing is important: to behave throughout your life toward the liars and crooks around you with kindness, honesty, and justice.
The key to kindness, he observes, is keeping “the purity, lucidity, moderation, and justice of your mind” from being sullied by the actions of those you encounter, no matter how disagreeable and discomposed by unreason they may be. In a passage itself defying the laziness of labels, rooted in a metaphor more evocative of a Buddhist parable or a Transcendentalist diary entry or a Patti Smith Instagram poem than of a Stoic dictum, he writes:
Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface. Even if he throws mud or dung in it, before long the spring disperses the dirt and washes it out, leaving no stain. So how are you to have the equivalent of an ever-flowing spring? If you preserve your self-reliance at every hour, and your kindness, simplicity, and morality.
In the middle of his fifty-fifth year, reflecting on his imperfect life and his own moral failings, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) set out to construct a manual for morality by compiling “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” whose wisdom “gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness” — thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person “about the Good Way of Life.” He spent the next seventeen years on the project. In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (public library). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book’s moral sensibility.
Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter’s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
At the end of the month, in a sentiment Carl Sagan would come to echo in his lovely invitation to meet ignorance with kindness, Tolstoy writes:
You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.
In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:
Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.
After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (“A person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.”) and John Ruskin (“The will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.”), Tolstoy adds:
Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
In a 1931 essay for the magazine Forum and Century, later included in his altogether indispensable book Ideas and Opinions (public library), Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) writes:
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
In The Book of Delights (public library) — his soul-broadening yearlong experiment in willful gladness — the poet and gardener Ross Gay recounts harvesting carrots from the garden with his partner, and pirouettes in his signature way of long sunlit sentences into a meditation on the etymology of kindness:
Today we pulled the carrots from the garden that Stephanie sowed back in March. She planted two kinds: a red kind shaped like a standard kind, and a squat orange kind with a French name, a kind I recall the packet calling a “market variety,” probably because, like the red kind, it’s an eye-catcher. And sweet, which I learned nibbling a couple of both kinds like Bugs Bunny as I pulled them.
The word kind meaning type or variety, which you have noticed I have used with some flourish, is among the delights, for it puts the kindness of carrots front and center in this discussion (good for your eyes, yummy, etc.), in addition to reminding us that kindness and kin have the same mother. Maybe making those to whom we are kind our kin. To whom, even, those we might be. And that circle is big.
In the plainly titled, tiny, enormously rewarding book On Kindness (public library), psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor observe that although kindness is central to all of our major spiritual traditions, it has somehow become “our forbidden pleasure.” They write:
We usually know what the kind thing to do is — and kindness when it is done to us, and register its absence when it is not… We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us. There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.
Defining kindness as “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself,” they chronicle its decline in the values of our culture:
The kind life — the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others — is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness…
In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness — like all the greatest human pleasures — are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess.
[…]
In giving up on kindness — and especially our own acts of kindness — we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.
Returning to their foundational definition of kindness, they add:
Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. Bearing other people’s vulnerability — which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it — entails being able to bear one’s own. Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other.
In his wonderful commencement address turned book, the lyrical and largehearted George Saunders addresses those just embarking on the adventure of life with hard-won wisdom wrested from his own experience of being human among humans:
I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
But still. It bothers me.
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
But kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include… well, everything.
Most failures of kindness, most triumphs of cruelty, are flinches of fear, unreconciled in the soul. In 1978, drawing on a jarring real-life experience, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye captured the difficult, beautiful, redemptive transmutation of fear into kindness in a poem of uncommon soulfulness and empathic wingspan that has since become a classic, turned into an animated short film and included in countless anthologies, among them the wondrous 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (public library).
KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab NyeBefore you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
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I had been in a rut for some months. I was working remotely, writing ad copy for a company that was based in Mountain View. I lived with my girlfriend, Hanna, in a house with two other couples in the other two rooms and also the living room had been converted into a bedroom for a seventh resident whom the landlord did not know about. Everyone in the house promised they would do the dishes and smoke outside only they never did. And it was so hot all the time, and our air conditioner was on the fritz. I was drinking too much. I was pretending I was tired when Hanna wanted to talk at night. I kept inventing excuses to get out of the house so I could go eat greasy burgers at the place we had promised not to go because they abused their workers. In private, I wondered if I was the worst person I knew. It felt all the time like something terrible was about to happen. Partly this was due to the general state of the world. The other part was inexplicable, like deja vu.
Twice a week my employer would mail me a package, inside of which would be my assignment. My job was to write reviews of products that made it seem as though I had stumbled onto the particular item myself. I wrote tweets and Instagram posts and blog copy, which would then be plugged into various sites and influencer accounts, masquerading as native content. I had written about self-seltzering water bottles, lip scrubs, wine aerators, depilators, solar-powered cell phone batteries, lotions, serums, and so very many diet teas. I hated the diet teas the most. They were basically laxatives, only they smelled worse. In fact I had long ago stopped sampling them—they were always accompanied by extreme stomach cramps and diarrhea.
