Category: Nonfiction (Page 8 of 11)

Climbing a Hill in China With My Father

13 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marie Look

I am about to climb a staircase up a hill in southern China with my father. A local has told us the summit is called Xianggong and that it’s the best view in the Guangxi region. It overlooks the Li River and the karst mountains that rise like shark teeth along the banks.

It’s a late November afternoon. There’s only a little time before the last bus back to Guilin and our hotel, but we don’t want to leave this hill unexplored. With naïve optimism, we begin. The stairs are steep, constructed of stone and wood and reinforced with metal. It’s humid, and my shirt sticks to me.

My father was born here sixty-seven years ago, on rural farmland in China. When he was seven, his mother sent him to the United States to live with a relative he had never met. He didn’t make it back to China again for decades, not until he was thirty-three, a little younger than I am now. Today we are both tourists in his native country, where neither of us can interpret the road signs or speak Cantonese with the locals.

The path uphill zigzags, and we can’t see the whole of it from any single vantage point. The level of exertion humbles us.

“Good thing you’re still hitting … the tennis courts … three times a week,” I gasp as we take the next turn.

“This is why you run … all those half marathons … right?” my father replies.

We discuss slipping our camera bags from our shoulders and resting. But we remember the bus, which will come soon and leave with or without us. So we ignore our screaming quads, our hearts beating in our ears, and we press on.

Some fathers and daughters have a favorite pastime they enjoy together. They take up cycling or become cinephiles or shop for vintage records. My father and I travel. We make discoveries, we collect experiences. But this trip is different from the others, in that we seek more than just a sense of place. We’re uncovering parts of ourselves in the local features, in this landscape that has remained unchanged since my father was born—possibly even since the time of his own father or grandfather. Who were they? Who are we? And if a man and his daughter manage to climb a question in the shape of a hill in southern China, what will it prove?

“What was your village called?” I often asked my father this while growing up in Oklahoma. But he couldn’t remember the name. Months would pass and I would ask him again, hoping for a different answer. I had so many questions about his origin story, which I understood to also be my origin story. Did he have siblings? How did my grandparents meet? What was China like? How many relatives still lived there? The details were always sparse. There were no stories handed down, no photos to pass around.

“I think it’s hard for him to talk about,” offered my mother, a Kansan with blue eyes and fair skin. “Or it’s possible he really doesn’t know.”

More discoveries await my father and me on this trip. The ancient city walls of Guangzhou, the hump of Victoria Peak, the stilt houses of the Tai O fishing community. But at present we’re chasing the bird’s-eye view of these limestone mountains, which for millennia have granted the tropical landscape around the Li a quality of otherworldliness.

Earlier, my father and I experienced the valley from the Li itself, aboard one of the ferries meandering southward from Guilin’s Zhejiang Pier to Yangshuo village. We stood on the upper deck, transfixed, as every bend introduced a perspective more compelling and timeless than the last. Fishermen on bamboo rafts. Serene-looking pagodas. Wading deer and buffalo. Over and over, we raised our cameras to capture it all.

Now, as we climb Xianggong, I feel every ounce of what I carry—especially my camera, a digital Canon EOS Rebel my father gave me several Christmases ago when I was still in my twenties. I call it my “big girl camera” because of its heft. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that requires responsibility, and I take good care of it. I know how to hold it, how to store it, how to clean it.

In the ’90s, my family lived in Broken Arrow, in a house on Orlando Street, where my father would empty the contents of a brown, leathery bag onto his and my mother’s bed. Lying on my belly on their floral comforter, I’d watch him clean his own camera and help him organize the lenses, the film canisters, and the various cleaning cloths as he explained apertures and F-stops, ISO and granularity. Negatives could reveal pictures if you used the right chemicals, he told me. I marveled at the system of it all. Photography was a superpower—the power of supersight, of supermemory.

At last, my father and I—chests heaving, legs shaking—lug ourselves and our cameras onto the hill’s highest point. Thoughts of the bus evaporate. The sun at our backs throws the jagged mounds of stone into light and shadow for as far as we can see. White ferry boats dot the river, appearing toylike.

