Tana Oshima likes to draw, paint, and write. She is a Japanese to Spanish literary translator, and has translated contemporary Japanese female novelists such as Yuko Tsushima, Hiroko Oyamada and Yu Miri. She also teaches art and comics at NYC public middle schools. She has self-published ten mini comics and has shown her work at galleries in NYC, Portland, Miami, Sweden and Spain. Her first novel is coming out in 2024.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO
Ben Montague makes comics, zines, poems, short fiction, memoirs, objects, tattoos and little films. Their work has been featured in publications by Driftwood Press and The Femme Moon, among others. They live in Chicago with two cats, a roommate, and many miscellaneous jars.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOThere is a reason why no sleepovers at our house or at the houses of other girls, my mother told me the day I got my first period. Pink rats live inside us. Your grandmother had them too. While we sleep, they crawl out of our mouths, gnaw on the toes of people not in our family. For example, your best friend Sam, your only friend. She will wake in horror, flee into the night, tell all the girls on the lacrosse team. Keep this secret until your wedding night. That is when I told your father, who could have handled it better but didn’t flee. At least not right away.
While she spoke, my mother drank long sips of red wine, her mouth ringed as if she’d been chewing on my fingers, though I was the one doing that. I liked the taste of my nails, the heady stink beneath them from between my legs. My cuticles stung when she had me chop onions, bled over incorrect math homework and the pastel pink bat mitzvah thank you cards. A dozen families from our temple had come, had kissed my cheeks and given me faux gold bracelets with gemstone hearts I’d never wear. None of them were our friends. I wondered if they too harbored animals they feared would attack.
Sam gave me a chunk of Baltic Sea amber on a black cord. I wore it every day until the cord frayed, then carried it in the back pocket of my jeans. She wrote me funny illustrated notes during school, sculpted me a blue hot cocoa mug and fired it in her mother’s kiln. In her presence, I felt full of raspberries, salt, stars, and moons except when she and the lacrosse girls held parties and didn’t invite me. Then I’d want to scratch her from my life, would lie awake feeling pathetic and mean. I’d wonder what the rats inside me ate besides the toes of non-family. My mother said liver and onions, so make sure you clear your plate. Otherwise, they’ll gnaw your guts instead.
In Hebrew school, we’d learned what it meant to be called vermin. I somehow knew not to ask my mother about this, to not question if our rats were an internalized myth, twisted to keep us alone and safe, an isolation passed down from my grandmother who’d lost her whole family. It was the same way I knew not to ask, at my first gynecologist appointment three years later, if the doctor felt them when she pressed my uterus, an organ more alien to me than any story my mother could tell me about myself. When I skipped meals, I wasn’t consciously hoping the rats would eat it out, along with my ovaries and breasts, return to me the body I loved. Still, the sharp hunger gave me a rush.
My first boyfriend loved my flat stomach. When he took me into his parents’ lukewarm shower and bent me over without a word, the pain erased any memory of my before-body. I grunted as if in pleasure, bit the inside of my cheek. The shower curtain was patterned in tropical fish. Any rats inside me stayed put. I can’t remember how many times this happened. After, we always snacked on his mother’s dried apricots which she ate to stay regular. She and my boyfriend went to our temple, and I’d heard her discussing her bloat with my mother, who recommended she switch to prunes.
My mother had no remedies for loneliness. When I came home at thirty, single and on my fifth city, she said, “There are difficult phases of life.” I didn’t tell her that on first dates with men, a hirsute rustling filled my throat. I stilled it with glasses of red, then invited them to my meticulously clean apartment, fucked them on the grey comforter. Then I swept them back out into the stream of strangers, cleansed again. After, my head ached for days. The rest of me was a staticky blur my friends admired in skater skirts, in tulled Roxy dresses. Over the years, a few girls asked me out. I’d want to say yes but something always clamped down around my heart, big-toothed, afraid.
I’m middle-aged, back in town for my mother’s seventieth birthday, when she says, “I ran into Sam’s mother at the store last week. Did you know she’s married to a woman?” On the table, instead of the usual liver and onions, she has placed a golden roasted chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, a tangy spinach salad. She has switched from wine to sparkling water. My pink rats seethe. I chug the cheap Merlot I brought myself, take measly bites. My mother devours everything fast. “You know, I would support you if that was what you wanted,” she says, her mouth shining with schmaltz. “I’ve only ever wanted your happiness.”
She stands up, grabs the sides of the table to brace herself. Then she vomits onto my plate as if I’m a baby bird. What comes up is not our meal but a glowing pink moon. It’s the size of her heart, reflects my still-young face. It smells of strawberry shortcake. “Don’t you want it?” I ask. “I’ve got many more, it turns out,” she says, a glint in her eyes. “Please, take this from me.”
I’m drunk and angry—mostly at myself, at my nagging sadness—but I stab it with my fork, crank my jaw wide like a snake. My eyes water; the moon burns going down. It doesn’t hurt more than anything else. It tastes like alternate lives, like amber softening back to resin, like a joy that was always mine. My first beard bristles my chin. “Wait, not like that,” my mother says but it is too late. I burp berries. Stars bloat my belly. I lick my lips, whiskered and ravenous.
Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer and teacher who lives in St. Louis. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared in Ecotone, Foglifter, and Passages North. Their flash fiction has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 and in the SmokeLong Quarterly Best of the First 10 Years Anthology. They co-founded Changeling, a queer reading series focused on works-in-progress, and teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois Springfield.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOafter Megan Pillow’s “Margo, Turn Left”
Here is a single cloud rolling over the sinking sun. Here, the crow caws for a chick that fell from the nest in the Meyer’s yard. Here now, the first night of heat, striking as sudden and hard as a branding iron even as the sun goes down. But we barely notice because we’re watching Xochi, sitting alone in her car.
She’s at the stop sign looking left, right, left, and we can’t see her face, but we can hear her wedding ring tapping the glass and it sounds like a fork hitting a champagne flute. We all know what she’s doing. We watch her from our Adirondack chairs at the edge of Mona’s hot tub, and all we hear is that clink and our lips purse waiting for a kiss that will never come.
That sound, that sound—we close our eyes in unison, and here is Xochi, already tan before summer really starts. We hear it, and Xochi strips down to her sandals and drops her keys into Bryn’s fruit bowl. We hear it and wait for Xochi’s husband to come and quiet the mourning cries of the crow.
Clink goes Xochi’s ring against the glass, clink clink clink and Alexandra brushes smooth the hair on her legs, but all she feels is Xochi tense as Alexandra brings her to the edge of herself for the first time, the last time. Clink and Mona slips her own ring off her finger and considers it like she’s seeing it for the first time. Clink and Bryn begins to bite the inside of her cheek so that she can soft-tissue pain like Xochi, who would eat herself alive if she could.
Here is Xochi at the stop sign and we all know this summer will be oppressively hot. We all know her bag is there beside her on the seat but empty because Xochi hates commitment, and what is she thinking? We all know that if she goes the sun will grow so hot it will boil our blood in our veins and our households will shatter and the bells that chime on every porch she walks past will melt. And yet here is Xochi, not gone yet. Now is the time for the incantation.
Alexandra brushes her course leg hair and with a practiced flick of her wrist, pulls out a pinch. Mona moves her wedding ring into her palm and drops it into the frothing mess of the hot tub. Bryn gathers a wad of spit in the back of her cheek and hocks it into the water and we all whisper the words:
Turn left, Xochi.
Xochi, turn left.
Again and again we whisper them, quiet, so our husbands won’t hear us and before us, the water begins to flash disco green. And while we chant, we think what we cannot say.
Turn left, Xochi.
(because if you do, the road will sprawl out before you in a way that will reveal the true curve of your body, coiled like a crouching snake.)
Xochi, turn left.
(because one day, one day, you will pad the walls of your mind with softness so that it won’t hurt when you remember.)
Turn left, Xochi.
(because you are too big for this town, too big for us, and even though it’s good right now, it might be bad later).
Xochi, turn left.
(because we read the question on your lips when you look at your husband: What were we doing? What were you doing?)
Turn left, Xochi.
(because we were there the night you held up a raisin and said, This reminds me of—and you laughed and it was the worst thing we ever heard.)
And we don’t understand, and we don’t ask because we don’t have to. But every night when we are alone in our beds, here is Xochi’s reflection in a funhouse mirror and she looks 16, has always looked 16, and all we think is you are the daughter we chose not to have.
Here is the cloud rolling over the sun. Here, the crow crying. Here, the first hit of heat.
And yet.
We watch Xochi.
We tend to the water.
We chant the words five, ten, fifteen times.
Turn left, Xochi.
Xochi.
Turn left.
Gabrielle Esposito is a graduate of SUNY Geneseo’s Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in The Manhattanville Review, Gandy Dancer, 34TH Parallel, and others. Her short story, “The Way Home,” is a recipient of the Doro Boehme’s Fiction Editor’s contest by Hypertext Magazine. She works as a Librarian and teaches writing classes throughout the Hudson Valley.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOEach day, it was someone else’s turn to receive a call. When it happened to one of us, we weren’t exactly sad. Neither were we happy; in that delicate space between hope and the hum of everyday life, we were a number of different things: digging out weeds, chopping carrots with dull knives, knitting by a fire that kept dying out, dutiful fingers interlacing threads that would become a scarf or a sweater. On a bright summer day, we might not have been at home for the call, the sound of the phone echoing through the halls and reaching no one, but there weren’t many bright days in Spring Mountain. Our lives were mostly cold, our shoulders never sun-kissed. So we villagers were in the middle of a meal: a roast and vegetables, smoked fish and boiled eggs. Or maybe we were about to enjoy a slice of pie, cheeks pinked by the warmth of the oven, when suddenly we heard the ring.
*
As it turns out, it was a bright summer day, the first blue one in years. The clouds had been scared away by a daring sun that radiated more warmth than I could handle. On my way to work that morning, I felt a slight pressure on my brow and realized I couldn’t look up—the light was a heavy hand directing my gaze to the ground. Over on Main Street, Billy Mayer stood on a staircase, a baseball cap covering his bald spot. He held a handmade sign that read, “Ice Cream today,” and placed it over the one that read “Firewood.” I quickened the pace. I took a shortcut through some backyards and walked into a side street to the parking lot, which was empty for a Monday.
At the office, I approached my station at the end of a long hall. The window was open and the air had changed: the usual smell of stale soup had waned, and something clear, floral, made its presence known. A few employees were already hard at work, a dark card in their hands and dozens of others piled up on their desks. I put the jacket I didn’t wear on the back of my chair and sat down. On my desk sat a headset, a dictionary, and a brown envelope in wax paper with my name in all caps. Tearing the protective seal, I found what I always found: a new stack of pitch-black cards, forty or fifty of them, each bearing the name and phone number of someone from the valley. The cards looked identical, and their message was the same.
I put on my headset and dialed the numbers on the first card. The phone rang once, and I thought of all the calls I’d made in the past, the ones yet to come, and how they all started with a ring, how almost everything began with a sound. The line rang again, and I thought of the length of each ring: like saying someone’s name, like calling them.
While the phone rang a third time, I picked up my dictionary. It had been a welcome gift from my supervisor, with instructions to look up new words between calls. Words had a special weight for the Division. On a board next to the water cooler, employees were encouraged to write up synonyms and effective ways to convey the same message so that the calls wouldn’t sound robotic. With any luck, I thought, I could write a new one on the board today, one people hadn’t come up with before.
