When I think back to that bar in Houston, the one that offered us mahogany and beveled glass and a brief reprieve from our hot, damp lives, I can still see Lynda and me: my blue-jean jacket, her skeleton earrings. We’ve swiveled onto our stools, and she’s paid for our drinks. She is laughing, leaning into me, and I nod, slowly agreeing to something.

Now that I am a professor, I catch whiffs of that familiar stink on them: a mix of sweat and burritos, of ego and anxiety.

We were graduate students then. Grad students inspire little pity because their misery is self-generated—what fools to chase education to such an extreme—and they are often obnoxious. Now that I am a professor, I catch whiffs of that familiar stink on them: a mix of sweat and burritos, of ego and anxiety.

But the agonies of graduate school don’t feel manufactured and optional while you’re going through them. They feel like hell. When I finished my orals, for some reason on Wuthering Heights, I went home and wept to General Hospital, my daily, and, I am not proud to say, singular guilty pleasure. I’d become unhinged enough to think of getting a couple of cats, of naming them Edgar and Heathcliff, and of finding this enormously amusing, but I doubted that I could support two feline suitors on a teaching assistantship.

Yes, life as a TA was tough, but what other choice did we have? To work full-time? A Maynard G. Krebs shriek formed in our sensitive throats. The poorer and older of us already had been there, done that. We’d slung enough hash to fatten whole towns, coming home with pockets full of crumpled bills, our hair smelling of other people’s food. Or we’d put in our time at pink-collar jobs, playing secretary in skirts and fingernails. We’d filed and phoned and tried to write poetry on the side, knowing that no one in Poe-Biz would take someone like us seriously.

Being in a creative writing program changed that.

We got to call ourselves writers, not secretaries, not waitresses; we deemed this to be a sacrifice worth making.

I remember breaking down to spend fifteen dollars on a lamp so I could have a decent light to read by. And dragging a mattress and box springs—a lucky find by the apartment Dumpster—up three flights to my lair. Sleeping on that bed was like lying on a slab of rock, with smaller rocks randomly embedded in the primary boulder, but I took pleasure in getting off my two-inch foam pad, in my upward move away from a cigarette-stale carpet.

Lynda was no better off than I. Her apartment had air and light and nothing in it. Well, a card table and two folding chairs, her pink three-speed propped against a wall, a plugged-in radio. I don’t think that I’m erasing furniture from my memory. I recall an impromptu gathering: after one of our fellow students had shot himself in the head, wham bam, dead and gone, a stunned and drunken group of us sitting on the hardwood floor, our backs against the wall because there was nowhere else to sit.

It always looked as if Lynda could be packed and on a plane in half an hour. And she could. Yet in the end, she chose not to fly but to drive her dirt-brown Honda Civic home to Washington. She’d had enough, gotten her MA, screwed around for another year in the PhD program while her beloved awaited and, apparently, issued ultimatums, as beloveds are wont to do. Lynda wanted company. It was a long way to go alone, especially in that rusty bucket of hers.

We had both come into a bit of luck, having been granted the two creative writing fellowships offered that year: five thousand bucks each. The director called me first, and I asked if I could tell Lynda, my best friend, the news, so I rang her up when she was still in Seattle. First, I told her that I’d gotten a fellowship. There was that half-second pause of disappointment, discouragement, despair before she breathed into the phone, “That’s great. That’s really great. Congratulations.” “Oh, yeah,” I said as if I had just remembered something. “You got one too.”

In Houston, we celebrated by ordering fancy lady drinks. I liked something the mahogany and glass bar served that tasted similar to strawberry tea with cream, and Lynda always fancied Pernod, that awful liquid licorice. She would have been a great Absinthe drinker.

We said that we should buy ourselves leather jackets, cocaine, and sexual favors, but we didn’t do these things. I paid bills, bought books, and forked over a thousand of my five so that one of Lynda’s questionable friends, a kindly Charles Manson lookalike, would rebuild the engine in my flame-red Karmann-Ghia. I also decided to take a summer off from teaching in Houston: one of the all-time worst ways to spend that season, wading through one hundred percent humidity into frozen classrooms filled with restless, albeit friendly, Texans.

I should spend the summer in Berkeley, Lynda told me, in that beautifully cool bar. I could see my mother, drink Peet’s coffee, and stroll under the Liquidambars, which blessed my shoulders with drops of their mysterious water. After another drink, I agreed to make the drive with her to the West Coast even though I would have to buy a one-way ticket back to Houston in August, even though it would be a long haul, and even though her tiny car, like mine, lacked AC. She made it sound good: a road trip, two girlfriends taking to the highway, a last hurrah. Lynda could be silver-tongued, and I can make rash decisions.

Usually I flew home on my annual pilgrimage to California, but the year before Lynda’s invitation, I had elected to take the train instead. My on/off ex/boyfriend dropped me at the station, then waved me off as I mounted the metal steps onto the car. Someone directed me to my seat, which was plush enough but did not recline a single inch. I felt a band of panic tighten my chest. Forty-eight hours, they’d said. Forty-eight hours in that seat? I couldn’t imagine enduring this, but the landscape already clipped past the tinted windows.

My seatmate was twenty, a handsome bagger at Kroger’s. We talked for awhile, then drifted downstairs to a small “screening room,” which ran B movies all night long. At 6:00 a.m., talked out, sleep-deprived, we were propped up on our elbows in the observation car, sipping too-hot coffee from Styrofoam cups and watching small, wild pigs jog around the seemingly endless prairie. He kissed me goodbye in San Francisco.

On the way back, I hung out with an eighteen-year-old guy who was traveling with his mother. Young men and trains go together, I guess. As we strolled around El Paso, he gallantly made sure to stay on the street-side of me, puffing up his chest, my protector. Having waved goodbye to his mom, we found a quiet spot and made out to while away the hours. I arrived with hickeys blossoming on my sleepy neck, but my ex/boyfriend didn’t seem to notice.

Let me set the record straight: mostly, I don’t want anything to happen to me. I want to stay where I am, usually prone. I want to eat in the same restaurants and order the same food because it was good before and it’s bound to be pretty good again. I like routine, comfort, security. But a vixen in my head sometimes says, “Take the train. Sit in the observation car until dawn. Let that boy slip his eighteen-year-old tongue between your lips.”