Click. A moment captured.

Click. A memory created.

Click. A question answered.

Then there are no significant words exchanged, no particular actions I expect to recall later. Just an indefinite moment of wonder at the sky above us and the earth below us, and my father and I standing in stillness between the two, catching our breath.

Marie Look is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction and short fiction. As a journalist, she’s contributed interviews, travel articles, and more to regional and national magazines. She studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and creative writing through UCLA Extension. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

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My Mother, Feminism, and Barbie

5 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Anna Stolley Persky

When I was about five or six-years-old, I asked my mother for Barbie dolls. I also wanted the Barbie Dreamhouse, which had an elevator. My friend had several Barbie dolls and a Ken doll, along with the Dreamhouse, and we would spend hours dressing the dolls and sending them up and down the elevator, only to change their outfits again and send them back up and down the elevator. We had to hide the Barbies and Ken if my friend’s brother approached us because he would pop their heads off, but other than that, I found my Barbie time to be tranquil and wanted to replicate the experience at home.

It was the mid-1970’s, and my mother, who was just returning to work after having three children, was dabbling hard with feminism. Barbies, she said, did not represent our values. Barbie was a bad role model. Her body was unrealistic. Barbie, my mother said, was all about materialism. She cared only about her looks and fashion, maybe Ken.

My mother said she didn’t want me to become materialistic. She refused to buy me any Barbie dolls. I cried. My sister, five years older than me, comforted me, but didn’t relate at all. She had no interest in dolls of any kind, and also hated to dress up, which my mother made us do when we visited her side of the family. Sometimes my mother had the three of us wearing matching dresses embroidered with kittens. We even had matching brown tights.

But at Barbie she drew the line.

I kept asking for Barbie dolls. I longed to be handed a gorgeously attired Barbie with tiny high heels, still in her box, waiting for me to free her and undress her, then dress her again.

One afternoon my mother presented me with a garbage bag filled with naked hand-me-down Barbie dolls, their limbs tangled against each other, their hair knotted and matted.

“Here are your Barbie dolls,” my mother said. She then handed me a sewing kit. “If you want to dress them, you’ll have to learn to make their clothes.”

I didn’t touch them. I gave up on asking for Barbie dolls. I moved on to toys my mother wouldn’t find objectionable. But a simmering anger stayed with me. Even at that age, I knew that while my mother had made her point with dramatic flair, she had done so at my expense.

I grew up, went to college, then started applying to law schools. My mother asked me if I was sure I was smart enough to compete with all the young men in law school, and I remember thinking, ah there’s the mother I know, still one foot in and one foot out of the feminist movement.

After my first semester of law school, I flew from California to stay with my parents in their new house in Maryland. My mother led me on a tour around the house that she had decorated. We came to her study, and a giant glass-fronted cabinet filled with her latest hobby – collecting Barbie dolls. There were some traditional Barbies, dressed in pink or evening gowns, then one with roller skates, a cowgirl, a Barbie in a suit. Several of the dolls in her collection were from the 1970’s, some of them still pristine in their boxes. She’d also bought a tongue-in-cheek black market White Trash Barbie.

“You have to be f***ing kidding me, Mom,” I said, shaking, livid. “F***ing Barbies?”

My mother quickly reprimanded me, as she always did, for cursing. Then she asked me why I was so angry.

“You didn’t let me have Barbies, remember? They aren’t feminist.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said. “Or maybe I do. But that was a long time ago. See, they have career ones now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hate your dolls.”

My mother’s face crumpled. At that time, I loved to try and make my mother cry. If I succeeded, I felt happy and then overwhelmed with guilt. She started crying. I apologized, but for years, she couldn’t mention her Barbie collection without igniting in me a seething fury. Maybe she mentioned it to see if I would still get angry, and I responded in a sharp, spiteful way to see if she would still get upset. Maybe we needed to know that we were still connected enough to elicit emotion from each other.