“Hello?” I heard the expectation in that woman’s greeting, the nervousness of not knowing what waited on the other side of the call. I always thought that one day, with a better phone, we would be able to hear their heartbeats.
“Am I speaking to Mrs. Kandinsky?” I asked, straight to the point. On a normal day, I probably would have buttered her up some. Good morning—is this Mrs. Kandinsky? I would have said. Or, May I speak to Mrs. Kandinsky, please? But time was of the essence. If the weather got any nicer, someone could decide to host a barbecue or celebrate a birthday at the lake. Over in Lava Springs, Mary Kelly could fancy Billy’s initiative and reopen her soda fountain store. I mean, people could get all sorts of ideas, which would result in me losing an entire day of calls that would reach no one. The stack of cards in my workstation wouldn’t shrink on its own accord. On the contrary, given all the empty chairs in the Division that day, I’d probably have to work late.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m Mrs. Kandinsky.”
“Mrs. Kandinsky, this is a call from the Division of Bad News. We regret to inform you that you were not the winner of the lucky draft.”
Mrs. Kandinsky breathed into the phone.
“Do you have any questions?” I said.
She hesitated. I gave her some time.
“Mr. Brooks,” she said timidly.
I knew where this was going, but I asked her anyway. “What about him?”
“We went out last week,” she said. “He makes a good steak.”
“Maybe try again in a few years?” I said.
“And my blueberries?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kandinsky. I wish I had better news.”
“Well, thank you very much for your call,” she said. She didn’t curse me. Didn’t call me names or hang up on me. We got that a lot. But she was so polite, it almost hurt. Mrs. Kandinsky let me finish my speech. “The Division of Bad News appreciates your business, and we hope to contact you with better news in the future.”
*
Spring Mountain sat at the base of Rocky Mountain, a mountain under a mountain, and those who were born there grew up with a stony presence looming over their heads. As part of the St. Patricio Valley, a patron no one cared to pray to, the town was surrounded by smaller villages like Lava Springs, Houndtown, and Heckville, and it lived under the constant weight of a blanket of fog. Most houses were designed to be useful rather than beautiful, small homes with red brick roofs and faint paint. People led simple lives. Our hearts weren’t visited by burning material ambitions. Everyone’s fortunes were determined by a draw, and only one person in the valley would receive good news at a time. Sometimes that happened once a year, sometimes once every five years; the frequency wasn’t clear. It had been this way for so long, there wasn’t even a record of a time when life wasn’t like this. We didn’t even have a division of good news, that’s how little good luck there was to dish out. To make a good-luck call, the attendant would head over to a small room in the back of the Division and call the recipient behind closed doors. I had never received a good-luck call, nor had I ever made one, but I’d laid eyes on a good-luck card once, when one of our oldest employees retired and was assigned a good-luck call on her last day. As she made her way slowly to the small room, she held the card next to her chest, and through her wrinkled, papery hands, I saw a combination of colors so pleasing I almost cried in my chair: different shades of pink, red, orange and blue mixed with subtle hues of green and yellow, a beautiful thing to behold. I felt taller just looking at it.
*
Carol walked through the door later than her usual late. I followed the top of her head as she passed each cubicle, her dark bun bouncing like a ball, the bun she would untie and tie up over and over again between calls, and as always, I felt the urge to chop it off. She sat in the station next to me and flashed me a sly smile, followed by a wink, a movement that seemed to imply that I was complicit; that I, too, would be late one day, and wasn’t that a normal thing, a thing everyone did at some point?
In my four years working at the Division, I had not once been late.
Sitting up straight, I breathed in and pulled my head toward my right shoulder. I let the air out slowly. Stretching one’s neck was important, the head of the Division had said during an employee retreat earlier that year. Standing alone on the stage, the director turned her back to us and explained, her fingers running down her neck, that speech was affected by each small muscle and ligament, that everything was connected. She could always tell, she’d said, when the caller was relaxed, and what a painful sound when they were not. They could always tell: all calls were recorded for quality assurance. They were also transcribed, the logs cleared of curse words and placed on a shelf in the basement, an underground library housing the luck (or more frequently, the lack thereof) of each one of the valley’s inhabitants.
I stretched my neck in the opposite direction and closed my eyes. I thought of the next call I was going to make, how it would be my best one yet, when all of a sudden I was struck by a sharp smell of apples. Apple pie, apple juice, something that required an unheard amount of apples clogged my nostrils. I opened my eyes. Carol’s face was only a few inches away from mine.
I pushed my chair back. “Jesus,” I said.
Carol smiled. “Did you have a good weekend?” she asked.
“What is that smell?”
“What smell?”
“Did you bathe in applesauce?”
“Oh,” Carol said, sounding pleased. She took a small tube of lotion from a drawer. “I got it over the weekend,” she said. She squeezed a small amount on the back of my hand. “Try it.”
She had started at the Division a few months before me, and based solely on the fact that she and I were the same age, she acted as if we were best friends.
I wiped my hand on her arm. I reached for my headset.
“Well,” Carol said. “If you must know, I had a fun weekend.” She looked both ways and whispered, “Mark and I went to the lake.”
There was also that: Carol had started seeing someone. She couldn’t help it. Although none of us would confess to harboring grandiose aspirations, our hearts ached for the tiny things like that. We adopted pets, met new people, drove with those people to the lake and, staring ahead at the silent body of water, made timid wishes—I suppose you could call them plans—for the future. Which, of course, only made the outcome all the more bitter: sometimes things took a turn for the worse within seconds of us receiving a bad-luck call. Milk would go sour in the fridge. A love interest would suddenly lose interest. A house would burn down and take the neighbor’s house with it. Some fatal car crash we would read about in the news. Still, we couldn’t help it. Though we wouldn’t openly discuss it, hope was the pale feathery thing tickling our feet at night. That’s why Carol and I had that job, and probably would have it for life. I liked to think I had learned my lesson, but Carol seemed a ways from learning hers.
I tapped the ends of my forefingers against my headset. Carol got the message. She dragged her chair back to her station, the casters leaving traces on the carpet. She unwrapped her brown envelope. I dialed the numbers on the next bad-luck card.
“Hello.”
“Can I speak to Mr. Knox,” I said.
A loud burp sounded on the other end, and the smell of Carol’s lotion made me think that whoever was on the other side of that call had eaten pie for lunch.
“This is he.”
“I’m calling from the Division of Bad News,” I said.
A female canine. The posterior opening of a mammal’s digestive tract. A person with limited intellectual development. That would be how Mr. Knox’s insults would appear on the log.
Carol let out a scream. I looked at her. With one hand she covered her mouth, and with the other, she held out a small piece of rainbow, a piece of paper so vibrant it seemed to suck in all the colors of the room. She had been assigned a good-luck card. The first good-luck card in years had been assigned to Carol.
She stood up. She sat down. She moisturized her elbows and stood up again. She looked at me. I covered my headset. “Go,” I said and shooed her with my hand. She moved awkwardly to the back of the room. She was nervous, of course. I would have been nervous, too. On top of the surprise, whoever was assigned a good-luck call also received some luck. That’s what the rumors said, though how much luck no one knew for sure.
I heard a voice in my ear. Mr. Knox was still on the line.
One who engages in sexual activity with another person’s mother, his final insult would read in the transcript. He hung up before I could finish my speech.
*
Carol seemed agitated when she returned to her cubicle. Feel my hands, she said, and placed them on my forearm. Her skin felt cold and moist, like beer on a windowsill. She untied her hair. She pulled a piece of gum from a drawer. We were not supposed to discuss good-luck calls, but if someone was going to break that rule, it would be Carol. She pulled her chair close to mine. She picked up my dictionary (who knows where she’d put hers) and pretended to look up words. She pointed her index finger at a random one. Her blue nail polish was chipped on the edges.
“He was on his way out,” she said to me. “I figured he was going for ice cream or whatever, so I said to him, do you have any fun plans for the day? It’s OK to ask questions, you know.”
We didn’t know. Because they were so rare, we were not trained to make good-luck calls. We could break the news however we wanted. Also, good-luck calls were never recorded.
“But he wasn’t going out for fun,” Carol continued. “He was on his way to work, like everyone else, he said.”
She reached for a colorful pen on her desk. She opened the lid with her mouth and underlined a word on a different page. “I love how this smells,” she said. She brought the dictionary to my nose. The ink smelled like bananas.
“He is from Heckville,” she continued. I felt a heaviness in the bottom of my stomach. “Did you know that there are lumberjacks in Heckville? A dry place like that? I would never have imagined.”
My heart sank. I knew one lumberjack in Heckville.
“Well, apparently there are.” She flipped the page. “But the strangest thing was, he didn’t ask me any questions. I told him my name, said I had fantastic news for him, but he just listened. I’d hoped my happy tone would tip him off—I’m a sucker for happiness, you know me. I believe we could all stand to be a bit more cheerful—but he just let me babble on. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t cry. Isn’t that funny? Some people are like that, I suppose.”
I shuffled my bad-luck cards.
“Anyway, I finally broke the news. Well, Mr. Dave Welly from Heckville, I said. It’s my great pleasure to inform you that you’re the lucky winner of the Division’s draft.” And you know what he said?
I knew exactly what he’d said. She said it aloud, and I said it in my head: “That’s better than being tickled by a monkey.”
*
There was a secret trail that connected Spring Valley to Heckville. A path that was often hidden by the fog, and that for that reason remained a secret to most people. But if someone, let’s a say a couple, a man and a woman: if they drove there together at the suggestion of one of them; if parking on the trailhead, they jumped the wooden fence that had been swallowed by the vines and made their way through the dense vegetation, the shrubbery scratching their elbows like arrows, they would find it: a stretch of dirt that linked one place to the other. It would feel promising under their feet, the trail; it would feel solid like a new beginning.
About half a mile in towards Heckville, the fog would begin to recede. The path would start to clear and the colors would become sharper. The couple would reach a steep hill, and at that point, they had two choices: either to continue the trek up to the top or to walk back to the car. Now, it would take a certain type to walk back after having gone that far, especially if they were on their first date and one of them, say, the man, had recommended the trail. And if the woman had ever wondered about the difference between a rock and a stone, that initial ascent would clarify it for her: a rock was what she thought she’d stepped on before falling on her knees. A stone is what tore through her trousers and bruised her leg, a pain both sharp and hot. But suddenly, an open palm before her eyes. Her scraped hand would meet his, and he’d get her off the ground with one pull. He wouldn’t ask if she was okay; he hadn’t said much all day and she found that comforting. Instead, he’d kneel and peel the fabric of her trouser gently, like a piece of fruit. He’d examine the wound and then he’d produce an ointment from his pocket. He was that kind of man. He’d apply it to the wound: it would burn at first, then a sensation of cool. “It will be OK,” he would tell her, and that would settle it. They would continue on the trek, slower this time, the man guiding the woman by the hand through the riskiest parts. She wouldn’t sense even a drop of sweat on his palm: the texture was similar to the trees he felled, and it seemed to carry their wisdom, the way a tree could be calm and reassuring.
At the top, the whole valley would unfold before them. The houses looked like toys, the streets like the fine lines of a map. The Division building would be a narrow concrete block in the distance, the lake but a drop of water on a carpet of green extending in every direction, and whatever happened there and whomever it happened to would look so small. The sky would be a shade of blue so vivid it wouldn’t seem real. Funny, the woman would think, how the more vivid something was, the less real it seemed to be. There would be a bench at the top. They’d sit on it. She’d lay her head on his shoulder, and he’d put his arm around her waist. The silence between them would be a kind presence, and all around the song of the world: birds, bugs, the wind, the cars below. At some point, he would say “That’s better than being tickled by a monkey,” something his father used to say to him, and his grandfather too, he would explain. “It is,” she would reply. She would think that was nice, being up there with him. It was as nice a thing as it could be.