My second-most hated assignments were the beauty products, for which I had long ago run out of language to describe. The skincare products all promised to make your skin “glowy” or “luminous.” That pregnancy glow. That orgasm glow. 10,000-watt glow-power. I found myself writing things that I could not bear to say out loud. Hanna would tease me: “Oh you look so glowy. Get over here—I can’t help myself.” The beauty products reminded me of my mother, who spoke often about “aging gracefully.” Sometimes I thought about what I would look like as an old woman, and then about Hanna. I thought Hanna would age beautifully, which gave me a perverse and unearned pride.
I loved Hanna so much it felt like an agony. I knew I was letting her down. I got emails from my boss at random hours. We are pushing natural-grown products. Lab grown = sketchy, aberration. Call me w Qs. I never had any questions.
On Monday I told Hanna I was going to the dentist for a cavity filling and instead went to a bar across town, where I flirted with the bartender for two hours and got her number. On Tuesday, I came home with a slice of cake for Hanna and me to share. Hanna asked, “Should you be eating sweets? So soon after a filling?” and I accused her of policing me, and then I cried and then she cried and we slept on opposite edges of the bed. On Wednesday I texted the bartender, Tell me your fantasy. She did not respond.
On Friday a city official knocked on our door. She was wearing a yellow hazard vest over her blouse and skirt, and an N95 mask.
“English?” she asked. “Español? Chinese?”
“English,” we said.
She handed us a document.
“It’s all explained in there,” she said. Then she went on to the next house.
The document stated that the area would need to be evacuated. Rising ocean levels combined with new rainfall patterns meant that the city could no longer safely house us in these zip codes, and that we would need to find new accommodations. City services—power, garbage, mail, water (ironically)—would be cut off. After this deadline, it would be illegal to occupy the area. Any questions and we could email this address, or contact this 1-800 phone number.
“This is dumb,” our roommates said. “This is unenforceable. Where are we going to go? They can’t do this. This is just classic fuckery. I mean, who is going to make us leave? The cops? Good luck, evicting thousands of people. Who drank all the beer? Where is the beer?”
I went back to our room and opened the package for my next assignment. Unusually, I had a whole week to work on this single product, a multistep skincare regimen. The package contained three glass bottles with eye droppers in the lids; they were labeled only as 1, 2, and 3 and the liquids inside varied only in the intensity of their lilac hue. They smelled faintly floral and medicinal—like gin & tonic. I was to apply the products, in ascending numerical order, morning and night for one full week. The liquids were said to contain several vitamins, moisturizers, and emulsifiers that would brighten; tauten; and yes, give a healthy glow to the skin. Florilux was the brand name.
I took one look at the bottles and I got on my knees and begged Hanna to get me out of the house.
“Okay, but only if you promise to dial it back, like, two hundred notches,” she said.
When I first met Hanna she’d been hovering, quite literally dangling, above my head. Strapped into a device for painting high walls. I was walking below and saw her sneakers, then her lovely shapely legs. She was an angel! She was an employee of the city, commissioned to paint a mural. I asked if I could buy her a drink. Two months later we’d moved in together.
That evening after I got the Florilux shipment, we went to the bar down the street that we loved, a skanky punk bar called Eddy’s. The bar looked rough outside but led way to a starrily-lit enclosed patio. The fence had a texture like fish skin because so many people had nailed their N95 masks to it—in an act of protest, or perhaps boredom. It was crowded that day, and someone was sitting in the booth we normally liked to sit in: a man about our age with a long beard and chipped black fingernail polish.
“Mind if we join you?” we asked.
“Makes no difference to me,” he said. We seated ourselves far down the table from him and got situated with beers.
Unprompted, he cracked his knuckles and announced, “Feels like the sunset of civilization lately.”
“You’re fun,” Hanna said.
“Do you mind not bumming us out?” I said.
“Hey, fuck you. I got evicted today,” he said.
I said, “Isn’t that just classic fuckery? How are they going to evict ten thousand people?”
“They’re sending us from the frying pan into the fire,” he said darkly.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Get this app. I created it, full disclosure. You can search any location and see what’s coming.”
He held up his phone and showed us Eddy’s. A little animated water line sloshed around above the building roof. It was surprisingly cutesy, for what it was conveying.
“Are you for real?” I asked.
“Ever heard of climate departure? Ever heard of the methane clathrate gun?” he asked.
We moved to a different table.
When we got home, I stared at the Florilux bottles, all lined up on the dresser. I felt like a fraud. Just a skincare regimen! Just one hamburger, just one ride on a plane! Hanna was on the bed on her phone, and when I turned around, she showed me our place, with a little water line dancing around and an animated fish swimming past our window.