So I arranged everything, got new contacts (another fellowship expenditure) and prepared to depart with Lynda. The day before we were to go, I grew convinced that one lens wasn’t sitting well on my eye. How could I leave and not be able to see?

“Oh, honey,” Lynda murmured. She had a good voice, sincere yet amused. “I’m so sorry,” she said, then added, “I hate it when I get like that.”

After a moment, I realized that Lynda wasn’t saying she was sorry my contact didn’t sit right; she was sorry I was crazy. Okay, so Lynda turned out to be right. Eventually, the lens did seem to fit. I accustomed myself to it, maybe.

We drove off, Lynda wiping the dust of Texas permanently off her cowgirl boots, I temporarily retreating from the confusion of loving and hating somebody I wasn’t exactly sleeping with anymore.

The trip was a drag.

We talked, sure. That was the good part. Lynda assured me that I was open-minded when I told her I feared I was judgmental. She made fun of the red bandanna on my head and all the bobby pins that I helplessly had stuck into my layered hair to keep it from getting wind-whipped. One arm grew stiff and pink; then the other. My nose reddened. By the end of the first day, my throat ached from shouting over the sound of the engine.

Lynda leaned to the left of me. I was a liberal and a feminist. She was a Marxist and a lesbian. She told me, laughing, that I kept her in touch with the mainstream. It is true that I made her watch The Princess Bride. Munching popcorn, she looked over at me with a buttery smile of surprise. “I thought it would be more ironic,” I said, but she shook off my apology. Lynda took me, along with half a dozen rowdy cowgirls, to see Desert Hearts, a sensitive and sexy lesbian love story. I tried to interest her in thirtysomething, my favorite television show at the time; she sat on my Salvation Army couch and scoffed. “You mean it’s all about these whiney white people?”

The last time that Lynda had gone west she had done so with her love, the woman with almost the same name as mine. Lynda’s girl had lived with her in Houston for a few years before she called it quits. She was pug-nosed and fair, with small breasts, short hair, and strong legs.

A young man circled around her for a while. Finally, he asked, “You a boy or you a girl?” “Girl,” she’d answered. Then he asked her out.

Once Lynda’s girlfriend told me about working at a gas station, squirreled away all night in a glass box. A young man circled around her for a while. Finally, he asked, “You a boy or you a girl?” “Girl,” she’d answered. Then he asked her out. Obviously, he was attracted to her any which way, but he wanted to make sure he’d gotten the gender straight. I loved that story, but I don’t remember her telling too many tales, at least not to me. Hearty and able, she worked at the natural foods market. I felt weakly feminine around her, the effete geek that Lynda dragged home to share their dinners of brown rice and saitan, the straight chick who didn’t even know what saitan was, for Christ’s sake.

On our road trip, I wanted to stop in real restaurants. I longed to be served, to be indoors, and to be out of the wind. Lynda objected. She and her girlfriend had eaten peanut butter and crackers by the side of the road, and they were perfectly happy. “I’m not going to sit by the side of the road and eat peanut butter and crackers,” I snapped.

As a vegetarian, Lynda had a hard time in the places we tried. She ordered cheese sandwich after cheese sandwich, and paid what I’m sure she felt was too much money for them. In New Mexico, at some in-between restaurant in some in-between town, I’d contentedly tucked into my turkey club, and she seemed mollified that they had pasta salad on the menu. Then her dish came: iceberg lettuce leaves beneath a mound of cold spaghetti, on top of which wobbled a large glob of mayonnaise. Pasta Salad. The cook must have put those two words together as best as he could. Lynda laughed but put her fork down. “I don’t think I can eat this,” she said, and she sounded close to tears.

It isn’t easy traveling with someone you’re not sleeping with. Of course, it isn’t easy doing so with a lover either. In my early twenties, a boyfriend and I spent three months wandering as far as our Eurail passes and limited budget could take us. We made it to Monte Carlo, to Morocco, to Athens, to Stockholm. This sounds exciting and romantic; in truth, the trek was difficult and tedious. I remember a fourteen-hour train-ride in Spain, crouching on the wet floor near an overflowing restroom, bound to each other and hell-bent. Afraid of the Babel of tongues and of men looking at me as though I were a side of beef, I clung to my guy, who came to want nothing more than to shake free of me. We parted at the San Francisco airport, each taking BART different directions towards our parents’ homes.

You travel with a partner, you break up. That’s the lesson I learned. There is greater politeness with friends; at least there is for me. I don’t get really rude until I have sex with someone. But it’s tiring being polite, and when you shift out of politeness into extended pissing and moaning, the switch can be a bit of a shock. Plus, you lack sexual soothing to help you through the other person’s terrible sense of direction, endless wheel-turning, or lead foot.

When Lynda and I checked into our first motel, she trilled with self-congratulation on her find—the place was terrifically cheap—but I remained peevish about the cracked tile and funky shower. I prefer standard brands: Motel 6, Travel Lodge. I like sterile and blank, not interesting and creepy. I fussed over the dingy shower curtain, then flopped on my twin bed in a vintage black slip that I wore as a nightgown. Lynda smoked, pleased with herself.

For the first time in our friendship, I felt uncomfortable, as if I had been traveling with a girlfriend, my bestie, and she suddenly transformed into a man.

I hate to admit that I suffered from classic straight-person’s anxiety: the fear that her gay friend will want to have sex with her, that she’ll be in love with her, that there will be weirdness, that there will be a scene.

What was I thinking in that Spanish-style hovel? That Lynda would make a move on me? That she’d try to seduce me? That I’d have to beat her off with a stick? Something along those lines. I hate to admit that I suffered from classic straight-person’s anxiety: the fear that her gay friend will want to have sex with her, that she’ll be in love with her, that there will be weirdness, that there will be a scene.

I had never felt such discomfort with Lynda before. I was surprised when she’d apologized for wearing a thin undershirt in front of me. We were friends; who noticed loose boobs? But Lynda slept with women. She noticed loose boobs. I remember her admiring the dark, cloudy beauty of a woman in our program one night. “She’s a vampire,” I said. “She’d bite your neck and drink your blood.” I didn’t care for the woman myself. “I’d bite her back,” Lynda insisted, and I turned my head away, shy to hear the lust in her voice.