No one asked her, but if anyone had, the woman would have told them: at that moment, she made a wish. With her head on the pillow of his arm, she wished for that moment to go on forever, just that.
Say, wouldn’t it be the saddest thing if she never heard from him again?
*
I had never heard from him again. That had been four years ago, almost to the date. I spent the first months trying to call him, but each time I got the same message: this number has been disconnected. I assumed Dave had died. He had died for me anyway, like the ones who’d come before him, like my plants had died a few years back, like my pet lizard who had been run over by a truck. Things died. You got used to it. How do you know something will work out, I asked my supervisor when it became evident I wouldn’t hear from Dave again. When you receive a good-luck call, she’d said. Until then, assume that nothing will.
I looked out the window. Light was fading out, rosy hues succumbing to gray. A small bird landed on the windowsill. So Dave had received a good-luck call. His whole life would change, I thought, as I stretched my neck once more. Whatever life he had been living up to that point would only get better.
Carol gathered her things to leave. She hummed a tune I didn’t recognize and I could tell by the delicate manner she arranged her belongings that she was happy. She closed the window. Through the pane, I noticed that the sun had put on its neon pajamas: the clouds were stained with the final colors of the day and the air felt chilly again. Carol fastened her jacket. She reached for her keys. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. She handed me my dictionary.
I read the words she had underlined.
here n: this place <get away from ~>
here.abouts \ -bout \ adv: in this vicinity
1. here-after \ adv: after this sequence or in time 2: in some future time
or state
2. hereafter n 1: FUTURE 2: an existence beyond earthly life.
I read them again. I thought it was funny how a small detail could change a word. It didn’t even have to be a full word; sometimes, half a word would do it.
*
Night fell upon the valley. The head of the Division was heading out. “Don’t stay up late,” she said as she left. And looking at the pile of cards on my desk, “Just give it to them straight.” She winked at me. Since we’d been understaffed, she probably presumed I was covering for someone. What she didn’t know was that I’d actually met my quota an hour earlier. I had simply moved all my bad-luck cards to the bottom of the pile.
The door clicked to a satisfying sound when she left, the sound of an instant coming to an end. Now it was just me and the flicker of fluorescent lights, the tired hum of the water cooler, which hadn’t worked that hard in ages. And then the sound of plastic as it wrinkled and crinkled, of me going through Carol’s trash bin and tossing all the contents on the floor. So much gum wrap—green-apple, strawberry, watermelon—her trash bin a testament to her obsession with artificial sweetness. A hairpin. Carol’s bad-luck cards from the day bearing doodles in the margins, which I thought was disrespectful. But Dave’s good-luck card was not there.
I sat in Carol’s chair and imagined for a moment what it would be like to be her. Where would she have put Dave’s card? I looked at her belongings. She kept a photo of her dog, a French poodle named Mary, in a portrait next to a candle. A pit bull had beheaded Mary the previous year, not long after Carol had received a bad-luck call from the Division, and for a week afterward she didn’t show up to work. We all had to work late to make up for her absence, a fact I resented. Her candle had a lid where the words “Jasmine Sandalwood” were written. I lifted the lid and immediately closed it. I went through her drawers. More pictures of Mary, gum, lotion, hair ties, highlighters in several colors. A holiday planner with gift lists and a holiday menu idea, a brochure of the latest real-estate development. In one of the drawers I found a box of sympathy cards with the same design on the cover: a purple octopus and the caption, “Need a hug?” I recognized that card. Carol had sent me one last time I received a bad-luck call.
Old bills. Memos. Receipts. Paystubs. Not a single one of those documents had a droplet of color in them. I threw everything on the floor and sat facing the sea of paper before me. I fought back angry tears. Carol had kept the card. Of course she had. Why wouldn’t she keep it? A beautiful good-luck card with Dave’s contact information in the middle, which, as luck would have it, I had long lost. Who knew, at this point she could be on her way to Heckville to meet him—who amongst us wasn’t desperate for something nice to happen, for change? She was probably at his doorstep right now. It was possible. Everything was possible. Dave had had good luck. Carol had Dave’s card. What a lucky day for some.
I started to clean up the mess I’d made. As I opened the bottom drawer, I noticed Carol’s dictionary deep in the bottom, dusty and hardly used. I thought of replacing my marked-up dictionary with hers. I pulled it out of the drawer and a piece of paper fell on the carpet, a bad-luck card. I picked it up. The name on it was so familiar, I couldn’t register it at first.
I read my name.
It dawned on me: I hadn’t received a bad-luck call in a long time. I really hadn’t. I thought about it. My new plants had made it through the winter. My roof was not leaking. I hadn’t caught a cold, hadn’t so much as sneezed over the past months. Even my hair was growing out nicely. I wondered how long my bad-luck card lay hidden in Carol’s dictionary, but in truth, it didn’t matter: we were supposed to make the calls the same day we were assigned them. That was the number one rule of the Division, a rule they emphasized at every gathering, and there were consequences, severe consequences, they told us, for not adhering to it. But what these consequences entailed we weren’t sure. As far as I knew, Carol was the first one to break the rule. Apple-scented Carol. Banana-pen Carol. Annoyingly optimistic Carol. Breaking the rule for me? I put everything back into the drawers. I chewed on a piece of watermelon gum. It tasted like the real fruit initially, and then like the worst thing I had ever tasted, overly sweet and repulsive. I switched off the lights and walked outside. I sat on the front steps of the Division and stared out at the darkness. Some stars danced against the blue night curtain of the sky, and I realized they were fireflies sparkling off and on, as if flickering in and out of existence. I took comfort in them. So much of life happens in obscurity, I thought. Almost all of it, really, but every now and then something glitters.
Flavia Stefani is a Brazilian American writer, a 2023-2024 Brown Handler Resident, who earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A former assistant editor at Guernica and Witness Magazine, Flavia is at work on a novel and a collection of linked stories. Born in Goiânia, she lives in San Francisco.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOPreface: The essay is about how adhd meds changed my life, but it hasn’t been an easy road or a quick fix. It’s been blips of perfection surrounded by turmoil. The format is intentionally jarring – I hope to convey the uncertainty of the adhd life. This is merely my experience and not meant as a universal definition. The thing about being neurodivergent is that we all exist on a spectrum. My viewpoint is unique to me. Perhaps you’ll find parallels in it, but there will also be points of departure. Take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything but my lived experience. All photos in this piece were taken, on film, by the author in Minneapolis.
“THE FEAR”
You can feel the fear in you. It wants to consume.
You just landed a dream job, a scholarship, new girl, anything worth celebrating.
The Fear says you are unworthy.
Or even worse: you will die before you ever enjoy this.
You were destined for misery. This Is The Fear.
If you get anything worth having in life, it will be right before you die.
Surely your death must be near.
You, taste, happiness? Please.
You’ve watched enough Star Trek to know that Logic is the blueprint for life.
The logic of your life thus far says you will die just as poor as you were born.
We don’t care if you feel you’ve made it.
You’re still that dusty lil African kid in that Mombasa Refugee Camp.
Utaango, you forget that place? Your mother nearly died there. Your brothers were born there.
And you? You’re still that Feed The Children commercial.
You forget how they bullied you in first grade, no English, Atlanta? African Booty Scratcher.
I am The Fear. I am your only friend.
I am the only one who can stand your bullshit enough to stick around.
Everyone else will leave you. You know it’s true. They already have. Show me a friend you’ve known more than 5 years. You can’t, can you? Tragic.
You said what? You are unworthy of love?
Well, you’re not wrong. I don’t love you. I am The Fear, incapable of Love. But I am here.
this is how the world began
I used to do a lot of drugs. The thing about abusing substances is that it depletes your neurotransmitters. This leads to very bad depression. Combine that with being dark skinned and growing up in a place like Seattle with no real sunlight, and you get a vitamin D deficiency (aka Seasonal Affective Disorder). This makes the depression symptoms even worse. This makes you do more drugs to cope. Which make you more depressed.. which makes you… yeah.
I’d end up in the ER, in the psych ward, at the tail end of a long binge. I would be so depressed that a psychiatric hold felt like my only option. The ER doctors only ever saw me at my lowest state. At other times, I’d show up to the same ER (hi, Harborview Medical Center) in a state of stimulant induced mania. They put all of this on my chart and their natural conclusion was: Bipolar. The man wavers from depressed to manic, he must be Bipolar.
I accepted their verdict, along with the Lithium salts which promised to ease my instability. It’s very dangerous to get dehydrated while you’re on lithium. I was working as a pedicab driver at the time, so I was routinely dehydrated. One weekend, I signed up for a 3-day festival on that pedicab and… it did not end well. I felt like I was dying for 48 hours. I didn’t ask for permission when I decided to get off the lithium. Better alive & down then dead & treated.
That was only one such incident. I have a million more stories like that, stories I’d rather not tell because they’re too painful. The basic story arch was this: misdiagnosis / wrong medication / very bad effects from medication / get myself off the meds / rinse & repeat cycle.
I was beginning to lose hope, and not just from being depressed. I turned to self-medication. Look, at least with weed, alcohol, mushrooms, molly, coke, meth, Xanax, experimental research chemicals (hello, 2CB) & everything else I got my hands on, I could control the flow of feelings.
Did I care that all this drug abuse was putting me in dangerous situations (I’ve had guns pulled on me, seen close friends OD, nearly died myself so many times)? No. It didn’t really matter because, as dangerous as this life was, it was better than the eternal malaise I was in sans drugs.
Years later, I would get sober, clinging to faith as my bedrock. Faith was the only thing keeping me from going back to the Old Ways. It didn’t occur to me that all the difficulties I was having could be attributed to ADHD or complex trauma or being Autistic. I had a feeling, but I had no way of knowing. We can’t know what we know until we know it, right?
See, I grew up in this culture that teaches you to be grateful for everything. Say you come home and say “mom, dad, I’m struggling with school. I feel sad all the time, and I don’t know why.” You would get a shower sandal flying towards your head (for daring to be so ungrateful), followed by a lecture on all the people back home who would kill for the opportunities you take for granted. You might be reminded of all the sacrifices your parents made to get you to this position. The refugee camps, the bullets flying overhead, the near starvation.
You want to say something like: yeah, I went through all that, too, except I was only a child, who didn’t have any way to process that level of death and destruction, and so perhaps that’s why I’m feeling so damn sad all the time. Perhaps that’s why I can’t relate to my classmates who only ever talk about the newest shoes or the latest reality show. Perhaps I am not ungrateful, but simply drowning in sorrow so deep that gratitude is the least of my concerns.
You know you can’t say any of this so you shake your head and shuffle off to your room. Cry into your pillow or something. Jack off and hope the endorphins make the pain stop. Cry again.
These days, I work as an adjunct professor, teaching composition courses at a slew of community colleges. The nature of adjunct life is such that you take whatever courses are offered. This is how I make my living, so I pretend to be grateful for the opportunity.
