Yearly Archives: 2015

By Elissa Wald 1. When I was in the eighth grade, a boy in my class (let’s call him A.) stopped talking to me. We’d “gone...

Although I vacillated between starving myself and eating massive quantities of food, I had no sense of urgency about my body, its abilities and its contours. I never thought myself fat or thin, attractive or unattractive, pliant or compliant. I never contemplated how it looked in a mirror, in a sundress, naked or in a photograph.

A friend told me about this scholarship. She said, “Just tell your story.” I’ve been telling my story for so long now; online and off, in poems and blog posts, in writing groups and in self-published books, and in the day-in and day-out of making a living and making a life. Sometimes, I think I get so caught up in the telling that I am realize I’m missing more of the living. And sometimes, I think that that, too, is a mindfuck; living is never somewhere else, and ultimately, I come back to gratitude for this simple fact.

So I knit. Not as a way to rejoin those rent pieces; such is far beyond me. But to remember the unity that underlies all life. Today, when I knit, each stitch represents to me the people whose lives where cut short by this tragedy.

Because lately I’ve realized that vague and restless excitement I feel has a name: Hope.

Sixteen times, I’ve stood at the side of a raised gurney in an operating room and sung my daughter to sleep.

I could feel the divorce before it came. It circled us for two long years, disguised as stress from sleep deprivation, an infant, a demanding business. It has been a year since I woke up to the abuse and control, since my son and I fled in our pajamas, the baby still the size of a fist in my belly.

But the thing I think the most about my class, as if it is a song I am playing on the radio, is: this one goes out to the girl who was raped during orientation.

Fall in love with the right man, the man who is like no one you have been with before, despite yourself. Make some mistakes with the right man and don’t run away because of them.

My best friend was there for me when I was hospitalized. He’d curl up in bed next to me. Even when boyfriends weren’t there, he always would be

I am scared that if I unwind too much too far or too fast, I will reveal what I fear to be true. That there is nothing underneath my corset of loving.

Le cafard is nostalgia, but it’s so much more than that. Le cafard is mourning for what once was, and will never be again. Le cafard is the deep wistful longing that it would be again nonetheless, and the fear that it never can. It’s a leaden weight in the pit of your stomach. It’s the sharp sting of absence. Of silence.