In truth, my discomfort didn’t come simply from my nervousness that Lynda might hit on me. I’ve had a number of male friends flirt with me, make discreet sexual overtures, and, in a couple of cases, overt and awkward passes. But I am used to there being a certain degree of erotic tension with male friends. As long as they don’t push things, that extra zing has been the hot mustard to the hamburger of our friendship. But my relations with men haven’t been the same as those with women. I don’t preen or purr or pose with my women friends.

Yet I’ve always liked lesbians.

When I lived in San Francisco and taught at a private high school, before I’d had enough of kids and gone back for my doctorate in the hope that I would one day teach adults, I answered an ad that promised a household of varying sexual preferences and moved into a fantastic apartment off Van Ness, with a lesbian couple, a cult-happy bisexual, and a woman who seemed to be predominately asexual, which made me the resident hetero.

The pigeon coos of lovemaking on the other side of the wall didn’t bother me, and the nutty bisexual and I got to be pretty friendly. I even let her take me to see Rama, that eighties’ guru, though I didn’t witness his bursting into a shower of lights; apparently, one needed to be enlightened to observe this.

Naïve as I was, I’d thought that the lesbian and bi women in my household also would be intellectual and political. But no. I was “the school-teacher.” The white woman in the couple worked as a cosmetologist, “a lipstick lesbian,” as she termed herself, and spent her free time giving her partner facials. “I used to go for black men,” she told me. “Then I met her.”

Her partner kept taking my typewriter, which annoyed me, but she scared me a little too, with her impressive biceps, on one of which a large, crescent-shaped scar shone. Finally, I got the nerve up to ask what had happened. “I got bit,” she explained. I pictured a mad dog, but she told me about being attacked by a former lover. “Human mouths are filthy,” she said. “That’s what they told me at the hospital.”

We never became more than amicable strangers. I often ate in my room, grading exams, half in love with a beautiful student, who sometimes drove me home in his father’s BMW.

Although I’ve always liked lesbians, I have never gone for women sexually. Well, once, when I was twenty, I made out with a woman at her birthday party. Someone had put on a tape of old Beatles’ songs, and a group of us shouted, “I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND! I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HA-AH-AND!” She and I slung our arms around each other, buoyed on the endless Beatles high.

We were in the same acting class, and she’d been sleeping with our married teacher, a man I also found desirable, so I envied her position as the designated student-lover. She was pretty, as I recall, blonde. We ended up in her bedroom, and she, drunk, blathered on about how attractive she found me, about how she’d never been with a woman before.

Then she threw up in the attached bathroom. However, the waves of nausea did not deter her. She’d washed her hands and brushed her teeth, she told me. I was lying on her bed, flipping through a magazine. She wanted to kiss me, so I let her kiss me. Back then, I was “open to experience.”

My friend’s face felt thin, her skin smooth, lips soft, a mirror of my own. I didn’t feel a fire light in my loins, but I let her stroke my jeans as I perused ads in Vogue. She complimented my ass, and I like being complimented.

Finally, I told her that this wasn’t going to happen between us, and she raged more than I would have thought her capable of doing. Then she slipped out the window of her bedroom because it seemed to her less embarrassing to reemerge through the front door than to come out of the bedroom with me. I left the way that I came in and weaved home.

Some days later, she left a note on my door. She wasn’t embarrassed, she said, about being attracted to me, she didn’t hate herself for it, she hoped that I didn’t either. I never responded. I didn’t despise her for coming on to me, but I distrusted the melodrama of that window-exit and the rather extended rant. Now I wish that I had written her a note, called her, something. Because I think that she was embarrassed and that she did hate herself a little for being attracted to me.

At first, I didn’t know that Lynda was gay. I came to Houston as one half of a couple (my troubled and troubling ex/boyfriend), and I was on guard against all comers (one of his troubling qualities was an inability to remain monogamous for more than a minute). Lynda had prematurely gray but hiply spiked hair and a nice figure: slender with curves. I remember watching her warily as she bounced on the balls of her feet and laughed at my ex/boyfriend’s jokes.

We were all in workshop together. She’d turned in some poems that didn’t impress me; one about a grandmother I found sentimental. But I liked what I thought was a poem in which a man tells his father that he’s “a queer.” “Lynda wrote an interesting dramatic monologue,” I told my ex/boyfriend. “Um, I don’t think it’s a dramatic monologue,” he said. I felt like a fool, but I had never heard a woman refer to herself as “a queer” before. I liked Lynda more after that.

“What does it smell like to you?” he asks his friend. “Fish gut or pussy?” That’s how the poem ended.

Then she handed in a poem that made me want to be her friend. Lynda had down all the details of waiting tables in a nice restaurant: the fanning of cloth napkins, snapping open of a lighter. The waitress goes through her professional moves, believing a man to be a good tipper. Then she feels him tug on the hem of skirt. “What does it smell like to you?” he asks his friend. “Fish gut or pussy?” That’s how the poem ended. It knocked me out.

When my ex/boyfriend gave me the boot, I called up Lynda, and she met me for gigantic glasses of iced tea, a Texan staple, and microwaved quiche. I confessed my heartbreak and made her my (perhaps reluctant) confidante, pushing us into emotional intimacy.

As a high school freshman, I had a terrific crush on this senior, Wally Silva: long black curls and sky-blue eyes. Cool to the nth degree. One night he actually called me. True, it only happened once; then he made up with his tempestuous girlfriend and never sought me out again, but it was a magical moment nonetheless. Wally Silva called me! Unbelievable! That’s how I felt about Lynda’s friendship. I couldn’t get over that someone as hip and cool as she was liked me, really liked me.

Of course, Lynda didn’t make a pass at me that night in New Mexico. We made fun of the TV and ate potato chips until we fell asleep. In the purple morning, she happily rubbed the soles of her feet together under the sheets, sounding like a human cricket. I told her to knock it off. We kept driving.

By the time we made it to the Bay Area, we had tired of each other. My mother welcomed us, and Lynda tried to be nice, but neither of us was in good spirits. When I ran my hand over my mother’s cat, creating a cloud of fur, Lynda abruptly said, “Stop it.” Then she bought me a red wooden goat from the import/export shop on College Avenue. I had admired it, and I still do. Faded to pink, it watches me in the bath, peeking out between pots of ivy.

Lynda tried to convince me to come with her all the way to Seattle, but I refused, no longer charmed, for the moment, by her seductive offers of adventure. She went on alone, and I spent the summer sure that I had stomach cancer, smoking cigarettes and drinking heart-palpitating coffee, hanging out in my mother’s studio apartment, a flowered curtain dividing our beds.