At the beginning of my second semester as an adjunct fresh out of grad school, I received an email that shook my world. “Due to low enrollment, we have no courses to offer you next semester. We know that your income, as well as you health insurance, is directly tied to the number of credits you teach. We encourage you to apply for food stamps, or disability, or unemployment, or find a wife who is willing to pay your bills until enrollment turns around again. We understand that you are Somali and Muslim, and that the expectation is for you to be the breadwinner in a household. We also hear that twitter discourse dictates you need to be a 6 figure salary (with benefits) man just to qualify for a first date. We see you and hear you. Hopefully you don’t get evicted while you try to find a new basket for all your eggs.”
Okay, maybe I’m taking creative liberties with the email. Much of what I wrote is true advice I received from other adjuncts: apply for food stamps/unemployment/disability; find a partner who can pay your bills until things turn around. I did not endure 3 years of MFA hell just to end up more job insecure than ever before. It was so disheartening that I signed up for a coding bootcamp, vowing to become a well-paid techbro & leave the adjunct professor grind for good.
Just as I was losing hope, two of the colleges I have relationships with reached out. One college wanted me to teach two classes. The other college wanted me to substitute for a professor on leave (5 classes for 6 weeks). Being in dire need of the money & benefits, I said hell yes.
Never mind the fact I’m Autistic & teaching in person is terrifying for me. I don’t enjoy being the center of attention, don’t do well with group settings, despise making eye contact. My voice isn’t very loud, so I have to scream for the entire class to hear me. I end up sweating at the front of the class for an hour & fall apart immediately afterwards. This isn’t a very healthy way to live, but this is how I pay my bills. What did Vonnegut say? So it goes.
I’ve always had a soft spot for caffeine, sweets, fatty foods, and nicotine. I quit smoking cigarettes a long time ago, but a hookah addiction had crept into my life in the last few years. I wasn’t proud of it, but it served a purpose. It helped me get through the long Minnesota winters. It allowed me to focus on tasks while I smoked. I did not know that these were all signs of ADHD. I just assumed that was my coping mechanism for stress. I thought it was a personal choice. A moral failing.
Years ago, I was addicted to much harder drugs than caffeine and nicotine. Think stimulants (coke & meth, mainly). During recovery, I used self-blaming as a sobriety device. I said it was due to trauma, I made my mistakes, but now I’ve moved on. I was right, but also wrong. First line treatment for ADHD is stimulant medication. Amphetamines, to be precise. The drugs I used to abuse on the street were nearly identical to what a doctor would prescribe me had I been diagnosed with ADHD at a young age.
I wasn’t born in this country, and neither were my parents. We came here from a refugee camp in Kenya. I was 7 years old when I my family landed in Atlanta, Georgia. I watched cartoons to learn English & American Culture. School was hard, but I am a quick learner. I soon was coming home with awards and being moved up in grades. My parents were proud, but they also reminded me that failure wasn’t an option. As the oldest son in an African Immigrant family, the pressure was on me to save the family. I never had a childhood in Africa (war will do that to you). I was sad to learn that I was expected to be even more mature in America.
There’s a lot about this country’s healthcare system that my parents were not equipped to understand. Because I seemed so smart and capable, no one thought to get me tested for anything. If I complained of being tired all the time, I was told that I was still young. If I wanted to feel real fatigue, try working a double shift at the Marshall’s factory like my parents did. I was always a good son, and eternally empathetic, so I told myself I needed to try harder. I don’t blame my parents for any of this. They did the best they could with what they had. They just wanted a better life for me. They couldn’t have known what they didn’t know until they knew it. I love them for all the ways they supported and encouraged me. I don’t think I would have become as skilled in so many aspects of life if they hadn’t pushed me. I wonder what life would have been like if I’d gotten an early diagnosis. I tend to think things would have been easier, but what about the downsides?
I recently watched a Good Morning America segment on the former NBA player Tony Snell. He was getting his son tested for autism after a teacher noticed classic spectrum traits. As he sat in on those sessions with his son, he found himself identifying with many of the diagnostic questions. That led him to discover, at age 31, that he was also autistic. The GMA interviewers asked him if he’d wished he got that diagnosis earlier in life. Tony said no, definitely not. Paraphrasing, he said something along the lines of: ‘People would’ve put limitations on what I could or could not do. They would’ve put me in special classes and discouraged me from pursuing my NBA dreams. They might’ve said that’s just not something someone like you can do.’
I immediately found parallels to my own life. To make it to the NBA, Tony needed endless determination and countless hours of practice. He needed grit and self-belief. He had to push himself well beyond his limitations or others’ expectations. When I got sober, I did it cold turkey. Quitting the hardest drugs known to man requires endless grit and self belief. Returning to college after 10 years away from higher Ed required grit and self-belief. Finishing an MFA degree as a recovering addict with undiagnosed disabilities required (in my mind) even more determination than it took to find my way to sobriety. I often ask myself how much easier life would’ve been had I gotten an early diagnosis, but I rarely think about how much more limited my outcomes may have been.
I worked as a medical interpreter for several years when I first moved to Minneapolis. A line I would often interpret, in the emergency room of a children’s hospital, was “you can’t bring your kids here for primary care. ER’s are designed for acute care, not long-term follow-up. You need to find a regular doctor and take them there for checkups.”
It was then that I realized how, all these years after we’ve been in this country, many of my people still struggle to navigate this country’s fraught healthcare system. This isn’t their fault. Even people who’ve been in this country for generations struggle to navigate it. I understand that is by design, that it ties into capitalism & money-hungry corporations disguised as hospitals. Having worked in hospitals, I understand how the bottom line is often more important than the patient. As Omar Little used to say: the game is the game.
The game doesn’t leave room for people like me. It forces us to go undiagnosed and struggle to make something of ourselves while carrying unseen burdens. Had I known I had ADHD, that I was Autistic, when I was a child… I probably wouldn’t have ended up nearly overdosing on the streets of Seattle for a good 5 years. I may have accomplished a lot more with my life. I may have gotten married and had a family by now. A mortgage, retirement plan, college fund. Golf slacks, nigga. Stock options and PTO.
But I’m Muslim, and though I lament the failings of this country, I understand that What-If’s are the devil’s playground. I believe in pre-destiny, which means there is nothing anyone could have done to change how my life played out. And I accept that. It’s not always easy, but I accept it.
I see how things played out in my life and how they continue to play out for younger versions of me. I feel it is my destiny to write, not for accolades, but to share my story. In doing so, I hope to help people avoid years of pain by getting the right supports. I know that’s a very cliché thing to say, in this influencer era that we live in, but it still bears worth saying.
Perhaps, if I my body & mind’s needs had been met, I would have been a more positive person who didn’t think so negatively of the world, even as a child. But there’s no way to answer those kinds of questions. What I do know, without a doubt, is that stories save lives. A friend told me recently: your survival story will someday serve as a roadmap to someone else’s liberation.
Perhaps I needed to go through what I did so that I could share my story with others. There aren’t very many of us (Somalis, or children of immigrants) who are brave (or stupid) enough to pursue writing as a life. It’s not easy to reject the trappings of this world when your people desperately need you to make it, to lift them out of poverty.
Perhaps a lot of people have gone through exactly what I went through, but how many of them are writers? Or: how many of them have been stubborn enough to continue writing, even when years of effort produced no tangible (I mean, fiscal) results? We may never know. All I know, for sure, is that I am honest to a fault, I love writing, and I’m always telling my story to strangers.
It may be shortsighted to make a direct connection between all the pain I’ve endured and the fact that I’m a writer now. Did I endure the pain just to become a writer, or am I writer because of the pain? Either way, I’m in a position to help light the path I’ve walked for those who may be at its beginning. Here, watch out for this pitfall. There, be careful of that monster’s lair. Turn left after the next curve. Be kind to yourself along the way, beloved.
Things went like this until, one day at the doctor’s office, I got a high blood pressure reading. I was 40 pounds overweight and my blood pressure was high. I had them run a blood panel to see what my cholesterol was saying. Just as I suspected: it was higher than I’d ever seen. Oh shit.
I asked the doctor what could cause all this, and how can I change it?
Smoking, eating fast food, and stress are all known contributors to these things, Said.
I looked for a camera in the room. Surely this was a prank?
My lifestyle was a direct result of this hellish job, these uncertain circumstances. Not knowing if I would have classes to teach from one semester to the next, my health insurance always in danger of being pulled, getting ready to apply for unemployment as an employed professor? It weighed heavy on my heart, on my body, and my creative practice had been thrown out the window in favor of survival. I was numbing pain & stimulating my brain just to do my job.
Hanif Abdurraqib, in his collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, titled an essay “Brief Notes On Staying // No One is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die”
I did not feel like dying, but I certainly wasn’t living. And I was so depressed that thoughts of no longer wanting to exist couldn’t have been far away. I made a decision, right then and there: YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE (shouts to Rainer Maria Rilke).
I had been diagnosed with ADHD for almost 2 years at this point, but I was scared to give medication a try for several reasons.
One, my addiction history – what if it was a slippery slope and I ended up right back in The Darkness? Two, and perhaps just as important: the cultural stigma in my community of taking medication for anything mental health related.
These things had held me back, but I figured, look: I’m self-medicating in extremely unhealthy ways. So, what the hell did I have to lose? Why not give medication a try? Why not reach out to an ADHD specialist who will monitor my medication side effects and give me guidance until we figure out something that works? And so, I took the leap…
I met a Nigerian brother who had a small clinic which did ADHD medication management. I looked him square in the face and said I need help, but I am scared. I laid out my past experiences with drug abuse in painful detail. I shared all my fears and asked for his advice.
He put it to me like this:
Brother, I commend you for your honesty and self-awareness. Your concerns are valid, but let me play devil’s advocate. You were at a different place in your life during the addiction years. You were young and had no idea of your disabilities. You assumed that your dropping out of college and turning towards drugs was due to personal failing. You didn’t make the connection between school struggles and undiagnosed ADHD. You were forcing your body to do things it wasn’t capable of. I’m sure you see the COLLEGE DROPOUT section of your life as the fall, but what were your high school years like? You said you started struggling in middle school and your grades never matched your intellect. You told me you were depressed in high school and barely made it to college. We have to look at the bigger picture here.
Now, let’s look at where you are in your life. You’re in your 30s, have been sober for over a decade. You went back to school, got your BA, got your MFA, published A BOOK which was a major award finalist while you were still in grad school. You did all of this with no medication. You told me yourself that you’re still healing from the pain of those experiences. You asked your body for everything it had, and then you took some more. You have accomplished incredible things, by the grace of God, and you are at a different place in your life. You have too much to lose – you’ve worked entirely too hard to just throw it all away now.
Here’s my suggestion: let’s get you started on a stimulant medication. The non-stimulant class is too similar to antidepressants, and you’ve told me how many terrifying experiences you’ve had with those. As long as you can be honest with yourself and with me, and you take the medication as prescribed, and you watch your diet/exercise/sleep, I don’t think anything will go wrong. Worst case scenario, it won’t work and we’ll get you off the meds. We’ll try something else. But look at the alternative. As you said yourself, you are self-medicating in unhealthy ways. If these meds work, and I am confident you will be responsible in how you take them, they could change your life in ways you can’t even imagine. How does that sound?
I listened carefully and let it all soak in. I agreed with him. I was scared, but I was more desperate for solutions. I agreed to give it a try. I prayed to God for assistance. I asked Him to keep my steadfast and to protect me from relapse. I had tried everything else. Now it was time to give meds a chance. Internalized stigma about meds be damned. I was drowning, and this sounded like a life raft….
/// …. …. ///
and this is how the world ends
Ramadan, 2023
2 weeks of fasting. 2 weeks w/o adhd meds.