My sister was unfazed by the Barbie collection. She told me in private they were ugly, but she didn’t care what our mother collected. She had plenty of leftover anger from our childhood and failing to meet our mother’s conflicted expectations, but none of them involved dolls.

“You were my real live baby doll,” my sister said to me years after our mother passed away. “Why would I want anything else?”

After about ten years, my mother sold off most of her Barbie collection, doll-by-doll. Each time I visited her, there would be a few less of them in the cabinet.

I inwardly celebrated their quiet disappearance. I said nothing to my mother for fear that my response would somehow change her mind, produce a rebellion against me, convince her to start collecting them again. It wasn’t long after that that I had my own babies, twins, to dress in matching outfits, but by then my mother was too weak to hold them.

Anna Stolley Persky, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, lives in Northern Virginia. She’s pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University. Her fiction has been published in Mystery Tribune and The Plentitudes. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Pithead Chapel.

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What a Nature Poem Can Learn from a Love Poem

1 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jesse Curran

Here I find myself: ten years into a marriage, seven years into two kids, two-plus years into a pandemic. Eros has gone dormant, a long winter of eating potatoes and squash and quietly reading books before seeking deep sleep. But it’s spring and I’m dwelling in things that used to be. I’ve been digging through the old file boxes, trying to find that poorly proof-read graduate paper. The one from the Romanticism seminar. The one about Shelley hugging the tree. About the roaring inside. About laying your body next to the earth. I was twenty-five and on fire, the libidinous pulse of poetry reached into every mundanity and exaltation of the day. For those years, everything was erotic. Everything was about connection. About a radical sense of continuity. About reaching through the loneliness. It was running and running and running and being not yet arrived. Whitman’s lusty oak. A Georgia O’Keefe poppy. It was the only subject. The tree-hugger was it: a symbol of the magnetic pull toward a forgotten union. Then something shifted. I turned thirty, I got married, I got pregnant, I got tired. For the past half dozen years, I’ve been working on the virtue of contentment—an often Buddhist and sometimes Stoic sense of equanimity. But still I burn. My god, I burn. I steep like compost at heat; a bowlful of watermelon rinds and coffee grinds and a bucket of crumbling oak leaves sparking something in the backyard. The tree is rooted in the earth. It does not walk. We move toward it and it stares back at us. I long for it to tear its roots, stretch its mycelium, and walk toward me. And sometimes in April, when the colors splatter, when the candy tulips and the dayglo maple leaves buzz with a heady fecundity, when a friend offers to take the kids back to her house after the school pick-up, when it’s suddenly quiet—sometimes, in April, verging on May, I take my seat on the porch and feel the maple shoots lean toward me.

Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Green Humanities, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Visit www.jesseleecurran.com

The Color of Noise

24 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sandra Marilyn

The noise seemed to have been born of the profusion of color that swirled around the hundreds of people sharing the streets on our first day in India.

It was as if one of the gods or goddesses said, “There will be too many of you and you won’t have much money, but I’ll give you an extra serving of color and it will define your brave spirits.”

Then the color rained down on them in great splashes making their houses lavender and orange, or outrageously crimson, making their lorries bright yellow each with an individual design of flowers on every paintable surface. The color even splashed on the horns of the garlanded cows occupying their rightful place in the streets.

The temples rose steadily up into the sky with layer after layer of deities, demons, monkeys, elephants, cows, and garlands all painted in every vibrant shade of beautiful with none of the West’s concern about appropriate combinations. My heart flew to the heavens with the soaring temples as I stood looking up letting the colors shower me with their abundance.

In the markets women with long strings of flowers in their hair sold powered colors that were displayed in rows of perfect pyramid shaped piles. The cobalt blue, lime green, scarlet, gold, orange, violet of their saris wrapped around their bodies as if to protect them from the tediousness of the world. There were no black, gray, or brown saris. The women on pilgrimage together at the shore all wore vibrant orange and yellow saris and moved laughingly together like a giant orange flower with yellow borders on its pedals.