My ex/boyfriend called to say that he was seeing somebody in the program. Seeing somebody. As if he were spending his evenings watching some woman duck-walk back and forth in his living room. I wailed into the pillows on my mother’s couch as she offered me a cheese danish from Nabolom Bakery and a glass of pucker-sweet sherry.

Lynda didn’t stay on Vashon Island very long. A year, maybe. Then a fellowship to Provincetown, a reckless move to a bad section of Brooklyn. Sirens and car horns drowned out her voice on the phone. She sounded thrilled that I got a teaching job in Rhode Island, just a quick train trip, and came to see me in my new digs on Benefit Street.

I had purchased a shit-brown Civic similar to her old one, after the fiery demise of my Ghia, and chugged to Providence to begin my first tenure-track position. Mostly, I moved through the US mail (books and papers and clothes). Everything else had been folded in tissue, including my neon coyote, a final gift from the ex/boyfriend, and strategically positioned in my small car, while allowing enough breathing room for my little dog, Percival.

My ex/boyfriend and I drove in tandem to Ohio, where he would begin his own job. We traveled like that for days, Percy watching me from his carrier. I watched my ex/boyfriend’s drugged Siamese crawl up the back of his seat and wrap around his head. I laughed when I saw the turn signal frantically sputter on. That drive was us all over: traveling together and alone.

We swallowed mile after mile like that, past countless dead armadillos, their small bodies armored and not cute, out of Houston at last, leaving behind a lot of our history along with fluffy biscuits and white gravy. He dropped off his cat at a feline hotel and came with me to Providence, where we said goodbye for good.

As lovers, I mean. We’re still friends. Well, friendly exes. The cat died, but he’s got a kid, and I think he’s pretty happy. I am pretty happy too. I’m married to someone who doesn’t (seem to) have issues with monogamy. My mother is dead, gone to Alzheimer’s, then gone altogether a few years ago. And Lynda is long dead.

When she came to see me in Providence, she looked great, newly blond and pink-cheeked, but she flicked drops of sweat off the end of her nose as we strolled around the East Side. She bled on my ivory-colored couch: a sudden period. Unfairly, this annoyed me. My first brand-new couch!

Not much of a pet person, Lynda was prepared to dislike Percy, a frou-frou with orange Troll hair, but he put his fox-like face on her shoulder. “Well, that is cute,” she conceded.

In a Thayer Street bar, Lynda admitted that she hadn’t been feeling well, then tapped her pack of cigarettes on the table. “And this,” she said, “has got to stop.” I told her that she looked too good for anything to be seriously wrong. She said, “Isn’t that how it goes? Everyone says that she looks great and six months later she’s dead?”

Lynda didn’t even make it to six months: an unusual and relentless cancer, the tumors not as “meltable” as the oncologist had promised as he blasted her body with poisons.

Lynda didn’t even make it to six months: an unusual and relentless cancer, the tumors not as “meltable” as the oncologist had promised as he blasted her body with poisons.

“I’m terrified,” she told me over the phone, having limped home to her family in the Midwest. “What are you afraid of?” I asked, dense as usual. “Of dying,” she told me flatly. She wasn’t ready to meet her maker, to make her peace. Her ex sent her books on death and spiritual transcendence; she threw them out. I got together a care package that she liked: boxes of chocolates and some sort of “healing” crystal, which Lynda said she clutched to her chest as she slept.

Her ex/girlfriend was with her at the end. With Lynda unconscious, on a respirator, I talked to her former partner on the phone. “Please tell Lynda that her spirit is welcome to visit me any time,” I said. She curtly said that she would. I imagine she thought Lynda’s spirit would never want to hang out with a nerd like me. Of course, after I’d made the invitation, I thought the same thing. Of all the places to go in the after-world!

I haven’t believed in a life-after-death for quite a few years. Instead of praying, I retell stories, I look at pictures. Lynda and my mother with their arms around each other, my mother alarmingly white-haired. Lynda and me, my hair alarmingly Texanned, long with poufy bangs. The quality of the photographs isn’t good. Our faces are slightly out of focus, the outlines blurred. But I like those arms around each other’s waists. We love each other; you can see that much.

I remember one long night in Houston when I bewailed the seemingly endless seesaw with my ex/boyfriend: how could I be so damnably weak, why did I let this thing drag on? Lynda shook her head. “Miss Calbert, nothing is harder than breaking up with someone,” she told me. “The truth is, we’ll do anything for love.”

Well, she was wrong, and she was right. There are some things that are harder than breaking up with someone, and we will do many things for love.

 

Cathleen Calbert’s poetry and prose have appeared in many publications, including Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. She is the author of four books of poetry: Lessons in Space, Bad Judgment, Sleeping with a Famous Poet, and The Afflicted Girls. Her awards include The Nation Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Sheila Motton Book Prize, the Vernice Quebodeaux Poetry Prize for Women, and the Mary Tucker Thorp Award from Rhode Island College.

 

On the day of my father’s funeral, I wake up in a twin bed at his house. Liz is still asleep in the identical twin bed across the room. Dad and Penny bought these beds for Caroline and Cate, my nieces, but as usual, we make accommodations that negate the previous accommodations we’ve made for them, and so, at thirty-five years old, my pregnant wife and I are sleeping in twin beds in a room cluttered by toys that piss me off for reasons I’m still trying to nail down. People tell me I’ll get used to toys like that, but I honestly don’t think so. And the way they tell me pisses me off. They say things like, “Just you wait… You’ll see come June, when you become a daddy.” And they say it with this all-knowing grin on their faces, and I wonder if my child will hate me some day for hating when people say well-intentioned things. Because it feels wrong, but I don’t want to stop hating people for that.

As if a childless person is too mentally stunted to see the benefit of a functional arm. I know I need to get my shoulder fixed but my dad is gone.

I try to guess what time it is, but I have no frame of reference beyond that it’s still dark outside. I don’t sleep well when I need to be marking things off my to-do list. Instead of sleeping, I recount the things on that list over and over, and I try to work out the steps I need to take to complete those tasks. What have I neglected in these days leading up to my father’s death? I try to remember if it’s the electric bill or the gas bill I haven’t put on auto-pay yet. I’ve been ignoring my work email completely. I think I scheduled a meeting with our wellness coordinator for this morning to look at my shoulder. I can’t do much with my left arm and it’s been this way since September when I moved a bookshelf down a flight of stairs, and I have to get it fixed they tell me: “You’re going to need that arm come June when you become a daddy, you’ll see.” As if a childless person is too mentally stunted to see the benefit of a functional arm. I know I need to get my shoulder fixed but my dad is gone.