I’ve completely regressed into my worst self.
Sugar cravings every night. Random mood swings. Inability to start or finish tasks. Distracted constantly. Sabotaging relationships I’ve worked hard to build. Overthinking EVERY THING. Poor impulse control. Lethargy. Hard crash after socializing.
Poor organization. Opening a new browser tab & forgetting what I wanted to search. Snapping on people when they ask too many questions or try to socialize with me when my social battery is drained. Negative self-view. Less optimistic. More worried & scared (especially about money). Going on spending sprees (even if I can’t afford it). Falling apart. Falling so far. Fell.
A few weeks back, I started this article and called it HOW ADHD MEDS CHANGED MY LIFE. I stopped writing because something felt missing. Now that I’m back to The Old Said, Unmedicated & Ornery, I see the perspective I was lacking.
I forgot how hard my life was before I found these meds. How impossible it was to sustain momentum, or relationships. How I constantly dumped my weird feelings onto anyone who would hear me. Most of the time, it pushed people away. Maybe that’s what I wanted, or maybe The Fear made me do it. Thing is, you can’t constantly leak your worries to everyone in your life. Even if they love you, humans only have so much capacity. They will tire, and that’s understandable.
I’ve had poor self-esteem & negative self-worth for most of my life. I assumed I was born to live that way. Getting on ADHD meds, finding the right medication & dose (which is a journey and a half of itself), has changed my life. I cannot stress this enough.
My life changed so drastically, so quickly, that I forgot what it was like without them. I realize that sounds rather like addiction, or dependence, but you have to remember: the ADHD brain is not like other brains. We deal with chronic under-stimulation. A lack of dopamine or some shit. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. I hear words and wrangle them.
What ADHD meds did for me was balance out the lack of dopamine. Make more of it available to my brain so that it could function how a brain is “supposed” to function. I put my body through hell just to get through the day without my falling apart. Even the best of medicines comes with side effects. It hasn’t been easy, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
It was not an overnight fix & I had to make MAJOR life changes for the meds to work. Strict wake-up & bed times; clean, healthy diet; regular exercise; GALLONS of water per day; rest days scheduled into my med routine. I worked with an ADHD specialist to help me troubleshoot side effects & move up to the right dose when I was ready.
Living with untreated ADHD is like playing life on European Extreme Mode. Except no one tells you that your brain is working overtime just to fail twice as hard as people who seem to be exerting only half the effort you are.
Now that I’ve been off meds for a few weeks, my body is returning to The Old Way — self medicating with stimulus seeking (anything to get a quick boost of dopamine). Food, caffeine, sugar, endorphins.
I’ve been sober since 2012. All I have left for stimulation is food & caffeine & exercise. I really can’t do any of that during Ramadan. My body has been pushed to its limits by the combination of fasting, dehydration & sleep deprivation. All I can do wait for month’s end.
I’ve noticed myself seeking more sugar at fast break time. Keeping sweet snacks nearby. Hanging out at my coffee shop more, even though I can’t drink any of it. Wanting to commit sins, but not following through, for fear of God in this Holy Month.
I am at an impasse. My life has quickly fallen apart and all it took was 2 weeks of not taking my meds + my body being stressed by the rigors of this month. I feel like a Bad Muslim when I think to myself “I can’t wait for Ramadan to be over.”
It’s not Ramadan I want to end. I love this month & am grateful for its transformative nature. It’s just that my body *quite literally* needs that medication to function as an adult.
When non-ADHD people take ADHD stimulants, they get high. They feel euphoric & do wild stuff. When we take ADHD stimulants, we feel like (what I imagine) the rest of you feel like. The first time I took meds, I looked up and immediately knew this is how the rest of you feel.
I was mad as hell. You Niggas just WAKE UP like this? Overnight I found I could have full, productive days without crashing at noon. I made small talk with strangers while standing in line. I built a social life where I met with friends in person. Hit up the gym at 6pm. In bed by 9. Asleep by 10 or 11. Up by 8am, fully rested. Rinse and repeat, even on weekends.
I had never thought that kind of life was possible for me. When friends told me about their typical day, I’d get sad and think “must be nice.”
Nigga. All I needed was the right medicine.
I had an uncle who told me once, right before I snapped on him, that I was fine but probably needed some type of medication. He wasn’t sure what, but something needed addressing. I’m sure he meant well, but I don’t do well with unsolicited advice.
I took it in the worst way possible: Are you saying I’m broken? Do you want to put me in your group home with the other broken, medicated people?
There was a lot of context for my outsized reaction. At the time, he owned a series of group homes that specialized in Somali clients. They provide a culturally relevant approach for people who need to be under long-term care, with medications. This all sounds great in theory, but in practice… it’s a lot. I had tried to work for him at one of those group homes and I fell apart. I couldn’t handle the overstimulation, but I was also bothered by the whole setup.
The fact that my uncle made obscene amounts of money from this endeavor, and that people who had similar life experiences as me were effectively trapped there… stuck on medication for years, eating the same old food, having every aspect of their life micromanaged… it really bothered me.
I remembered a time, back in Seattle, when this same uncle came to scout a location for a new group home. I was extremely depressed at the time, laying on a mattress on the floor. He came in and casually appraised me. His voice always had a robotic quality to it. I was in so much pain, and all he could see was a new business opportunity. Something about that bothered me, and I guess I always looked at him through that lens. Exploiting sick people for personal gain, ain’t that the American dream?
The other side of the argument is that if he hadn’t created culturally specific group homes, those same clients would end up in white institutions that didn’t understand their needs with nuance. A lot of the clients had complex diagnoses that needed a lot of support. I now work in the disability sector, so I see how hard it is to help people within the narrow scope of State regulations. There are so many agencies and rules and systems and so much and. It is less than ideal even in a best-case scenario.
I also realize that I’m too close to this issue to have objective thoughts on it. Being autistic makes it hard for me to hold opposing/conflicting views at the same time. I tend to see things in black and white, as all or nothing. It’s hard to see shades of grey. Every autistic person is not like this, because there’s no such thing as an autistic archetype, but I know it’s true for me. I have more compassion for my uncle these days, but back then I only felt attacked. Like someone wanted to fix me. I once heard Ross Gay say: “to fix means to mend, but it also means to kill [as in euthanize an animal]…” I wonder why this world wants to fix us so badly?
3 of the biggest blessings of my life: coming back to Islam (thank you, Allah); getting sober (drugs are hell); getting my right diagnoses (Autism + ADHD).
Being Autistic with ADHD is a unique experience. I have friends who are just Autistic and friends who are just ADHD and friends who are both. The combined experience is something I’ll struggle to make sense of for years, but I am not ungrateful.
In many ways, I relate more to ADHDers than to other Autists. The ADHD has a propensity to take over my life, while being Autistic is more of a background feature. Don’t get me wrong – I still struggle with sensory sensitivity (eating in a busy restaurant is one of my worst fears). Social situations are still challenging, but that may have more to do with an under-stimulated brain than it does with Autistic vs Allistic communication patterns. Could be a little of both, but I’m no scientist; just a dude trying to write his way to a place of understanding.
Prior to ADHD meds, I had chalked up most of my issues to being Autistic in an Allistic world. And I was not wrong! However, I completely disregarded how many parts of functioning in modern society are hampered by ADHD.
What the hell am I trying to say? I’m running out of energy.
My nigga, long story short, ADHD isn’t what pop culture has led us to believe. It is complex & subtle & overwhelming. It looks like personality traits. It looks like a Broken Brain. It is simply a shortage of dopamine in the brain. Therapy helps, but all the therapy in the world won’t change the fundamental issue.
I was against meds for a long time because of my bad experiences + cultural stigma. Now I can’t picture my life without them. I was NOT living life before this. I was riding the waves from one crash to the next. I was falling apart smiling & accepted it as my life.
I know how all this may make me sound — perhaps like an addict. Brother let me tell you: I’ve been to the deepest depths of addiction. It nearly destroyed me. I clawed my way to sobriety & learned to live a sober life. I rekindled my faith in God (by His Mercy) & put my trust in Him. I went from college dropout & hopeless addict to Published Author with a Master’s degree. A Keynote Speaker & College Professor. Always giving back to my various communities in any way that I can. I am grateful.
I know what it means to have nothing — I lost my country at the age of 3 and watched my younger brothers’ births inside a refugee camp. I learned to be an adult before I ever knew childhood. I have lived no less than 17 lives in my 35 years on this earth. I know what I am, what I am not. Perhaps I’m still an addict and perhaps I don’t care.
Medication isn’t for everyone, but I know they help me live a life worth living.
Alhamdulillah for everything, even this.
I’ve done too much explaining. Here’s a poem:
I can hear the sound of papers rustling
On the other side of the room
In this busy café, filled with noise
I can’t process which part of the noisescape
Is most overwhelming to me right now
All I know is the barista in front of me
Wonders why I’m looking out the window
Instead of sustaining eye to eye contact
All I know is these big bay windows
Let in too much light, even on cloudy
Days I wish life was easier, or made sense
Days I wish I didn’t exist, forgive me Lord
Nights I awake in a cold sweat, bad dreams
Seen people burning, hope it’s not me, I pray
I see heaven one day, screaming for forgiveness
On Judgement Day, pleading with my Lord like
Dear God, did you not see the ways I suffered
On your earth, at the hands of Your creation?
I beg thee, beloved Lord, forgive all my sins on this
Most hallowed of days, when the sun is just inches
Away from our sweating bodies, and the earth has been
Flattened like a scroll, and the humans rush from left
To right and plead forgiveness for the sins committed
Against one another, for they know that this day is unlike
Any other day which came before it, and now, just now
All they can hope is that they lived just right enough
to walk into Heaven, even if it’s a hard walk
All I can hope is that my few good deeds and my
Endless inner breakage, the tears shed, deep grief
I hope it’s enough to lift me from that eternal fire
I pray for this, and dream it, and write it, every day
This was meant to be a treatise on being Autistic + ADHD
It turned out to be a prayer and a wish, a hope everlasting
/////
Said Shaiye is an Autistic + ADHD Somali Author, Photographer, Professor & Disability Advocate in Minneapolis. He is represented by Mariah Stovall at Trellis Literary Management. His debut book, Are You Borg Now?, was a 2022 Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir. He has contributed essays to the anthologies Muslim American Writers at Home and We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. He has published poetry & prose in Indiana Review, Texas Review, Obsidian, Brittle Paper, Pithead Chapel, 580 Split, Diagram, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where he was a Graduate Instructor of Creative Writing, as well as a Judd International Research Fellow. He was a 2023 Loft Windows & Mirrors Fellow. He can be reached at www.saidshaiye.com.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOOnce upon a time, in a Brooklyn branch of Duane Reade down Borough Hall, I called upon an obeah man. Summoned from the search engines of Google, Eric Miah appeared before me as a link to Ifalasa Enterprises. Intoning himself a Yoruba priest, his brown face was lit by LED cowrie shells dancing along the perimeter of his homepage. Chipmunk cheeks announced an appetite for offerings. Smizing eyes were crowned by stringy, grey-streaked, fuckboi hair. He advertised his services as an acolyte of Ifa, plus a psychic on the side. Prices listed as fair.
And though he seemed to me oily and sly, in that moment I prioritised the community college teaching job that wouldn’t let me quit it, the noisy city tying my ankle in a bungee rope trap making every escape attempt a mere visit, the nonreciprocal friendships with people by whom my authentic self was discomfited, the men next to whom I’d lain and still felt lonely, the lack of love in my world, and that family and their lies from which I’d freed myself taking a no-contact knife to each and every tie. Why did I have to be alone?