“You downloaded it?” I asked.
“Look at this,” she said, and swiped the screen to show a stick figure clutching its neck and drowning. Its eyes turned to Xs.
“Say we move inland,” Hanna said. She fiddled with the app again, and now the stick figures were running from cartoon flames.
“This guy’s a sicko,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m deleting it,” Hanna said.
But then she didn’t say anything else for a long time. I opened the Florilux bottles and quickly, roughly applied the product to my face. One-two-three. I hated myself for finding pleasure in it.
“Are you okay?” I asked Hanna.
“I know you’ve been texting other girls,” she said.
I sat down. I didn’t bother denying it. I said, “It doesn’t mean anything.”
She scratched the blanket with her fingernail, back and forth. She said, “I don’t want to have to always be asking you to do the right thing.”
“You won’t,” I said.
“Anyway, just because the world is trash it doesn’t mean you can do bad things,” she said. I wondered if she knew about the burgers. I put my hand on her thigh.
“I know. I’ll stop,” I said.
Her face was turned away, but she curled her fingers around mine.
“I feel like shit,” she said.
“Now you sound like me,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said. “You don’t have a premium on despair.”
I kissed her over and over. I tackled her back onto the pillows. I pushed my face into her lap.
“Don’t,” she said, giggling. “You smell like an old lady.”
The next day I did not work on my assignment, instead staying in bed all day watching TV. And I didn’t work on it the next day, or the next, or the next. I tried, but instead I found myself walking to the coffeeshop I liked in the morning and sitting in the shop for the time it took to drink my coffee and then by the time I got home all I could do was get into bed. I threw a T-shirt over the Florilux bottles on my dresser. They made me think of too much: my mother, standing at the mirror, pulling her brow taut with her hands. Flowers. Springtime. Hanna when we first started dating. The curl of her hair, the tawny patch of down on her navel. It was objectively insane to love someone this much. In the evenings, I’d meet Hanna at her BART stop and walk her home. I did not text other girls. Soon a week had passed; I missed the deadline for my copy and I received a professional-but-concerned email from my boss, with her boss copied on it.
Noticed your copy did not come in last night. Everything okay? We can give you a one-week extension, but do hope that you’ll get something to us soon.
I read it once and deleted it.
On Saturday, our roommates informed us that there would be a protest to the eviction down at the lake.
“What time will it be?” I asked.
“Ten or eleven-thirty,” they said.
“And what are we protesting?” I asked.
“Eviction,” they said.
“How is that going to help?” I said.
“Shut up, you boot-licker,” our roommates said.
We put on our walking shoes and made our way down to the lake. It was crowded; it stank of algae. The heat rose off the pavement in wiggles. I thought of the man’s app, wondered what grisly animation he had cooked up for the lake. He didn’t strike me as an expert. There were many people in the crowd, pent up and angry, wound like springs. They held signs with various admonishments. At the fringes were the slower walkers, the families; I saw a girl bend waveringly to tie her shoe, her mother putting her hand like a cap over her head.
We approached a stage built up in front of the courthouse. There was a speaker up there, a woman with long, gray hair and black taped Xs over her nipples. She was otherwise topless. She had a megaphone, and she stood in front of several others who also had Xs on their chests.
“My name is Justine,” she said. “I have been ringing the alarm bells for fifty years. And, boy, are my arms tired.”
My phone dinged. Assignment overdue, it said.
Justine was still speaking, though the persons around her had laid down on the stage in the pose of corpses.
“Extreme heat at the equator plus existing humidity is already causing staggering numbers of deaths due to renal failure. A wet-bulb temperature of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit—temperatures we are already seeing regularly in places with such humidity—is lethal within hours.
“At three degrees of warming, we cannot even be certain that there will be clouds,” she said.
Hanna squeezed my hand. “I want to go,” she said.
“Right now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
We went home, we went to our room, we sat together on the bed.
“How soon do you think it’ll be?” Hanna said. “What do you think it will be?”
“What is the ‘what’ here?” I asked.
“Death,” she said.
I pushed her shirt up to uncover her perfect belly, round and tan. What the French called the “cheese belly.”
“There simply aren’t any satisfying answers to that question,” I said.
She turned away from me, and I could tell she was crying.
“Hanna,” I said.
“You’re the doomer,” she said. “So just tell me, so I can expect the worst.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She wiped her nose on the sheets and said, “I want a sea burial.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “A what?”
“I want a burial at sea. Actually, I want a Viking burial,” she said. “I want you to put me on a raft and push me out to sea, and then shoot a flaming arrow.”
“I have really bad aim,” I said.
“You can only get into Valhalla if you die in battle,” she explained.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s go down fighting.”
I loved her so much. I told her, “I love you so much.”
Then I asked her if she wanted to get very drunk.