I make a mental note to reschedule my wellness appointment, but that’s as far as I get on my to-do list. I’m too distracted by what the day will bring. We are putting my father in the ground today and I will never see his body again. I lie in that twin bed and consider my dad’s life until I can’t keep it all in my head at the same time, and I feel like if I can just write it down I can come to terms with it. So, I tiptoe out of the bedroom and walk in the dark to the dining room where the large table is covered with a smorgasbord of food the church ladies brought last night, and I have to move the dishes around a little to make room for my laptop.

There’s a tray of nine homemade cinnamon rolls. I start to cut one from the edge, but the one cinnamon roll in the middle looks so soft, and it has no hard edges because the other eight cinnamon rolls have protected it. I think about how my sister would cut the cinnamon roll from the center because it will undoubtedly be the gooiest. She always does things like that. She will run her finger along the bottom of a chocolate cake tray to get extra chocolate while I will insist on getting only the chocolate goo that is intended for my allotted piece. It pissed me off so much. I remind myself of how my sister strongly suggested Liz and I sleep on the twin beds instead of the room that was built for us with the queen-size, and I decide I won’t be able to handle seeing her get the middle cinnamon roll. And so, I put it on a plate and stick it into the microwave for fifteen seconds before sitting down to write about my dad.

To really understand who Dad was, a reader will have to understand the stock he came from and the heritage he was so proud of. And so, in explaining my dad, I begin writing about his grandfather, whom Dad will soon be sharing a patch of ground with. Maybe I get too into the weeds, but after a couple of hours of writing, I’m still ninety-some-odd years away from the part of the story where my dad is born. That’s when Liz emerges from the darkness into the light of the dining room. She has this look she gives me during the early morning hours, when she doesn’t know how long I’ve been up and she finds me at my computer. It’s a look that says she didn’t like me not being there when she woke up because she missed me while she was sleeping. Even if we were in twin beds. That look is a reminder of how much she loves me, and I take comfort there on this day that has already been committed to both formal and informal sadnesses.

Liz gets a cinnamon roll and laughs at the vacancy in the middle of the pan.

“You didn’t,” she says.

But I assure her I did. I am eating my grief, and it becomes clear to me that my grief warrants a second cinnamon roll. We heat them up and share a fork so there is one less utensil to wash later.

The others wake up and trickle into the kitchen for coffee and to survey the breakfast options. Penny, her friend Anita, my sister’s family. I sip my tea and watch my little nieces sitting at the bar eating cinnamon rolls that are the size of their faces. They’re still in their pajamas—cotton gowns with Disney princesses on them. Cate, the five-year-old, asks why my tea is in a coffee cup instead of a regular glass. Because it’s hot, I tell her. That’s not tea, she says. Yes, it is. It’s hot tea. No, it’s not, Gunkel. I don’t know what to tell you, Cate—it’s hot tea. She’s confused and embarrassed at the things she does not know yet because she is only five, so she changes the subject.

“Talk like St. Patrick’s Day!” she says. That’s her way of saying she wants me to use an Irish accent, but my Irish accent is terrible and I don’t want to do it in front of adults. When I tell her as much, she is unsatisfied.

“Talk like Mommy!” Caroline, the nine-year-old, says.

I can do that, I tell them.

The girls look at me expectantly with their big, little-girl eyes, waiting for my impression of their mother. “Caroline, Caroline—hey, listen to me for a second.” Caroline thinks I’m talking to her in real-time, rather than doing an impression and she drops her head down to listen to what I’ll say next. Chris, my brother-in-law, is listening and he laughs.

“That doesn’t sound like Mommy,” Cate says.

Chris assures his daughters it does sound like Mommy.

“Talk like Daddy!” Cate says.

I tell Chris to say something and then I mimic the line as best I can and the girls laugh.

“Talk like Penny!” “Talk like Aunt Liz!” “Talk like Nene!” I roll out my best impressions for my nieces and it’s fun, but I can feel the inevitable conclusion long before we get there.

“Talk like Papa!” Cate says.

I can’t think of what my now-deceased father sounded like. For years, when I thought of him, I thought of how he would say, “Good grief,” when something had completely exasperated his patience—quite often his son—but the girls wouldn’t know about that. Ever since that first brain hemorrhage three and a half years ago, Dad had all the patience in the world as he endured one thing after the other—the stroke and the physical therapy and the occupational therapy and all the rehabilitation and the shitty food and not being allowed to drive. The seizure while behind the wheel shortly after he got his license back, the wreck that it caused, the tumor on his brain that caused the seizure, the house fire in the middle of the night that nearly killed him because the medicine he had to take at the time made him sleep hard, the tumor that came back on his brain after they told him there was a 99% chance it wouldn’t, the four tumors on his spine they stumbled across by chance moments before they went in after the tumor on his brain, the sleepless days and nights in the hospital that Dad called the “beepin’est place he’d ever been in.” He had times when he could barely breathe, yet he endured the goddamned hiccups as a side effect for two years. And of course, there were the treatments, the treatments, the treatments, and there was the deterioration of the man who let me steer on the dirt road just before we reached our house when I was six. The man who told me to watch the ball and keep my elbow up. The man who took me bear hunting with a BB gun because he just wanted to go to a piece of land he loved and walk around there with me for a while. He just wanted to give me a life I would enjoy. And I hope I can do that as well for my son as he did for me.

Cate was two when Dad got sick and from that time on, so much of his communication was reduced to short but strained yesses or no’s—Are you cold? Yes. Are you hungry? No. I try to think of an impression of her Papa that she will recognize, but I can only think of the last words he gave me. Three days before he died, Dad lifted his head barely off the pillow, which required significant effort, so I knew he meant to tell me something important. I was alone with him, sitting at the side of his bed, and I leaned in so he wouldn’t have to speak any louder than he had to. “What is it, Dad?” I whispered. He had no medicine that day and so I knew he had his incomparable wit about him. I put my hand behind his head to help him lift it.