I needed to know.
And so, once upon a time, before I learnt to cope, before l knew how to accept my singularity with equanimity, on a white winter’s day, I donned over-the-knee, camel Uggs, a camel, shearling coat, and boarded the express, green-line train up to El Barrio in Spanish Harlem to learn my fate. I was off to see el brujo, who in his East 116th apartment, sat in wait of me. And there occurred the inception of a violation from which it would take three years to become free.
‘This is some good odu’. Said to me with a let-me-convince-her smile and affirming nod. The horse-shoe-shaped opele chain had again and again been flung down. Some kola nuts facing the ceiling. Some with eyes on the ground.
This pronouncement declared, Eric’s fat Puerto Rican friend nodded. His jowls shaking. His light skin turning red. Sweat dripped into the cotton neckline of his green jersey. He bounced like a puppy. Eager to please. Quick to agree with whatever this priest man said.
It was then, again, something chook me in my belly and say leave. Me alone, this woman in a basement with two men I don’t know. One of whom I hadn’t even been told would be there. The fat one who just appear in the apartment when I was in Eric’s bathroom changing my clothes. Stripping offensive brown leggings before making my approach to his so-called temple’s door. Now I sat on the hard, concrete floor hosting open flames around the enclosed room. And still I say lemme stay and hear this, what he call it, odu.
Why?
Because my life wasn’t working.
I placed above my disquiet the restlessness inside questing for more. To fix every avenue falling apart, I’d repaired to the religiousness I abhorred. To the very Awos my sister, Sherrie, and I used to make fun of, wining down to the floor, imitating all the sexiness these robed priests had to put on just to pour some libations before they gods and mostly-female congregation, opening the way they say for them to be told life-altering information.
Peddlers, oh sorry, they prefer to be called priests of Ifa are initiates to the orisha Orunmila, deity of destiny, and practitioners of his system of divination that uses a chain with nuts, coins, or shells to read what’s needed to restore mystical harmony. And apparently, for me, that somehow required Eric to say, ‘You’re going to have to be the one to take care of your mother’.
Steups.
I wasn’t paying $75 to hear about that woman. ‘Me?’ I obliged with a humour-him question. ‘Yes, you’. Eric observed me closely. ‘She’s going to have a long life’. Fuck. The woman was only in her fifties. Arite, doh roll yuh eyes. Look down. My jaw was tight. Wah de ass dis have to do with me and about what I come to inquire? I buy some time.
In the waiting silence, I fiddled with the sleeve of my red, gold, and cream cardigan. Rearranged my side-swept legs. Pulled the fishtail of the white skirt I was told to wear over my slippers. Rolled my hip to let another portion of my soft thigh cushion the impact of the unpaved floor. Tried to look demure.
Eric didn’t defer. ‘The people you think will be there for her in the end won’t be there. Your mother will need you. She won’t have anyone’. I failed to see how that was my problem. She have four daughters and two uh them does still talk to her. Cyah see Ericka, her current favourite, the one with the make-amends therapist, ditching the bitch. Neither Sherrie, her finally-see-me, co-dependent, last child baby leaving Smiley in an old folks’ home. But since he not going and done, ‘what about my sisters?’ Lewwe move this along.
Right into a prolonged speech like he at the podium and trying to breach the stubborn minds of his congregation instead of one paying client who could very well see that Eric’s NYU Bachelors of Psychology degree, displayed prominently on the wall just before the glass-paned doors leading out into the square-walled yard, did not qualify this man to justify the shards of ice my egg-donor’s abandonment, verbal disparagement, emotional instability and manipulation had driven into the bronchia of this daughter who had once felt like she couldn’t breathe without her as just being a generational divide. I would not agree it was up to me to see her side. Except he wouldn’t done talk. So, I cried.
I figured that’s what someone who cared would do when confronted with the image of their wizened mother deserted and dying. Not enough to make my eyeliner run eh or even smudge, naturally. Just a delicate sniff, rapid blinking back the tears gathering and threatening to overflow. I still had to take the train back to East Flatbush after this. But having given these expectant men an appropriate show, maybe we could finally get to what I wanted to know.
Why didn’t I just go?
What is it that taught me my final stand against a life out of my control should be appeal to some spiritual force? How many of my actions were being conducted through grandfathering genes until compelled to intervene, I’d manually lift the tracks and re-chart my own course?
That day, I sat on that floor fiddling with my gold necklaces through Eric’s didactic talk of my ancestors being over-protective; and newly remembered harms wrought by my male cousin; and the benefits of being sexually uninhibited cause who doesn’t look back and wish they’d screwed around more; and, though they want me to go and I desperately want to leave, they can’t move me and I won’t be exiting that job for a minute, not until something’s fulfilled and the time is appropriate; and ways to start my own business; and me being married in the spirit to Orunmila and needing to receive icofa or his hand, and and and
Till I felt reduced. Talked down to. While he made me feel small. Till my head swirled, tangled. I hadn’t wanted to come at all. Any time I ventured into the world of candles, prayers, or coins, cards, runes, offerings of sweet bread or goat loins my life derailed. But then, at the advice of Michelle, a Columbia counsellor being trained, I tried once more to embrace this proclivity.
Downstairs in Duane Reade on the corner of Court Street searching the make-up aisles for the perfect shade of gold eye shadow and red lip-gloss, I could have conceded that my other search on my iPhone was yielding no hope. Every other return on varied orisha keyword entries hurtled me to the steps of Spiritual Baptist churches that still imposed Christian saints over African deities. I had already been baptised in those intermediaries. My whole Trinidadian father-side family was steeped in syncretised sanctity. That never had and was not working for me. Nothing was. In the last few years, my life had become a reverse-Midas touch where every aspect turned to shit. I needed the real gods to put a stop to it. But Yoruban practitioners operated in secret. They did not flash their wares on the internet. There were no sightings until Google conjured Eric.
Reaching out, the network dropped, and Eric was rude the first two times. I should have taken that as a sign. Likewise, all the damn simmi dimmi at the front door emblazoned with a setta emblematic symbols, and the pompous, officious way he incline his head when letting me in like he forget I coming and wish instead he was left alone on his Saturday morning. And the no wife home and busy, stuffy apartment with big, clunky furniture and too much shells and colourful insignia hanging from the walls, and too many products pack up in the bathroom clawing they way out every cupboard and shelf. And the show-offy way he make a big to do before he knelt down to light the cigar and the smoky bush fire and the red candle asking The Gatekeeper if I good enough to enter before he grab the handle on the iron door at the bottom of rough-hewn concrete steps, telling me to duck my head before treading into his sacred temple basement.
Lawd, do I have no self-preservation whatsoever? A strange man from the internet in another borough taking me down underground a first-floor compound with high concrete walls and burglar-proof wire on top all around and I follow?
Stayed below? For over an hour, for a final rattle of bones thrown like pitching dice. A new, burgeoning smile. A glance up to catch fat friend’s eyes and instruct and share whatever it was he was reading there. Dark, caterpillar eyebrows raising to mimic Eric’s. Both men impressed. And excited. Like a doctor and his apprentice about to hack into a pig. Exhilarated at the prospect of a good-character life they got to further man-splain and authoritatively dissect. I saw the glee. I knew whatever added deliverance was coming did not bode well for me.
And yet I stayed.
‘Your daughter has something others will need. Some important work to do. She’s going to help a lot of people’. Eric’s side profile smiled. He traced his square fingers along the short chalk lines he’d drawn while delivering this edict. Now his mesmerised eyes did not leave the bare concrete floor bearing his markings. Reading. To me, though, these strokes were just etchings, resembling those from The Count of Monte Cristo, Ericka’s favourite movie, carved into the walls of his cell numbering all his trapped years.
‘I don’t have children’.
Was that fear on his face? Definitely doubt. Reassessment. Backtracking and confusion. Questions and refusal. ‘You don’t have children? A little girl? Your daughter?’ Both men’s eyes lasered into mine. The weight of their stares pressed me down, searching for the lie. Buh whey yuh go hide a chile? And why?
‘Nope, Ah’en ha no chirren’. This man qualify? He know how to read them bones he throwing? This man I’d interviewed on the phone. Half Puerto Rican, half Pakistani or Palestinian, or one uh them P’s practicing a distinctly Yoruban religion. Eric looked down at his book. Wait. Was that a glossary? The man need to consult an encyclopaedia to interpret the chalk drawn lines he self inscribe? Questions kept pushing the curtain of belief aside. I paid close attention to the man behind the title on which I was being asked to rely.
I paid attention, thus this memoiristic recollection, while Eric’s brow knitted and fat friend’s head swivelled like this was a tennis match. The dogged tugging inside me to make sure and peer closely kept at it as I turned to glance into the shadowed corner behind me. A dried calabash bowl holding water proffered before the candlewax-encrusted, blue and white clad, 2-foot figurine of a Black mermaid standing there. Yemoja, their divine sea mother. Eric had lit a tealight candle on top her head and talked to her when we three had entered before he led us to the altar of sorts in the fireplace mantle. I turned to watch the other lit candles and little bush fires blazing, left to flourish and flare. Observed the dancing smoke. Inhaled the nag champa scenting the air. Played with my gold bracelets stacked up my right forearm. Shook the gold bangles on my other wrist, enjoying the lilting chime as I discreetly checked the face of my gold watch wondering how much time before…
‘And I don’t want none. Ah doh ha no chirren cuz I don’t want any’. Jeez, what about my job? You know, what I came here to find out about. Again, having to push these arbitrary subjects along. At my resolute assertion, Eric’s salt-and-pepper head lifted, and the Cheshire cat smile came into view. Yuh know these god-like types like nothing more than a declaration of independence to try to lord their chauvinism all over you. So right on cue, ‘Oh, I know you don’t want any. I could see it on you. But Oshun wants a daughter. You were supposed to have her already. A child to pass on your gifts to. To teach. She’s anxiously waiting to be born. You can’t have her with just any man, though. It has to be a man of your same stature spiritually’.
What the fuck? My head jolted and three pairs of gold earrings struck my cheek, enacting consternation. My eyes speared his questioningly. Was he…? ‘No, no, not me’. His cheeks tightened with the denial. ‘The man, the child’s father, won’t stay, though. But you must not grieve when he does go because then the placenta won’t attach properly’. This man was again lecturing me on female biology. ‘And then that’ll form a rift that will take years of work, and bindings, and forgiveness to bridge, if ever. So, you have to love her and want your daughter because she chose to come. Read to her and make her know she’s welcome. Because this is what Oshun wants of you. It’s her will being done.’
This Oshun, another Black mermaid who swam across the Atlantic alongside ships transporting the ancestors like cargo in what racist academic texts still refer to as “trade”. Another of the orishas uprooted from West Africa, and now worshipped across the diaspora. This deity of the river. Coquette, seductress. Mother and inspirer of artists. Bestower of riches. Adorned in all gold. Her colours – yellow, gold, coral, amber. Dancer, warrior, wife, and mistress. Sweet honey her food, kept in a pot about and under her waist. Birther of twins. Goddess of love, lust, and all beautiful things. With a veil drawn over her face. Flipping through my mental wikipedia, drawing forth knowledge of all I’d ever read of her, I pondered what this unknown spirit had to do with me. Time to wrap this up. ‘I don’t have cash. You take debit?’
And then that Saturday, I did leave.