Cars honking, cows mooing, children laughing, motorcycles revving, people shouting. The noise that might have been jarring took on the life of the colors running together in an ecstatic cacophony. Even in the noise there was no gray.

When I returned home my old house looked much bigger, much more convenient, much more reflective of my privilege than I had noticed on returning from other trips. Yet, the lack of noise and color was unsettling. I stood at the window feeling a profound boredom settle into my bones. Most of the houses I could see were versions of beige; many were gray; one was actually black. There were no flowers painted on trucks or cars; there were no animals walking freely down the street; women leaving their houses for work wore predictably dull clothes. I wondered if I would be able to live with the cheerlessness of our normal.

In the next few weeks I pulled out the ladders and tarps and set about the long task of painting my house a considerably brighter blue, shiny periwinkle actually, than it had ever been before. All the while I scraped and sanded, lugged paint buckets, and dragged my weary legs up and down ladders, I was saying a sort of prayer for my old house.

“I will honor your soul with this magnificent color if you will protect me from the bleakness and harshness of the world.” She agreed, of course.

Sandra Marilyn, her wife, and a dog live in an old house on the side of a hill in San Francisco. She looks out the window at a view of the city and wonders about the lives of people who live in other cities. And she writes about them every day.

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A Painting features Forever

20 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

A woman, pear-shaped and clad in a modest swimming suit, edges her way into the
water. Her toes sink into the wet sand, partially disappearing into a cushiony
softness as a few gentle waves ebb and flow. Despite her tentative approach, her
stance gives off a certain determination. Clutched securely in her right hand is the
left hand of her grandson. Together, in a kind of cross-generational unison, they
advance into the gentle Mediterranean.

Little by little, the waves ripple and swell. By the time the water swirls around her
knees, he will already be waist deep. Mindful of this, she goes no further, not for
now. This will be just a teaser, a taste, an awareness of why a beach holds sway,
why they are here today. The sky, in a wash of orange watercolors, gradually
transforms as the day wears on. The light brightens, nearly blinding in its
luminosity before it recedes, as the day proceeds, as life proceeds, gradually
darkening into another palette of grey and purplish navy blue.

Though the watercolors, light and lovely, maintain their transparency, something
has changed. The grandson will come to approach the water on his own one day,
arms held aloft in greeting, a young expectant heart soaring. She knows this. As a
promoter of life, she somehow hungers for this and yet, looking at the horizon, she
also knows she is enacting a certain lesson, a teaching for him, yes, but also for
her.

He will go on, a member of the future, embracing life on his own. And she, the
grandmother, will follow him along with her eyes, quietly drinking in his wonder
and waving to him, tenderly, from afar.

Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

Never Too Late

8 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Nick Wynne

I had no experience with fatherhood, nor did I have the kind of experience with my father that would have helped me to be a better one. My father was an alcoholic, and I and all my siblings bore the brunt of that. He could be kind, but he could also be harsh and emotionally abusive. Despite his shortcomings, he and my mother made sure that we grew up with strong moral values and work ethic. Although we went through periods of severe economic stress as a family, they sacrificed to ensure that we were fed, clothed, and loved. Tragically, as a family we didn’t articulate our love for each other until after his death. It was there, but we didn’t express it.

I must confess I never really understood my father until I was in my mid-30s. Only then did I understand that he was a brilliant man who could have been anything he wanted to with an education but was forced to leave school in the third grade and work to support his mother and family. We, his own family, were five in number, and he worked hard to support us despite knowing that every job he took involved hard labor and minimum wages. Nevertheless, he persisted. It is no wonder that he took to drink to relieve his frustrations at not being able to provide more. Hard to understand, but understandable.

I do know that I never told my father I loved him until he was on his death bed. My brother Joe and I were in his room where he was in a coma. Joe left for some reason, and I was there alone with him. He briefly opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt compelled to tell him face-to-face, “I never told you this, you old sonofabitch, but I love you.” He blinked his eyes, smiled a little smile, closed his eyes, and died.