He looked at me through what became his foggy, gray eyes and he said, “Just. Shoot. Me.” And he looked at me with what I think was hope.

He looked at me through what became his foggy, gray eyes and he said, “Just. Shoot. Me.” And he looked at me with what I think was hope.

“Dad, I can’t do that,” I said.

“But maybe, you can,” he said.

“It’ll be over soon,” I told him.

A stranger might interpret Dad’s asking me to end his life as weakness, but I assure you it was a testament to the dignity with which he lived. Long before he ever got sick, Dad said, “Son, if I’m ever stuck in bed and unable to care for myself with no hope of recovery, just shoot me.” And now he was living up to those courageous and selfless words he’d laid out for me then. My father was strong and dignified, even in those final days—especially in those final days.

He looked cold and I saw his hand trying to pull the plaid blanket, but he was too weak to move it. I straightened it for him and tucked it around his body, up to his neck like he liked it. I asked him if he remembered tucking me in when I was a little boy. He nodded slowly. I told him how I remember watching him tuck my sister into her bed across the hall before coming to tuck me in. And how after he would tuck me in I’d watch him go back into her bedroom and turn on the lamp so they could check her for ticks. She always claimed to have ticks as a way to get him to come back in to see her. And when he’d finally turn out her lamp for good, I’d fear what might be waiting for me in the dark—a possessed Teddy Ruxpin, or an animal of some kind just outside my window, maybe—but I told him how I found security in the sound of the television coming through the wall behind my headboard. Because as long as I could hear that television, I knew my dad was awake on the other side of the wall and would ward off anything that might get me. And if they attacked, he would use his pickax to destroy them, just like he did that copperhead I almost stepped on in our driveway. And I’d be reassured by his strength and his ability to keep anything bad from ever happening to me.

A tear fell down my dying father’s cheek as I conveyed the memory to him. I wiped it with my hand and I told him I loved him and that he was a good dad to have. I sat with him until he fell asleep and I never saw him awake after that.

I don’t know how to do an impression of my father that the girls will recognize and I am stalling until finally Caroline says, with attitude, “Okay, moving on…” the way nine-year-old girls do. And we stop the game and I go to the bedroom with the twin beds and the toys that will hopefully stop pissing me off “once that baby gets here,” and I pull out the suit and tie I will wear on this day when we will bury my father.

 

Guy Choate earned an MFA at the University of New Orleans. Among other literary journals, his work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly and Cobalt Review, and he is currently working on a manuscript about his attempt to walk across the country with his friend Rory. Guy is the founder and director of the Argenta Reading Series in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife, Liz. They are expecting their first child, to whom Guy addresses his photo-a-day blog, which you can follow at getoutofthisplace.tumblr.com.

Photo by Joshua Asante

Green signs loom over I-80, beckoning us towards Omaha; it’s difficult not to exit downtown to the Courtyard Marriott, tell them we want our old room so we could pretend we’re still new at this. I could still get butterflies when he emerges from the bathroom in a shirt and tie, flash-forwarding to the man this boyfriend might become; I could take a shower, examining the suck-marks on my sore body with ecstasy, the proof of a desire I believe is permanent; he could take me to The French Café where I’d purr like a raccoon, us drinking cappuccinos by the fireplace, sneaking our hands under the table and between each other’s legs; we could be nineteen and so new in love we can’t stop looking at each other and grinning.

We scoop up and over hills, loping and bounding westward past clusters of farmhouses that make me remember a life I once thought I wanted.

But we’re older now, bound for the grit and grub of a campground, turning off the interstate and driving down small Nebraska roads. We scoop up and over hills, loping and bounding westward past clusters of farmhouses that make me remember a life I once thought I wanted. I get a little panicky that this road is map-colored the gray of gravel and isolation as we turn into the state park where we’ll camp.

We drive past a series of algae-clogged manmade lakes named 1, 1A, 2, 2A, 3. The grandma who took my $15 at the head of the campground promised nothing more offensive than a skunk or a deer, but I can’t shake the fear that a bear has rambled its way across the state, is hiding in the thin patches of trees marking the edges of the campground, so I pick a site near the center of the grounds, making sure other tents will barricade us, just in case.

We brought no firewood or matches, so we drive to the gas station and I refuse to go inside, preferring the air-conditioned car, watching the Dodge-driving high-school football player pull up next to our Saturn, sidle into the gas station, come back clutching a Dasani, and back his truck down the road before my angry boyfriend bursts out with a cord of firewood and a whole paper-covered box of Winston matches. “I had to buy this fucking thing,” he storms, tossing the box of two hundred matchbooks onto my lap. $2.19 is outrageous for something we could have gotten for free, I argue, because he totally should have just gotten a single matchbook up at the register. We yell the whole way back through the campground, the windows rolled up: he says there weren’t any single matchbooks, I contend that we could have borrowed two fucking matches from someone else at the campground, he snarls that he’s sure I would have asked someone to borrow matches when he’s never even seen me call a pizza place in the two years we’ve been dating, that’s fine, whatever, I’m sure we need two hundred fucking books of matches.

We promised the grandma we wouldn’t drink alcohol on the premises, but as the sun starts to set and he runs to the river to take pink-and-orange-scarred photographs, I uncap a Rolling Rock and camouflage the green bottle behind the green gas burner as I pat a hamburger, trying to wipe away the unbudging fat with one of the three napkins we scrounged from the glovebox. I wait for him to come back and fry the burgers, bees crawling in the burger-blood no matter how worriedly I flap at them.

In the gloaming, a flashlight trained on our napkin-plates, I build prairie dreams, remarking how skillfully I’d picked a good campsite, how we’re eating a great dinner of chips, Oreos, and homemade burgers, dreams rapidly dissipating when we can’t even build a campfire, and I snidely poke at him, trying to give advice that wouldn’t be useful even if he’d let me get it out. I sulk in a lawn chair, watching the stars poetically as he swears and snorts until a little plume of smoke gets started and I remind him that the fire probably wouldn’t have started without the twigs and branches that I collected, but that’s okay, whatever, it’s finally working, right.

But the kindling refuses to take off, and we bicker around the charred firewood that’s haphazardly towering inside our fire pit; the family to our north roasts marshmallows and the kids run around with burning branches, excited; angry, we unstick all the burrs from our fur and hurl them at each other, remember when we used to be in love, remember when we didn’t use to fight all the time, we are in love!, don’t you know why we’re fighting, and I start crying, pull my hood over my eyes and crawl into the tent, I’m going to sleep.