Still, I returned to Eric’s just once more. After about a week. To wash my head because, apparently, I had enemies, nuh. Or maybe he liked the ease with which my PayPal payment for the previous reading cleared immediately. Either way, threat of badmind people and predatory men on my street or not, invoking maljeux guaranteed he got another $160 out of me. Trinidadians don’t take too kindly to evil eye and we grow up using bush baths to cast it aside. Eric read the ingrained culture in me right.
So, I showed up again to his place, but this time on a weekday, using one of those many, lovely holidays CUNY’s calendar allots in the Fall. I stepped out of his bathroom this time dressed all in white. White spaghetti strap tank above a yellow bra; tight, white long-sleeved, v-neck top; a different, long, flared, white skirt; and different gold at my head, ears, neck, wrists, waist, ankles, and toes. His eyes formed o’s. His daughter’s did, too. ‘ooOOOOH, I love all your pretty jewellery,’ the cute six year old said to me before she half perched in my lap with her half-naked doll and regaled me with all her school tales including that of the little boy who sat next to her in class.
Eric kept going downstairs to his basement and coming back up to tilt his head to the side as he stood in the frame of the sliding glass doors, studying me. I felt like I might get the hose ’fuss it take him and his quiet, aiding wife so long to compose whatever ceremony he had downstairs cooking while I played semi-patiently. Iz a simple wash. Me’en understan all de hassle and de back and forth. He done make me hadda go all over Spanish Harlem from one botanica to another, pulling out the little espanol que recuerdo to buy the herbs and flowers and oils and butters fuh de maljeaux, which any charlatan priest worth his salt supposed to do his damn self. And now I still had to spend an hour combing a dolly hair and wondering what this Ifa-derivative, Santeria man hadda prepare so much, and what next.
Huh, what next indeed. I didn’t realise Eric was giving such credence to my dress. And that the next Nigerian obeah man I visited seeking authenticity would, too. My appearance was my own expression of self, not some premeditated homage being paid to spirits I’d only read about and not served given my extended paternal and maternal family’s devout half-Ifa-half-Christianity that feared “dem devil ting” that inherently intrigued me even as a child. Their own genes that would not subside in spite of their hiding, their chiding, their deriding. The work of what they self planted inside and all it bring.
Not uprooted that day. Their religiousity passed through the blood — the work of generations to take shape. The work of conscientious years of my life to break.
And not pass on.
Camille U. Adams is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Camille’s debut memoir has been selected as a finalist in the Restless Books Prize for Immigrant Writing 2023 and her essays have received multiple Best of the Net nominations. Camille earned her MFA in Poetry from CUNY and is a current Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Nonfiction. She is a 2022 Tin House alum and an inaugural 2023-24 Tin House Reading Fellow. Camille was also awarded an inaugural fellowship from Granta Magazine’s 2023 Nature Workshop and a memoir fellowship from Roots Wounds Words. She teaches English and is a CNF Editor.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOContent warning: This contains discourse about trauma, childhood abuse, dissociation, and suicidal ideation.
This essay is a treatment.
It tracks the predominant physiological responses of your traumatized past, the way your body remembers, the way your therapist guides you to presence, and the way presence unlocks a treasure house of language. Poetry, which has been your stillborn child as long as you’ve written, dead in its formaldehyde waters, has cracked the glass open, and you gaze at its enlivened hands with wonder.
What marvel, given you experienced childhood as though you were sleepwalking.
Deep-Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a trauma psychotherapy that processes attachment disorder through the analysis of physiological responses associated with threatening events—events like, say, a mother, your mother, threatening you with a syringe if you do not eat as you are told. Your relatives say this occurred at some comida de domingo. Which melcocha of your mother’s cooking did you refuse to eat? In your mind’s eye, a litany parades. Boiled beets? Beef liver? You have no memory of the instance, but you remember the sting of her belt buckle, the pitch of her voice, her disfiguring rage.
The developer Frank Corrigan MD, FRC Psych explains those suffering from attachment shock have a “protective tendency to turn attention away from the memory as soon as possible1.” That they experience dissociation, depersonalization, numbing, blanking out, and that the original memories are often so layered in further similar experiences that traditional talk therapy methodologies fail in accessing them.
When your therapist, M—, approaches you with this new treatment, tells you she’d like to try it with you, she explains your wounding predates language. Language lives in the cerebrum, the top brain, while your lower brain, responsible for fight, flight, freeze, the stress control of your body—it developed first, and it remembers.
Which is to say, escape from your body is more natural to you than language.
Before cutting off contact, before moving away, before even the forming of the word mamá on your mouth, you knew how to leave your mother.
“Embodiment begins with… getting comfortable with the discomfort felt in the body2,” the trauma scholar Deb Courtney says.
You spend the next three seasons of therapy with the discomfort in your body, trying to reel in your escape-artist brain, which slips with an ease like a silvered dolphin, so as to stay in your body, so as to feel the totality of your despair, taking breaks in between this violent undertaking. In each session, M— asks, “Where do you feel tension now?” and you listen, or try to listen, to the murmurs your body has long lidded and trapped.
Shoulders
The layers of memory accordioned over one another.
You’re thirteen and practice learning how to fall onto your couch because you read in some YA fantasy that the faerie princess could walk soundlessly, that she practiced falling down a well, and you need to know, your survival depends on it, to avoid the squeak of the third, fourth, and eighth stairs that will wake him, your mother’s love interest, and bring his searching hands.
You’re twenty-four and depart your first massage weeping and petrified, careening towards the Loop rush-hour train, because for a quarter hour your body felt weightless, and you are not ready for such goodness and your body rejects it like poison.
This essay is a temperament.
You embarked on a prose poetry class this spring with Ruben Quesada, who you’ve had the humbling fortune to interview, and now you are his student. You learn terms such as anadiplosis, anaphora, epizeuxis. You drop into prompt replies during class. You write an alexandrine. You count your syllables on your fingers and recall the Tuesdays you sat with Dr. Kaizer tapping metronome beats to synchronize your study of the Moonlight Sonata.
Ruben introduces you to Gregory Orr and his concept of the four temperaments of poetry: story, structure, music, and imagination, and how the most scintillating poems are ones which achieve the greatest symmetry of balance amongst the four. It isn’t lost on you, in subsequent lessons, how this is a kind of embodiment, a gathering of the parts.
During class introductions, Ruben asks your small group to share why you’ve come, and when it’s your turn, you say the truest, most concrete thing you know, which is that language is opening itself up in new illiquid ways. You don’t go into details about what this means or why, don’t delay the others or the class. But the missing context is this:
You have been the shell that holds the pearl. You have been the current of the sea tossing. You have even been the pearl. But you have never been the ecosystem, never been the three things all at once, equally singular and at home within. But something inside of you has shifted. You are the multitudes now, gathering. You are the infinite depths.
Face
In your twenties, you reunite with your cousin in California. You had been binaries of the other growing up, youths sunk into the orchestra pit with stars in their eyes, until your emigration. He criticizes you at Kroger for purchasing foundation when you are unemployed, says he didn’t take you for being vain, and you argue about splitting room and dinner prices and leave the following day on the six o’clock Amtrak without saying goodbye. You do not have the Spanish proficiency to explain the acne scarring on your face, the protective layers needed against your mother, your classmates, gender-conformity, the patriarchy. You do know you need the mask more than another night at the Motel 6.
This essay is a rhetorical device.
It loops and repeats and folds itself ostinato, non-linear, like the actual experience of living.
A week after your first DBR session, your friend U— takes you canoeing to the Skokie Lagoons. She has a German collapsible canoe, made from cardboard laminate, that when you unfold together on the grassy slope, appears like a giant’s paper origami project, and you’re delighted by the childlike glee it reproduces in you, who used to fold paper cranes. On the water, every other canoeist or kayaker pulls alongside you and asks excitedly against the sun, “Is that a foldable canoe?” and your friend laughs in the affirmative.
Suspended in timelessness, watching how algae clings to the oars, you catch up on each other’s lives, talk about your shared fascination with danmei and dangai. She asks if you’ve been writing and you admit you have not, you cannot. You have spent the past week in a dissociated state triggered by your DBR session, wherein embodiment was too much and your brain, agile and hypervigilant, simply checked out.
For you, dissociation is absence. This does not mean you do not feel or experience emotions, but rather that everything is coated with a dampening flannel, like a piano pedal or a sound recording room, which softens and deadens the ache. It sounds soothing on the whole, has saved you since the start, but it disconnects you from yourself so entirely that you cannot manage day-to-day. Your dishes go unwashed, your meals unmade; you eat takeout or from out of the refrigerator, or, more commonly, skip meals altogether. Creativity holds no meaning for you. You waste hours on television, some of it good, some of it questionable in taste.
On the lakeside drive back to the city, U— is concerned, but you reassure her that your therapist specializes in dissociative traumas, though you hadn’t known that at the time you sought her. At home, your out-of-state friends text you, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT??? and you wonder if the cosmos is gossiping. Yeah??? you text back. The news alerts reveal the impetus of their worry—five miles from where you were, along the picturesque road you traveled, a gunman opened fire at the Highland Park Independence Day parade and slaughtered seven, wounded forty-eight. There, at the intersection where you once carved jack-o’-lanterns at the pumpkin festival years earlier.
Time collapses in a black hole. At least in your dissociation, you don’t hurt other people.
Neck
You are thirty and solitary at your Roger’s Park apartment, dressed in your satin Ren Faire dress from high school, a decision you don’t recall making. Your spouse is with her lover and you are despondent at what will bring her back (nothing), so you try to choke yourself with the exercise band draped on her closet doorknob, except you remember Chris Cornell hung himself this way and she had been upset at the news of his death, so you stop. You curl on the ottoman she restored pressing your hands against your trachea, your wails ululating like monsoon gales until your dissociation sets you free and you are blank as an 8 x 11 page. Hello, dear friend.
This essay is an opportunity.
Dream life, lucidity, and creativity go together3. There is research that describes it as a continuum with waking life on one end of the axis and sleep on the other, daydreams, lucid sleep, and dreams in the middle. Correlations exist between REM sleep disturbances, the dream state, and creative associations, and when you dream, your dreams are so vivid, it’s as if they’re made from saturated celluloid. You record them in a document and you will never run out of ideas, only time.
However, the detachment of dissociation disrupts the occipitotemporal cortex, impairs your language and judgment and motor skills4. In a state like this, how do you write from a place that requires you to feel? Poetry, of all the linguistic arts, is the one that most closely mirrors the subconscious of the brain. It can linger on a moment with such vibrancy your senses sing with it; the crush of a broken rib, the iciness of snow in your mouth, the whisper of a lover’s breath upon your skin. Poetry cauters associations, it condenses narrative and time so that events from your past life, isolated from one another, occur in a single instant instead—you are there as if you never left, only, and this is where embodiment hinges, you are there not only with your past self, but your future self, with every self you have ever been.
If your poetry felt narrow before, it was because it came from a singular direction. But you are moving from a bidirectional plane into a quantum realm, and you can begin writing from it now like a prism.
Breath
You lose it, somehow, at a picture of a person you cannot have. You’ve known this, but this gray November eve, silted like pond scum, you flail uncontrollably about it like a drowning rat. You cannot get air in your thirty-four-year-old body—on your bed, you choke, rasp. Overnight, the nightmares flash and you wake with cheeks like corrugated plastic. All day, you run through your list of grounding aids: yoga, piano, breathwork. You take long exhales through pursed lips like your therapist taught you. If these work at all, they’re fragmentary, and in ten minutes’ time you’re back to the crawling panic under your skin.