Nick Wynne is a retired educator and published author. He is a native of McRae, Georgia but lives in Rockledge, Florida. His latest book is Cousin Bob: The World War II Experiences of Robert Morris Warren, DSC. His website is www.nickwynnebooks.com.

Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash

Bridging

5 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kate Marshall

“So many of my patients love the bridge,” the new bone doctor says, readjusting his lowriding mask.

“All well and good, but I’m really not a bridge person.” We’ve just talked about bone-enhancing medications after and I’ve brought up how if I succumb, I might not be eligible for certain dental procedures should the need arise.

The doctor tells me about other options; self-administered daily shots, twice-a-year infusions, and a once-a-month new-improved coated esophagus burner.

I nod and stare at a series of anatomical charts of urogenital and skeletal systems, predominately male, anchored to the off-white walls, while the doctor types into his web portal. I don’t say that copays for the shots and infusions could run 50 grand a year with insurance.

“Hmmmmmm. We wouldn’t want you to fall and break a hip.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.” I think of my aunt who’d fractured a hip after being knocked over by a neighbor’s Irish Setter after a bird club meeting. Aunt’s final bedridden years bemoaning life’s unfair burdens and cursing the neighbor and her horrible red dogs before her lungs gave out in the middle of a particularly dark night.

“Let’s take another peek at your results.” He readjusts his mask while he studies my longitudinal DEXA scans, which peg me as having the bone mineralization strength of an eighty-five-year-old woman despite my being twenty years younger.

As I wait for further wisdom or elaboration, I slide back that day in Nepal. My Ph.D. reward trek that included a four-week stint in a Buddhist monastery. On that day the wind was up, the river wide and the canyon walls high. The slated wooden footbridge swayed over the water. Most of our group had decided to cross upstream beyond the canyon. Three of us hefty Americans and a Nepali guide elected to walk the bridge. We ignored the sign in Nepali, English and French, forbidding more than two at a time on the bridge at the same time. I followed the marathon runner, and my pot-smoking friend, Big Jake from Fraser, Colorado who lumbered across with the help of some black market weed he’d secured in Kathmandu. From the far side, he and the runner waved, shouting encouragement.

If they could do it, I certainly could. I was prepared for the wind-sway and could fight the urge to look down. Don’t slip, don’t fall, eyes on the prize. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. One step at a time. As the bridge shook, I brought in every self-help cliché until I came to a section where loose and missing boards had opened a one-meter gap. Was that what Big Jake was trying to convey with all his shouting? I looked back at the guide who watched silently from the start side.

Just do it, the marathon runner yelled. Three feet is nothing. You can’t give up now. Give up? I was at least fifty percent in, and I wasn’t even sure that turning back was a safer option. Up the creek without a paddle. I spat out Buddhist mantras like I was on a timed game show. May all beings have safety including me and be spared suffering and come to equanimity, especially the equanimity part.

The doctor looks up from his computer screen. “If it was my mother or sister, I would definitely recommend medication. Life in a rehab center is not pretty.”

Forward or back. A plunge seems inevitable.

I scratch my cheek through my KN95. “Do you have a sister?” I know I’m playing gotcha. But what else can a woman do when she’s up against a “Good Doctor” and “Doogie Howser” combo?

“I’ll think about it,” I say, after he blushes, shakes his head, “no” and admits he’s an only child.

But I know when I leave, I’ll do my best to move beyond charts and pills. I’ll practice ass-falling without hands until I rewire my instincts. I’ll spend an hour a week one-foot balancing on a yoga block, while repeating the same damn Buddhist mantras that helped me over the chasm in Nepal where in the end I backtracked to the place where I started, joining the upstream group, where we cold-water forged the river, abandoning poor Jake and the runner to finish off the last of the pot.

Kate Marshall is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado. She has been published in 50GS, Iowa Writes: The Daily Palette, The Selkie, The Ravensperch and The Chalice.