We break camp by the Platte, the brilliant oranges in the sky reflecting in the shallow riverbed, little mudlets choking the flowing water, morning coffee on the gas burner and our soft sighs of comfort as we reconcile inside the zippered double sleeping bag, spooning like two raccoons.

I turn on my side and refuse to touch him when he finally enters the tent after enough time has elapsed to show me he isn’t caving. I have a dream that makes my stomach drop out, even in my sleep, and it scares me so much that even when I wake up to him ripping open the tent zipper to piss right outside the tent, I don’t yell at him for peeing somewhere I’m going to have to step in the morning; it is a bite on my tongue I can sustain.

We break camp by the Platte, the brilliant oranges in the sky reflecting in the shallow riverbed, little mudlets choking the flowing water, morning coffee on the gas burner and our soft sighs of comfort as we reconcile inside the zippered double sleeping bag, spooning like two raccoons. We disassemble the tent, the morning air breathing humidly under my hair, the slot-machine shower flushing hot and cold, and I walk in my wet clothes hand-in-hand with him, the rest of the world waking up while we drive out of the campground, sputtering past last night’s roadkill, speeding past the signs for downtown Omaha in the rearview, one hundred and ninety-nine books of matches in the glovebox.

 

Kristine Langley Mahler has recently published nonfiction (or has work forthcoming) in Quarter After Eight, Sweet: A Literary Confection, The Bitter Southerner, the Brevity nonfiction blog, and Crab Orchard Review, where her work was awarded the 2016 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award. She is a nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel, an assistant editor at Profane Journal, and a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Today: “Ms. Rolfe, are you dying?” This isn’t the first time a student has asked me this after I had a coughing fit in class. In fact, I get asked this all the time. Too often. And I’m used to it. But today, I am hanging on by a thread. I have trouble walking up the stairs. Today, when I got to the top, I was so winded I was seeing stars, and for a minute everything inside me was hard, immovable, like the air was made of liquid steel. It’s only ten steps, but it’s fucking hard. Now my thighs ache, and my breath is shallow. I don’t feel well. I can’t go home sick because there’s a standardized test coming up, and my inattentive students need to do well. I want them to graduate. I want them to move beyond this class and learn how to actually think and be good citizens. I must power through. It’s important because I don’t want to look weak. I do not want to be a liability. But when one of my best students asks this question and another snickers and says under her breath, “Daaaamn, that doesn’t sound good. She might be,” I snap. I just snap. And I snap on a kid who really, really doesn’t deserve it. I say, “Yes, actually, I am dying.” And I don’t leave it at that. I continue, “Would you say that to someone who had cancer? I mean, have you ever really thought about how rude that question is? Like, what if the person is dying?” My student is stunned. He is stunned because I don’t often talk about the fact that I am, indeed, dying. That I’ve been dying for a decade. And that I might be dying for another decade.

2007: I have a fourth-period conference that runs into lunch. I have three office aides who are my best students. They edit the newspaper and yearbook. I love these girls. I see one of them four times a day. She stops by my classroom in the morning, eats lunch with me, and takes two of my classes. She has her aunt’s old Cure records, and I quickly realize a few months into the school year that we are cut from the same weirdo cloth. We watch Strong Bad videos together. She makes a video project for my photojournalism class to M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” and I think if I had a daughter, I would want her to be this kid. I’m in a bad, abusive relationship. I am sick and damaged and they miss their fun teacher. I feel like crap all the time. I am losing weight. I’m miserable and exhausted. The moping, scattered mess I’ve become is starting to scare my students and they assume it’s boyfriend trouble. They are teenagers and they always assume it’s a boy. I even think it’s about a boy. However, what I don’t know yet is that it isn’t just the boyfriend making me depressed and exhausted and sick. My boyfriend thinks I am faking being sick so he won’t leave me for the hairdresser who, I learn from a barely readable message she sends me, can’t even spell liar. He thinks I am exaggerating the seriousness of the situation. And the whole time, I am not focused on the fact that I might have a terminal illness. I am more concerned with being able to prove him wrong and make him feel like shit—because, you know, that’s what’s really important. Then one morning during that fourth-period conference, my pulmonologist calls to discuss the results of my genetic test. Before he gets into it, I mention that the lab called the day before and said that the sweat test was negative, but he responds by saying, “Well, it doesn’t matter because the genetic test turned up two different cystic fibrosis gene mutations.” He says that usually people have two copies of the same gene, but I have two different genes that cause CF, and one is extremely rare. He calls my CF atypical, and I cling to this word for years. I will think it means that the CF I have is somehow different than the CF that I’ve read about—the one that causes people to die by my age. For years, my CF will exist somewhere in the background. I begin treatment for an infection in my lungs that has been slowly destroying my health for the past few years. And for a long time, I feel better.

When I finally cut that abusive boyfriend loose for good, one of the last things he yells at me is, “Who’s going to love the dying girl?”

2008 or so: When I finally cut that abusive boyfriend loose for good, one of the last things he yells at me is, “Who’s going to love the dying girl?” But I don’t think of myself that way, or at least not yet. Years later, these words will bubble up again, and they will be more painful than they were at the time they were spoken. Now that I know I have CF, I do some research, and while what I learn should be scary, it’s not, because I realize I can’t possibly have the same disease as these people I’m reading about. I’m atypical. I don’t take hundreds of pills—just five or six. I have inhalers but not nebulizers. I have no idea what this vest contraption is that people keep talking about online, and when I read about doing hours of treatments a day, I have no concept of what that’s like because I don’t do any treatments. I take my antibiotics, and I use my inhaler, but other than that, life is pretty much the same as it always has been.