We went to Eddy’s. I felt a sudden and intense conviviality towards every single person around, my fellow humans. I wanted to make love to everybody all at once. We went to our booth and Hanna put her forehead on the table. I bought drinks and returned.
“To your health,” I said, tapping my glass against Hanna’s.
She slurped at hers. She pointed to a booth at the back where people had begun to pile sundries: blankets, bags, jugs of water. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED read a sign taped to the wall above.
“It’s like everyone already knows it’s an emergency,” Hanna said.
I didn’t say anything. My phone dinged: another email from my boss. We stress the urgency of you turning your assignments in. Failure to comply with deadlines will result in probationary status or, if misbehavior continues, termination.
I downed my drink. I reached out and took Hanna’s hand.
“I’m going to be better,” I told her.
We arrived home tipsy and as we went into our room I nearly knocked into our dresser.
“Steady, cowgirl,” Hanna said, giggling. She pulled at my clothes.
“I have to send my thing,” I said.
“Do it later,” she said.
“I’ll be so quick,” I said.
I got out my computer and stared at the Florilux bottles. I opened one and that herby, lovely smell leaked out. I took a tiny drop and put it on my tongue. It was gaseous, like perfume. I imagined downing the whole thing. Glug! Hanna bit my ear and I batted her away.
I typed, Are you aging? Are you tired and worn? Do you spend all your time fretting about the fine lines on your face and how they foretell the slow and steady march toward death or, worse, that moment when the world will turn its eyes from your old & unbeautiful face? Do you wake in the morning with an aching in your knees and wonder if there will be any dignity in the end? If so, FloriluxTM is for you.
Then I hit send.
That night I dreamed of my mother, I dreamed of her swimming laps in the pool at the Y like she did three times a week. When I was younger my sister and I would go to the daycare but when we got older we would do our own thing, swim sometimes ourselves or play in the gymnasium or, once we reached middle school, go on the ellipticals. We all went together to the locker room and while my sister and I would undress in the bathroom stalls, my mother would strip alongside all the other middle-aged-to-old ladies, and put on her navy one-piece and swimming cap. I could picture her body even better than I could picture my own, even still, her long skinny limbs and her soft round belly, the appendectomy scar she had that looked like chewing gum, the freckles on her shoulders and back, the nodules of her spine. She fretted about the changing of her body into something spent. “Youth is its own beauty,” she would tell us.
In the dream, she was already in the pool, cutting back and forth across the water like a blade. She turned her face every three strokes to breathe: slice, slice, slice, breath. But as she swam, only the lane she was in began draining, and she didn’t seem to notice, she just swam doggedly on, even until her knees and elbows were knocking the pool’s bottom and finally she was on her belly. Only then did she get up and move to the next lane to begin again. I woke before the entire pool had emptied.
Unsurprisingly, my copy submission had elicited a curt response from my boss, which read simply: Come to office ASAP. So I showered and dressed and declined a portion of the eggs Hanna was cooking for breakfast.
“I have to go to Mountain View,” I said.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“If you wait like fifteen minutes I can walk with you to BART,” she said.
“Actually, I think I’d like to go alone,” I said. “Trying to get my head right.”
The train that day was standing room only. It moved above and below ground, finally descending under the bay in a pop of darkness. We rattled along there down below. Everyone around me was distracted, wearing headphones or scrolling on their phones or staring at their feet. It felt like the waiting room at a hospital. Still, it was sort of a miracle, traveling under the water like this. How had they built a tunnel underwater? How did you do that without it flooding into where you dug? There was so much I didn’t know.
At Millbrae I switched to an aboveground train. I kept checking my phone, wondering what sort of trouble was waiting for me at the office. Or maybe I would just be fired. I tried to summon alarm at the thought, but none came. I saw a billboard with two beautiful golden people tongue-kissing in a club. I wondered if I was the worst person I knew.
At the office, I checked in with the receptionist and was led to a room to wait for my boss, Jules, a scary, beautiful, and severe woman whom I’d once watched eat sushi by stabbing pieces with a chopstick. I got out my laptop and futilely typed some notes: Florilux: so luxe it’s in the name. Floral = flower (??) Flowers are nature. Smells great! Jules marched in, her tight skirt gripping her thighs.
“You think this is funny?” she asked, holding a printout of the copy I’d turned in yesterday.
“It’s not meant to be funny,” I said.
She sat down. I could see her working to compose her face.
I said, “Do you ever think about how we’re ugly little cogs in a terrible machine?”
Jules pressed her lips together. “You’ve picked a funny time to grow a conscience,” she said.
“It’s recently come to my attention that our days are numbered,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. The world is falling apart and we’re writing ad copy for lip gloss. I’m not stupid, you know. But you can’t eat self-righteousness. So do your job,” she said.