Jacaranda

29 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alice Lowe

A stroll through Old Town on a quest for yard art yields a 7-foot-long bronzed hummingbird rain chain to hang in the corner of our porch. Returning to the car with our treasure, my spouse and I stroll up Juan Street under canopies of lavender blossoms, floating off trees, carpeting lawns and sidewalks, lighting gently on my hair and shoulders like a soft, sweet-smelling snowfall.

Each spring we’re stunned anew by the blooming of the jacarandas, their purple flowers feathering the sky, blanketing the ground below. They flourish in Southern California from April to June and in Australia during corresponding spring months. While both we and the Aussies like to claim them as our birthright, jacarandas are native to South America. The name, from the Guarani language, means “fragrant.” They represent wisdom and wealth, and if a flower drops on your head it means good fortune. Lucky me!

Gorgeous specimens abound in our San Diego neighborhood, but one tree on this Old Town jaunt brings me to a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed standstill. Tall and full, perfectly shaped, it towers over an unassuming ‘50s-era duplex. A VW bug parked in the driveway underscores the tree’s magnificence, emphasizing that it isn’t the purview of the privileged. The next day I’m still thinking about that tree—I have to see it again. “That one!” I say as we drive down the hill. My husband takes pictures of me surrounded by a cloud of lavender.

Gail, the protagonist in an Alice Munro story, travels from Toronto to Brisbane, Australia, where she’s astonished by the wildlife and landscape, the galah birds—rose-breasted cockatoos—and the blossoming trees: “The flowers are a color that she could not have imagined on trees before—a shade of silvery blue, or silvery purple, so delicate and beautiful that you would think it would shock everything into quietness.” A local tells her they’re called “Jack Randa.”

I lived for several years on a street bordered by alternating palm trees and jacarandas, one in front of my house. The fallen blossoms surrounded the tree in wide circles, and I would scoop piles of them into a basket that I’d place on my dining table, refreshing them regularly until the last blooms had fallen. Not everyone was a fan. “They’re so messy,” a neighbor complained, raking them off his manicured lawn. My housemate considered them a menace. “Goddamn purple flowers; they’re ruining my paint job.” Are you kidding? Get a car cover, I said. Park somewhere else.

That silvery blue-purple or purple-blue evokes the bluebells that Leonard Bast wades through in the movie adaptation of Howards End. They’re what I see when I imagine myself similarly ankle deep in fields of jacaranda blooms. I have a pot of lavender lobelia that stands in for them on the deck just outside my window. And a purple chenille bathrobe, it’s soft nubby texture a reminder in winter months of the treat in store for me come Spring.

Alice Lowe writes about life, literature, food and family in San Diego CA. Recent work has been published in Big City Lit, FEED, Borrowed Solace, Drunk Monkeys, Midway, Eclectica, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She’s been cited twice in Best American Essays Notables. Read her work at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Voicemail

25 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Megan E. O’Laughlin

You can’t seem to do the things to help you feel better. You can’t keep food down, not with this feeling of something tied around your throat. You wake up in a cold sweat, a murder of crows in your head. You sigh when you send calls straight to voicemail; the number in the little red circle increases daily. You struggle to buy groceries, walk the dog, to drop the package off for the Amazon return. You can’t make that bottle of wine last longer than an hour. Your bad memories are now three-dimensional; they sit on the couch in the living room and eat all of your chips. You just can’t seem to do the things to help you feel better. You can’t even think of what those things are anymore.

Your friends and family notice. They say—are you okay? They seem worried, maybe even annoyed, and definitely tired. They all say it’s time to get some help; perhaps something can help, someone will tell you what to do, and then you’ll do it. If you get some help, they can feel some relief.

Something needs to change, but you aren’t sure what. You need to accept some things, but you aren’t sure how. So, you finally decide to do it. You type some words in the Google search bar: Therapists near my city. Therapists for depression. Therapists for anxiety. Therapists for grief. Therapy for I-don’t-know-what.

