Spectacular failure slid quickly into desperate irony. I no longer trusted myself, yet the only place I was comfortable was…by myself. Friendships fell apart while I wandered my head, poking into dim and tender spaces. My marriage wobbled along a divergent fault line we’d been eyeing warily for years. A final isolating punishment, I pulled out the black sheep suit I slip into for family gatherings and inked it an impossible shade of pitch.
Right before his stroke he’d told my mother he’d been planning his escape. He was going to leave my mother, and us, and start a new life, maybe a happy life. And then everything changed. He had a stroke, and then he learned how to cry. And I let go of my secrets.
I dream that this sleep will take away everything: the fatigue, pain, neurological damage and every 'red herring' that cannot be quantified by the medical community.
I will wake to my 'old body,' my teenage body, the one I so shamelessly took for granted. The body I binged and purged from out of hate, the body surreptitiously stuck on the other side of the glass.
In your honor, I am reclaiming Armistice Day. It is the day of your birth, after all. You told us that when you were a boy, on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month all the people of the nations that fought in the First World War were silent for that minute.
I have spent a lifetime overcoming obstacles. I have found my greatest strength in the midst of insurmountable weakness. Yes, I have thought about being denied several times. The only thing I haven’t thought about, was how I would tell my daddy that the drug I mentioned two years ago while he was pushing me around 6 Flags in a wheelchair, to fill his heart with reassurance and hope, I can’t actually have.
I couldn't stop crying. This was what I ran from – from life, from reality, from feeling. But I couldn't run from this. This was every breath and heart beat. This was every second of my life, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me to attention.
Two years ago, at fourteen, I was obsessed with the prospect of a perfect body. Despite asthma and a lack of athletic skills, I forced myself to run every single day after school
And two weeks later Billy hanged to death in your house. The house the two of you were building together. Hanging from the rafter that I said to leave exposed because it added charm to the place. Surrounded by a group of his friends who never bothered to call for help until rigor mortis had set into his fingertips.
Five years ago, I embarked on a failed NaNoWriMo adventure – and I say failed, because I didn’t come up with the whole 50, but, November, 2010 was the year I crystallized my obsession with the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and the effort eventually produced two books. The first one was published by Diversion Books in September of last year.
Listening to her was like looking fear right in the face, but there she was sitting across from me, so I knew the story was going to end well somehow. She was like quiet ash, beautiful, sad, soft-spoken, transformed by life into fine mincemeat. Here is Sefi’s story.