She slid the paper across the table to me and left the room. She had drawn a big black X over my copy. I thought of the people from the rally. I typed, Florilux: You’ll need your skin in tip-top shape for when the clouds disappear and we all irradiate.
I hit send; I waited. A few minutes later, I received Jules’s reply.
“Do again,” it said, “or you’re done.”
I pictured the bottles, their floral smell. I thought of Hanna and her Viking burial. I thought of my mother washing her face. I considered that Florilux was in many ways a perfect product. It promised not only beauty and youth but also something more fundamental, the idea of preparing for a future that would surely come and would be better than the past.
Florilux: for those of us left, I wrote. Then I hit send and I went home.
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Rumpus original art by Rosie Struve
A list of books we love by Black authors. All are absolutely worth your time, regardless of the month, some which have appeared on this list in previous years because we are still shouting their praises.
— The Eds.
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Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions–those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.
The Islands by Dionne Irving
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women–immigrants or the descendants of immigrants–who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother–who is also a touring comedienne–at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves–to grow where they find themselves planted–in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.
Inheritance by Taylor Johnson
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.
The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb
The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions.
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. What follows is a heartrending and unputdownable exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.
Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks
It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion–or worse–from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town. Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks’s heartfelt and riveting debut is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America.
Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die by Tawanda Mulalu
Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image.
Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys–as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself–have decided to turn around the farm’s bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a “stockman” to impregnate them. But the women are determined to protect themselves. Now each of the six faces a choice. Nan, the doctoring woman, has brought a sack of cotton root clippings that can stave off children when chewed daily. If they all take part, the Lucys may give up and send the stockman away. But a pregnancy for any of them will only encourage the Lucys further. And should their plan be discovered, the consequences will be severe. Visceral and arresting, Night Wherever We Go illuminates each woman’s individual trials and desires while painting a subversive portrait of collective defiance. Unflinching in her portrayal of America’s gravest injustices, while also deeply attentive to the transcendence, love, and solidarity of women whose interior lives have been underexplored, Tracey Rose Peyton creates a story of unforgettable power.
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.
Composition by Junious Ward
In his debut full length collection, Junious ‘Jay’ Ward dives deep into the formation of self. Composition interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens. Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his readers an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.
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Gayle Brandeis is glowing on my screen, talking about the body’s part in her creative process. That same morning, she and her friend, Rebecca Evans, led a class called “Musings and Movement,” where participants were encouraged to wear comfortable clothes and “have something to write with, and something to write on.” This made me think of Brandeis’s new essay collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss (Overcup Press, 2023), which is a celebration of the things we are taught to keep hidden, especially our bodies. Movement and dance have always been a big part of Brandeis’s creative process: “I listen to that part of me that wants to move, wants to write,” she says. “It leads me into an intense place of focus.”
This focus has served Brandeis well. Writing across genres, Brandeis is a prolific author, respected teacher, and beloved mentor. Her nonfiction books include a hybrid memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press, 2017), and Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (Harper One, 2004). Her novels include The Book of Dead Birds (Harper Collins, 2009), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt, 2010), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award. Her recent novelette in poems was the terrifying Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), which was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. My personal favorite—maybe because it contains one of my favorite poems, “Jacaranda”—is her poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press, 2017).
Drawing Breath is Brandeis’s newest offering: a collection of personal essays examining our breath and breathing from different perspectives. From birth to adulthood, Brandeis’s life, loves, losses, and tales of writing about it have been ordered into sections (Eupnea: Quiet Breathing; Hyperaeration: Increased lung volume; Ponopnea: Painful Breathing . . . ). Fluctuating from humorous to horrifying, the essays are honest depictions of what haunts us, helps us, and heals us. A couple of the essays originally appeared in The Rumpus, including, “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” published in 2012, a groundbreaking essay for Brandeis. It was the first time she had published anything about her mother’s suicide, and the supportive response she received was instrumental in giving her the courage to write other essays about her mother, and, ultimately, her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—a book that changed my life.
Brandeis and I exchanged a series of emails before our Zoom interview, where we reconnected and talked about Drawing Breath, the book’s examination of the grief and sadness associated with loss and trauma, the writing process, and this marvelous container we call our body.
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The Rumpus: Your collection of essays has been described as a love letter to your readers. Maggie Smith says, “This collection draws inspiration from form—form of the body and form on the page.” I completely agree. How did this collection come together? Did you breathe in the air of your world, and breathe out these essays?
Gayle Brandeis: I didn’t have this collection in mind as I wrote each essay—each had its own sense of urgency and wholeness within me. I get a bit of tunnel vision when I’m in the thick of an essay, and it feels like the only thing I’ll ever write; I don’t consciously think about how it connects with my other writing, or how it could be part of a larger body of work (though my process is always evolving; perhaps someday I’ll write an essay collection with the bigger picture in mind along the way.) At some point, I realized I had more than enough essays to pull into a collection, and as I sifted through my files, I could see the underground rivers that flowed between them, the subconscious threads that stitched my work together. These essays were written over the course of more than twenty years, and I clearly have a stubborn devotion to subjects I keep returning to in my work, including breath, which became a meaningful organizing principle for the book.