I probably received your message, but I rarely check my voicemail. Also, I don’t have any openings. And, I don’t take your insurance. Maybe your friend recommended me, your doctor gave you my name, or you liked my website. I’m that professional person with the education and approved license to do what you are finally ready to do: psychotherapy, some coping skills, process some childhood issues, psychological assessments, even medication management. We are psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, or licensed counselors. You tried to figure out the difference between all these things, and it doesn’t make much sense. All the acronyms blur together: LICSW, PsyD, LMHC, not to mention the things we do, that we spend years and thousands of dollars on, the acronyms like DBT, CBT, ACT, EMDR. What are these things? You don’t know. You just need someone to call you back. There’s simply not enough of us to go around, especially now, especially since the pandemic, and we are burned out too. So, I’ll give you some referrals. Maybe they are full, too, and don’t call back either. Or you can go to that agency, where brand new therapists are overworked and underpaid, and yes, I used to work there too.

Maybe you come in after you waited for months. You will tell me all about your childhood three times a week. Or I will prescribe you three kinds of medication; only one is habit-forming, one causes terrible side effects, and one seems to help. Maybe I will teach you some coping skills, listen with care, and start and end our sessions on time. I might fall asleep, call you by the wrong name, or ask you the same questions every week, and you realize, wow, this therapist has a terrible memory. Maybe I’ll cry when you cry, and you feel seen. Or I’ll sit with a stone face, and when you ask me a question about myself, I’ll say, “why do you ask that question?” Maybe we’ll meet for years, months, or just a few times, but our time together will change your life. Perhaps you’ll meet with me and then decide to meet with someone else, and then they will help you change your life.

Please know it’s not your fault that it’s this complicated. Please know it’s not my fault either and yet here we are, in this system, that doesn’t work so well for any of us. It’s not perfect, but don’t give up after one call. Call again. Send an email. Show up, and then show up again. I will show up, too. In our perseverance, we might find the things to help you feel better.

Megan E. O’Laughlin is an emerging writer and MFA candidate at Ashland University. She writes about mental health, ghosts, and mythology. Megan works as a therapist specializing in mindfulness and trauma recovery. She lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington state with her spouse, child, and two dogs.

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A New Heart From Somewhere

20 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ethan Kahana

Sitting quietly in my small room overlooking the graveyard, I heard a sudden burst of joy from the halls that got me out of bed for the first time that day. What I saw was a young, skinny boy in the same light blue gown that I had neatly folded in my room. His bony legs, splayed open to fit into the wheelchair, were remarkably long. And, most notably, his mouth was dropped open in shock as he set the telephone down on his lap. His mom, holding the heart medication that fed into her son’s IV, was crying while laughing. His dad simply stood there in silence, his head buried into the shoulder of one of the doctors.

They had been wearing the same clothes for days and the wrinkles showed. Both had the look of people who had been under extreme stress for a great deal of time; there were shadows on their faces that I previously deemed impossible. When they started walking through the halls as a family, we all whooped and cheered at the opportunity that this child was getting at a new life. A second chance, albeit an arduous one. When he passed me, I excitedly held out my hand to give him a high five. He stopped, looked at me with his big brown eyes and smiled, holding my hand in his own.

Elated, I paced around my room until the resident came by. Expecting him to be happy after participating in the joyous occasion, I was surprised when he sat down, hunched over, with his light blue eyes looking conflicted and almost mournful as he stared at the blank TV screen. When I asked him what was wrong, he mentioned how pediatric transplant was an extremely difficult rotation for him because while you do see lives saved, you also have to understand that his new heart comes from somewhere. I just stared at him.

Recently, I was observing a heart surgery on a six month old baby with aortic valve disease and was delighted that this difficult surgery went well. Although it took more than six hours, the surgeon told me that the patient should lead a normal life. As the baby was wheeled out of the room, looking so tiny and vulnerable with the pink scar on his chest, I noticed a sheet of paper on the counter: 15 months old, death by drowning.

Ethan Kahana is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying data science and pre med. He has work published in Idle Ink, Across the Margin, Potato Soup Journal, and Five Minutes.