In the depth of your mania, something else pulses. You sit in your armchair with the journal you took to Iceland and a poem bleeds itself in your Lamy pen’s scarlet ink. Somewhere, a part of you marvels. You, who’ve convinced yourself you aren’t a poet, whose attempts are formless tides signifying nothing, wrote something, at last, that glimmers with musicality.
Your therapy session occurs in the same armchair via FaceTime. “M—, I tried everything,” you plead. “I walked the dog, I played piano, I even wrote a poem! Nothing helped—I just kept on feeling—”
It dawns the moment the words slip from your mouth. “Oh. That’s it, isn’t it?” you say. “I’m supposed to feel it.”
Through your screen, she nods. She looks at you with a mixture of softness and pride. “You are. But we can mourn the loss of your dissociation. You needed it for a very long time.”
This essay is an embodiment.
When you remain at long last in your body through the duration of the DBR session, when you’ve leaned into your responses for the better part of an hour, and your eyes cease their nervous wandering, your brows relax, your breathing regulates, and you slacken, even, against your Vanitas-Still-Life–with-Flowers-and-Skull pillow, something remarkable, miraculous, occurs—you begin to laugh mirthfully, hellaciously.
“Sorry,” you tell M—. “I don’t know why I’m laughing.”
“You don’t have to judge it,” she says.
It’s as if you were made of helium, as though if the ceiling were pulled from your apartment like a doll’s house, you would float up and join the clouds and dance shapelessly. It’s midwinter, and the clouds are tinted periwinkle.
You name this sensation joy but it can also go by other names: contentment, wholeness, embodiment. It is a state of presence, of undeniable fullness. You have found this on occasion at other moments of your life, in travel, in love, but it was dependent then on an external force to summon it, only for you to have it scatter between your fingers the moment your flight home landed or your dear one departed. Now you find it within and know, whatever murks you dive into, you will not dust yourself to oblivion.
You are grinning like a pearl, like a sea, like an ecosystem.
¹ “DBR History – Deep Brain Reorienting.” Deep Brain Reorienting,
https://staging3.deepbrainreorienting.com/history-of-dbr/. Accessed 12 May 2023.
² Heim, Benjamin. ““Bodies Tell Stories”: On Meaning Making and Trauma in Social Work,
Poetry, Pandemics, and Embodied Practice.” REFLECTIONS, vol. 28, no. 3,
reflectionsnarrativesofprofessionalhelping.org/index.php/Reflections/article/download/1895/1710/8882. Accessed 12 May 2023.
³ van Heugten-van der Kloet D, Cosgrave J, Merckelbach H, Haines R, Golodetz S, Lynn SJ. Imagining the impossible before breakfast: the relation between creativity, dissociation, and sleep. Front Psychol. 2015 Mar 26;6:324. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00324. PMID: 25859231; PMCID: PMC4374390. Krause-Utz A, Frost R, Winter D, Elzinga BM. Dissociation and Alterations in Brain Function and Structure: Implications for Borderline Personality Disorder. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2017 Jan;19(1):6. doi: 10.1007/s11920-017-0757-y. PMID: 28138924; PMCID: PMC5283511.
⁴ Sebastian R, Gomez Y, Leigh R, Davis C, Newhart M, Hillis AE. The roles of occipitotemporal cortex in reading, spelling, and naming. Cogn Neuropsychol. 2014;31(5-6):511-28. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2014.884060. Epub 2014 Feb 17. PMID: 24527769; PMCID: PMC4108518.
Raised in Mexico City and the Midwest United States, Jael Montellano (she/they) is an ESL writer, poet, and editor. Her work explores otherness and queer life and features in publications such as Tint Journal, Beyond Queer Words, Fauxmoir, The Selkie, the Columbia Journal, and more. She is the interviews editor at Hypertext Magazine, practices a variety of visual arts, and is at work learning her fourth language. Find her at jaelmontellano.com, at X/Twitter @gathcreator, and at BlueSky @gathcreator.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO| Diagnostic Criteria Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Bipolar I Disorder: |
911 Caller: There is a guy walking around. He looks like he is crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun and he’s like popping it like he’s pulling the trigger. He’s not pulling a trigger but he’s making a motion as if he is and there is something sticking out of his jacket.
Dispatcher: Ok, is anybody injured?
911 Caller: Nobody is injured.
Dispatcher: Ok, give me one second. Ok, help is on the way, I just have a few more questions, ok?
911 Caller: Uh-huh.
Dispatcher: You said it looks like a gun?
911 Caller: Yes.
| A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood, and increased goal-directed activity or energy lasting ≥1 week |
| (any duration if hospitalized), present most of the day, nearly every day |
| Characterized by the occurrence of 1 or more manic or mixed episodes (the manic episode may have been preceded by and may be followed by hypomanic or major depressive episodes, but these are not required for diagnosis) |
911 Caller: Hi I’m walking on Utica Avenue in the direction to…yeah walking away from Eastern Parkway towards Empire Boulevard. There’s a guy in a brown jacket walking around pointing. I don’t know what he’s pointing at people’s faces. I don’t know what if it’s a gun.¹ It’s silver.
Dispatcher: You said Utica Avenue and Eastern Parkway?
911 Caller: I’m walking in the direction towards Empire Boulevard.
Dispatcher: So, Empire Boulevard?
911 Caller: Right. I’m walking on Utica in direction towards Empire Boulevard. I’m between Carroll and (Unintelligible Dispatcher/Caller audio overlapping).
911 Caller: I’m sorry. (Unintelligible Dispatcher/Caller overlapping).
911 Caller: He’s an African American guy. He has on a brown jacket.
Dispatcher: Brown jacket?
911 Caller: Right. He’s pointing a thing in people’s faces. He’s wearing blue jeans and black and white sneakers and a black hat.
¹ Officers later determined that the object Vassell had pointed at them was a pipe with some sort of knob on the end of it.
| During the mood disturbance and increased energy or activity, ≥3 (or 4 if irritable mood only) of the following: |
| A. Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity | Four officers, three in plainclothes and one in uniform, |
| B. Decreased need for sleep | fired 10 rounds, striking the man, |
| C. Pressured speech | who was later identified as Saheed Vassell. |
| D. Racing thoughts or flight of ideas | The officers then called an ambulance, |
| E. Distractibility | NYPD Chief Terence A. Monahan said, |
| F. Increased activity | and Vassell was taken to Kings County Hospital, |
| G. Excess pleasurable or risky activity. | where he was pronounced dead. |
Sources
Blumberg, A. (2018, April 6). NYPD Releases 911 Transcripts, Footage Of Saheed Vassell’s Final Moments. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nypd-911-footage-saheed-vassell_n_5ac7eb73e4b09d0a1193ce18
Purse, M. (2022). Types of Bipolar Disorder Episodes According to the DSM-5. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/bipolar-disorder-episodes-380392
Janine Blue lives in Illinois and is a PhD candidate studying creative writing. Janine’s prose and hybrid work intertwine feminism, police brutality, queer culture, and critical race theory. As a Black female, her intersectional identity is embedded into her writing regardless of the medium or subject matter. You can find her at janinewrites.com and on Twitter @JeblueWrites.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO/id·‘jaī/
ᴅᴇғɪɴɪᴛɪᴏɴ:
There, beyond you and me, a million crickets dance a fan dance in the dark bamboo groves. Before dawn, the man wends his way through his flooded field. A frog choir swells deep from the bogland, and from above, a bulbul whistles his clear descant. The man attempts to hum along, but the scale does not register, does not chart against the solfège etched in his memory.
There, beyond you and me, first light dusts a rust orange glow over the man’s rice paddy. Leaning against the stone well, a bucket conjures a wish of its own, to ring like the bronzed temple bell, commanding and holy. The man appears at the well and casts the crying bucket into the depths, its metal rim clanging against the damp walls.
There, beyond you and me, the carabao’s strong jaw and elephantine haunch. A gentleness belies his bullish face, engine of this industry. A bast fiber rope strung through his nostrils. By this rope, the man leads him to the river to bathe. The beast wades in: his heft, his charcoal eyes, his small twitching ears.
There, beyond you and me, the man’s grandmother steps out from a curing shed, her sunken eyes squinting against the rising sun. Even she could not have remembered what the field once knew: the forced quotas, a constant air of suspicion, the threat of a whip. No, that memory was long buried. He helps her bundle cured tobacco leaves to take to market. His eyes meet hers, teary from her smoke.
There, beyond you and me, on a concrete patch the man revs his traysikel, a sputtering rickshaw with a sidecar, enough for two or three: his wife, her brother. The man’s young son always perched right behind him on the backseat, where he would hug onto his work shirt and feel the motor’s sheer force, thunderous and deafening.
There, beyond you and me, a horse-drawn kalesa strides by, creaking and quaint. From his market stall, the man notices a young tourist: his unworked hands, a clean shirt too warm for this heat. He could be his son. The lone tourist comes to admire the umber fans of cured tobacco. Remembering a song from childhood, he asks for sigarilyas, assuming it means tobacco. No, the man shakes his head:—winged beans. You are looking for winged beans.
/‘lä·ŋit/
ᴅᴇғɪɴɪᴛɪᴏɴ:
Who governs this myth
full of sky
langit sky
sangit cry
silvered
I have felt this rain
silver my skin
who governs these myths in the sky
the myths where—
the myths whose
language was native to—
the language whose—
who governs these myths in the sky
in the sky
the sky whose language
the sky whose first language was rain
the sky whose first language was water
the myth whose first utterance was rain
I have felt this rain
patterning
on my tin roof
I have slipped in this rain’s puddle
I have slept in this rain’s puddle
I have cried tears which remind me of this rain
tears
whose body of water came from this rain
tears, my tears then, have sought
to rejoin itself with the sky
/‘ᴅᴇᴇ-lä/
after M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.”
a tongue cut in half / becomes sharper
Öykü Tekten
ᴅᴇғɪɴɪᴛɪᴏɴ:
if not ᴅɪʟᴀ if not my if not my ᴅɪʟᴀ if not from here where if not from here then where are you from where is ᴅɪʟᴀ from beneath ᴅɪʟᴀ I found — buried what can be called ᴅɪʟᴀ unburied ᴅɪʟᴀ from ᴅɪʟᴀ ᴅɪʟᴀ hiding from ᴅɪʟᴀ hiding ᴅɪʟᴀ what else, what more | to lick tongue, as in lumber to kiss, lick to tell a story, a fib tongue, to lick tongue snake fangs to mock tongue to taunt arrowhead houndstongue the spirit tongue plant which wards off evil tongue, bolt of lightning flame, blaze to lick, to lap tongue drywood mushroom lamp of the shadow-puppeteer to illuminate to lick, taste prickly pear, tiger tongue the needle of a scale for weighing |
ᴜsᴀɢᴇ; ᴏʀɪɢɪɴ:
when the ᴅɪʟᴀ dila
fractured upon híla
the shore
did it find new dilaʔ
meaning
jelap
hulaʔ
shila
dila
lela
lera
dila
rilam
dèlah
what meanings loosened
from drifting continents lila
what hesitant
breakage dila
inflections become ancient lera
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Aldric Ulep is an Ilokano American writer from Hawai‘i whose poems have appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tinfish Journal, and Zócalo Public Square. His work was nominated for the Best New Poets 2022 anthology and earned an honorable mention in Southern Collective Experience’s 2021 Asian American Poetry Chapbook contest judged by Lee Herrick. He received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop.