Rumpus: You write: “The word ‘essay’ shares the same root as ‘assay,’ a verb used in metallurgy, chemistry, alchemy, meaning to test or weigh a substance to determine its composition. I think back to childhood collections, my intuitive groupings of pebble and shell. I similarly tested and weighed these essays as I put this collection together, tracing their origins of heat and grief and heart.” Your scientific curiosity, combined with an unflinching nerve, is beautiful alchemy. How did you find the perfect balance of science and heart?
Brandeis: Roxane Gay gave a guest lecture at Antioch several years ago called “In & Out” that was such a revelation to me in this regard—she spoke about the importance of looking both inward and outward when we write creative nonfiction; that’s where the alchemy happens, she said. It later occurred to me that I had being looking both directions in some of my work without articulating it as such, starting with the title essay, “Drawing Breath,” that’s divided into Inhales, where I look inward toward my own experience with breath, and Exhales, where I look outward toward the literature and science of breath. Her talk inspired me to continue to try to find this balance, to look both directions in a way that can both ground my work on an embodied level and make it more intellectually capacious (of course I don’t always find the ideal balance.)
Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. This really is a book about writing through our lives, isn’t it, and writing about the body?
Brandeis: Yes! It has been a lifelong interest of mine, the connection between writing and the body, a connection that really came into focus for me in college, where I created a degree in Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation, and Healing. Dance and writing are both forms of expression, both forms of language that spring from and find interconnection in the body. Looking back, as I do in my essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl,” I realized that when I was a kid, I was already writing about things like mental and physical illness. Things I still write about today. So, writing the body has clearly interested me since I started writing. It’s one of my most long-standing devotions.
Rumpus: “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl” is also haunted by the desire to be seen, to be known—a setting that feels both sad and familiar. How did your emotional neglect (like so many of us) feed the desire to create art?
Brandeis: I should preface this by saying I had a wondrous childhood, overall, and certainly a privileged one. My sister and I had a lot of freedom to play, to roam, to explore, to create, and we were exposed to art and culture and other enrichment, all of which I’m so grateful for.
At the same time, I recognize the deep wound I carry from having a narcissistic mother who instilled a lot of shame and guilt—sadness, too—in me when I was a child, and made it hard for me to express some of my deepest, truest thoughts and feelings. Writing was (and continues to be) a place where I could give those deepest, truest thoughts and feelings a voice, where I could truly be seen and heard, even if only to myself. It feels like an act of both resistance and joy that I’ve built a life around writing, around the place where I’ve felt most free.
Rumpus: “Drawing Breath” is a shaped essay that explains the desire for cohesion, as a person, as an artist, as a female, as a mother. What was the inspiration to craft the essay into (seemingly) hour-glass and bee-hive shapes?
Brandeis: I have to give credit for the visual shape of this essay to Jenny Kimura, who designed the inside of Drawing Breath. She had the idea to shape the essay so that it expanded and contracted like inhales and exhales, and I was delighted by this idea, by how the text breathes on the page, thanks to her genius. This essay is one of the older ones in the book—I wrote it over twenty years ago as my critical paper when I was getting my MFA at Antioch. I was fascinated by the connection between breath and writing, and am grateful I had an opportunity to explore that connection in such a deep way through the critical paper component of the degree (and am grateful to my amazing mentor Alma Luz Villanueva, who supported my unconventional approach.) I love that this essay has new life all these years later, and in its beautiful new shape gifted by Jenny.
Rumpus: The language in “Thunder, Thighs” is informed by a research questionnaire you made for women participants, one for a project about the cultural history of the thigh! It includes various sources: ancient texts, the Indo-European etymology of the word “teu,” a diet booklet from 1953, and even Mad Magazine. Are these sources, from the serious to the flimsy pulp of pop culture, complicit in shaming of women in their bodies?
Brandeis: Most of the sources in this essay are indeed complicit in the shaming of our bodies, other than the sources that celebrate our bodies, like the ancient Egyptian prayer for abundant thighs. The advertising industry, the diet industry, etc., are arms of the patriarchy and capitalism and white supremacy, which all benefit from making many of us feel bad about ourselves. There’s always a product or service we can buy to try to fit unrealistic beauty standards—products and services that keep us from loving ourselves as we are. I’m glad the piece made you laugh as well as cry—I’m a pretty silly person, but I tend to skew towards seriousness in my writing, and I’m happy when some of my humor finds its way into my work.
Rumpus: “The Women Who Helped” is an incredible essay, all about an assault you had to endure. You address the power in the supportive sisterhood that helped you afterward. What was it like to revisit this trauma, including what you call “the most important part” of the ordeal?
Brandeis: The way the women in my dorm supported and nurtured me after that experience of assault was life changing. I’d always had small groups of friends growing up, usually just one or two friends I was close to at any given time, and I hadn’t experienced being part of a larger circle of women until that moment. My mother was distrustful of other women, competitive with other women, so I didn’t have the model of communal sisterhood growing up (though I had the most beautiful and profound direct experience of sisterhood with my own sister.) The #MeToo movement prodded me to take a fresh look at many experiences of my life, and I was startled to realize how when I’d told the story of this assault over the years, I’d completely left out the women who’d helped me afterward.
Writing this essay felt like an act of repair, of honoring, of healing. I was able to read it publicly during a college reunion (or “renewal” as the alternative program I was part of calls them) and found myself literally embraced by a circle of women after I read, some of whom had been part of that original circle, all of us crying and hugging each other, holding each other up.
Rumpus: The collective ‘we’ in “We Too” is mega-powerful and a masterpiece in language. Peppered with science, it is a fabulous, factual romp into our power. You end with the encouragement to “find our wider voice.” How did this essay evolve?
Brandeis: I wrote this essay around the time my novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, was released. When I started writing that book back in 2009, it came to me in first person plural, a collective voice for the girls and women allegedly murdered by Countess Bathory around the turn of the seventeenth century. The only work I had read in first-person plural at that point was The Ladies Auxiliary, by Tova Mirvis, about ten years prior; I remember finding it really energizing and inspiring—it likely helped me find the collective voice in my work. I ended up setting Many Restless Concerns aside for many years—I was pregnant in 2009, and writing about torture and murder felt unsavory in that condition. Then my mom took her own life a week after the baby was born, and that was what I needed to write about over the next few years. I only returned to Many Restless Concerns after I finished writing my memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—I felt ready to write about a grief bigger than my own, ready to access a voice bigger than my own. In the intervening years, several other books and shorter pieces had been published in the first-person plural—it became a bit of a hot craft choice, in fact—and I thought it would be interesting to investigate what the point of view could accomplish on the page, especially for women-identifying writers. It made sense to write the essay itself in first-person plural, and it became a fun choral experience, merging my voice into a collective voice made of other collective voices.
Rumpus: Of all the essays, I enjoyed “Joy” the most! It was your mother’s fragrance, and the sense memory seems to match the relationship you had with her. The fragrance of the essay transcends language and lingers long after the last words (the haunting “Don’t Go Don’t Go Don’t Go,” repeated over and over by a little girl chasing her parents to the elevator). Why is smell so important to memory? Important to recognize as a trigger for an emotional response?
Brandeis: Thank you so much for these beautiful words! To get a little science nerdy here, smell is deeply entwined with memory and emotion because it accesses the same area of the brain—it bypasses the thalamus, which processes all our other senses, and goes straight to the primary olfactory cortex, near our limbic system, hippocampus, and amygdala, the parts that process memory and emotion. That can make scent such a powerful trigger, and the scent of my mom’s perfume (even just the memory of that scent) certainly causes our whole relationship to well up inside me, which made this essay both challenging and meaningful to write (it was also challenging because scent can be difficult to pin down with language, since it’s so evanescent—a word I just realized has the word “scent” embedded inside it, which feels so fitting!)
Rumpus: “Self Interview” was the essay that made me fist pump the air! It’s a post-memoir interview that reminds me how important it is to write our family stories, and how life changes after we write them! How has Gayle Brandeis, post-memoir, dealt with the sneaky grief that lingered after that cathartic book was written? After this one was written?
Brandeis: I asked myself the same question—“How did writing your memoir change you?”—so many times because I realized I could give many different answers. Writing The Art of Misdiagnosis profoundly changed me in some ways and also didn’t change me at all in others, and I wanted to try to capture that contradiction, that gamut. As for how I’ve dealt with that sneaky grief—such a powerful question!—that seems to differ from time to time. Sometimes grief still catches me off guard and feels like it will strangle me, and other times it arrives more like a soft cloud, a gentle passing pang. I guess I’ve gotten better at knowing grief will pass, even when it feels violent. I try to sit with it and feel it and breathe my way through it as best I can until it subsides. Enough time has passed that appreciation comes on the wake of grief now, and I can feel grateful for all I shared with the ones I lost instead of just feeling the ache of that loss. I’m thankful to be able to access that sweetness.
Rumpus: “My Shadow Son” was fascinating! I wrote, “Maybe this is a book itself?” I the margin. How does this essay speak to grief and the body for you? What was the reason for including it here?
Brandeis: It’s cool that you could see “My Shadow Son” as its own book; I had considered expanding this story into a book project after I wrote the essay, and was really excited by the idea—there’s so much more I could explore, and this is the most viral essay I’ve ever written, so there’s clearly interest out there—but the man who thought I was his biological mother for so many years (and has since become a friend) was worried any further digging would be difficult for his family, so I’ve let the idea go. I decided to include the essay because I felt it fit the type of breath I was exploring in that section of the book (Orthopnea: Breathlessness in Lying Down Position Relieved by Sitting Up or Standing). The essays in this section look at moments of relief after difficulty, and being able to find my shadow son’s real biological mother proved to be such a relief for both him and myself.
He had been pouring so much pain and grief and anger towards me because he thought I was denying him connection to his roots, to his true story. It was painful for me to carry all his grief on top of my own. Once we could let go of that grief between us, we could find real connection.
Rumpus: Another fascination was “Anniversary Gifts” an essay chronicling your separation from and reunification with your husband. The grief that caused havoc in your marriage proved to be a lousy, impermanent substance compared to the titanium of your union. What does this say about the stubbornness of life? Like the cover of your book: roots cut and blossoming, despite their death sentence.
Brandeis: I love the phrase, “the stubbornness of life” (and love the connection you found with the book cover!) Life is so beautifully stubborn, indeed, and I’m grateful that my marriage proved to be beautifully stubborn, even after I selfishly blew it apart. The love was clearly still there, underneath all the resentment between us and the chaos I had wrought, patiently waiting for us to acknowledge it and nurture it back to life. I love that our marriage grew back sturdier than ever, and love that we both cultivate it mindfully now. We both know how lucky we are to have this second chance, and we want to do whatever we can to help our marriage, and one another, thrive.
Rumpus: You’ve said that when you start writing, “It’s like this is the only piece I’ll ever write, the only piece I’ve ever written.” Can you talk about that?
Brandeis: When I write something that’s meaningful to me, it tends to pull me into a hyper-present state. I get into a zone and get hyper-focused. I try to come to my writing fresh each time and give all of myself to the piece in front of me—body, mind, heart, soul. All of my energy is focused on the point of the cursor as it moves forward. There’s a place within me where the work comes from, and everything else blurs and falls away. Of course, I get distracted by my own thoughts and worries sometimes, but it’s a desire of mine to be as fully present as I can be.
I try to do this in other areas of my life as well—to be as present as possible with what is in front of me—even though I may not be able to do this one hundred percent of the time. I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
Rumpus: Is this a discipline that you’ve learned through the years?
Brandeis: I’m a pretty undisciplined person. It’s kind of amazing I get as much done as I do! I’m always really happy to hear about writers who have specific disciplines, and specific schedules for their writing. I’m not like that at all. But somehow my various practices, as unruly as they are in my life, have always naturally taken me to a good, focused place.
I was a dancer and figure skater when I was young. I would learn these routines in my figure skating, but then, when it was time to compete or perform in a skating show, those routines would fall away, and I would let the music move me. I would improvise, much to the chagrin of my coaches. So, there’s always been this stubborn part of me that is following its own creative impulses. That part of me wants to move or wants to write without rules or routines. I get to that intense place of focus, and from there, it’s just a matter of listening to what needs to come through me at the moment. Once I tap into that, it kind of pulls me forward.
Rumpus: Your work is marvelously relatable. Do you focus on connecting with the reader?
Brandeis: I think that happens in revision. With writing, it helps to think no one’s ever going to read it, so I’m not holding myself back. When I revise, it’s very much focused on connection with the reader. I want to make sure what I’m writing will make sense to other people. I want people to be able to feel it in their bodies.
That early draft is really me getting out of my own way and then, with each successive draft, it’s just to connect more and more with the reader. I want to make the work as clear as it can be, as potent as it can be, for others to take it in. It feels like a sacred relationship, the connection between writer and reader, and I want to honor that through craft as well as through love. When it’s in service to that connection, craft becomes an act of love.
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Author photo by Asher Brandeis
A new animated series starring beloved kidlit characters "Frog and Toad" is headed to Apple TV+, premiering Friday, April 28. Them is reporting that "gay Twitter" is lauding the adaptation of Arnold Lobel's Caldecott and Newbery Award-winning children's book for its "queer subtext," calling the amphibious friends "one of the internet's favorite queer relationships." — Read the rest
This gentle essay documents Roxanne Gay’s and her wife, Debbie Millman’s, journey to Antarctica. It’s not a racy tale, just a thoughtful look at what the trip meant to them, told from their perspective. A lovely take on shared contentment.
I took a picture of Debbie, bundled in her bright red parka, eyes covered with goggles, beaming as she held the chunk of ice. There were more penguins. We pulled up to a craggy landing and stepped foot on land to . . . say we stepped foot on Antarctica. We admired the landscape, and I was struck by the fact that this really is one of the last places in the world that is largely unconquered. I found an unexpected comfort in that.
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