2013: I began my teaching career at a Title I school where sixty-five percent of the students are classified as economically disadvantaged or “at risk.” Most of my students do not speak English as their native language, and since I teach English, this makes my job a challenge. My last year at this school, eighty-nine out of my 120 students do not pass their standardized test, and now I’ll have to prepare them for not only their ninth-grade test but their tenth-grade test as well. What they want me to do is impossible, but I try anyway because I love my students. I want them to graduate and have opportunities. But I am tired, and I am starting to realize that I am sicker than I used to be. One day after school, one of my coworkers, who confuses my thick-skin and blunt manner for a lack of feelings, says to me, “My students keep asking me who’s going to die first, you or McDonald,” meaning a coworker who is planning on retiring at the end of the year because of prolonged illness. And in that moment, I understand that perhaps I look as run-down as I feel and that maybe my coughing, though normal and routine for me, is jarring for others. Two days later, my school district announces that it is switching to some state-sponsored health insurance and that if I want actual coverage, it will cost me $425 a month out of my own pocket. The union has plans to protest, but I am scared shitless. A week later, I go to see my pulmonologist, and he says that he wants me to get established at the transplant center in San Antonio. My pulmonary function tests are showing a decline. And after requesting these test results for the past few years and doing more online research, I realize that my rate of decline is concerning. I’m getting close to the transplant range. I make the appointment. I start looking for a job in a district with better health insurance. And then I join a CF forum because the only person I know who has had a lung transplant is dead.

Thoughts that regularly occurred between 2013 and 2015: A lung transplant is considered a success if the patient lives one year post-transplant. I know this from Gregory. His transplant went down in the books as a success. But he died one year and one month later, and in my mind, it was not a success because my friend is dead, and I need him now. Most CF patients live five years post-transplant.

At first, at my new job, I do not tell anyone that I have cystic fibrosis. Mentioning this while applying for a teaching position would’ve hurt my chances of getting a job.

2014: At first, at my new job, I do not tell anyone that I have cystic fibrosis. Mentioning this while applying for a teaching position would’ve hurt my chances of getting a job. Later, I tell a few coworkers, but I still don’t want to tell my boss until I’ve proven myself. One day during my first year at this new school, a man approaches me in the copy room and pulls me aside to talk to in confidence. He says, “I know this is a weird question, but do you have cystic fibrosis?” He explains that he heard there was a new English teacher with CF and that his daughter has it. We talk for a while. He suggests I contact the CF clinic at Dell Children’s Hospital, where his daughter is a patient. I realize at the end of the conversation that this man looked at me and recognized that I had CF. I look like I have CF.

2014: I’m in the hospital for IV meds. The infection I had for years is gone, but now I have pseudomonas. I know from my CF forum that this is common, and while not the worst bug you can get, it’s hard to shake. I’ve been quietly lurking on the CF forum for a while now, and I’m starting to realize that I am indeed atypical, but perhaps not in the ways I thought. I slowly begin to understand from stalking profiles and gleaning information from posts that there is no such thing as atypical CF, or rather there is, but in general all CF is different. It’s a disease that affects no two people exactly the same. Some die at thirty, and some live into their seventies, and no doctor can tell you what will happen. They can’t tell you how long you will live or how you will respond to a transplant, if you can have children or not, or even how long you’ll be able to work with the disease. One study I find on the internet says that atypical CF, while once believed to be a milder form of the disease, can actually just be a later onset of the disease that affects mostly one organ, and unfortunately for you, it’s the lung. The one you need to breathe—the most basic life-sustaining function. When my coworkers come to visit me at the hospital, I take them to the mini-kitchen for ice cream. I get to order hospital food like it’s room service, and so I don’t mind being here. I keep saying that it’s like a very boring all-inclusive resort.

Six months later in 2014: At the transplant hospital, they forget about me for two hours. This is my third visit, and my lung function has dropped to thirty-five percent. The respiratory therapist, who is an asshole, grills me about why I don’t go to a CF clinic. He asks why I don’t do the usual treatments that most CF patients do, and then he gives me the hard sell on going to the CF clinic that’s opening in San Antonio. Later, when I see the transplant doctor, he also gives me the hard sell for a lung transplant. I can tell he wants me to get one because he thinks I’ll be good for their success rates. I’m young(ish) and healthy(ish). I still go to work. I still function like a relatively normal person, but my lung is indeed damaged and only getting worse. When I leave, I decide I’m never going back. I don’t want to be sold a transplant. I don’t give a fuck about their success rates. If I get a new lung, I will be out of work, and I’m not going to stop working unless I’m near death. Odds be damned. If I can’t teach, I don’t know who I am. But things are bad enough that I’m finally very afraid I’m going to die, and so I call the CF clinic. I also finally tell my boss. When I tell my pulmonologist I am leaving him for the CF clinic, it feels like a breakup. At the clinic, they give me the vest. I get the nebulizer, and I am put on the typical treatment regimen.

2015: I am going back into the hospital for the second summer in a row. I’ll be getting my first PICC line. And since I still have exactly zero friends with CF, I Google the process, and I’m freaked-the-fuck-out. Websites describe needles and long tubes that go into a peripheral vein and are then guided toward one of the central veins near the heart where blood flows more quickly. They mention the use of ultrasound machines to find the vein. The night before I go into the hospital, I get drunk with my coworkers. I’m facing two weeks of being connected to tubes and drugs and probably no booze. And this realization actually scares me more than the poking and prodding does.

Somewhere deep inside I can still feel a visceral denial coursing through me. Because this has always been my problem—dealing with the admission that I am dying, or seriously ill, in any real sort of way. It’s the denial that allows me to skip treatments in favor of watching the love arc of Naomi and Max on 90210. It’s the denial that never fills my inhaler prescriptions because I would rather spend twenty-five dollars on booze than on albuterol. And I am pretty sure that denial was in full force the night I decided to smoke a clove at a Queers concert despite knowing the probable consequences. (That night I coughed up so much blood that I texted a photo of it to my boyfriend for confirmation that it was, in fact, a disconcerting amount of blood.) The denial comes in waves, but it’s always there. Until something happens and my body forces me to reckon with the reality of its limitations.

Today: I am almost forty, and I’m standing in front of my students—all of them born since the turn of the century—losing my shit over a dumb “are you dying” joke. Which is stupid because I’ve never had trouble with the admission that I am dying when I need it for dramatic or comic effect—mostly when I return home for a visit and my family seems both unrecognizable and unaware that I am visiting for only a short time and forces me to do things I do not want to do, like a family gathering where I don’t actually know anyone they’ve invited. Sometimes I use it when I am pissed off at a friend or ex-boyfriend and I want to make him feel like shit for ignoring me for the last decade, or when a coworker is complaining about something petty and I want to be morbid to freak her out because I am bored of teacher talk. Sometimes I use it to segue into a particularly inappropriate comment or as an excuse for one. Sometimes I whip it out in lieu of an apology. More often than not, it’s the reason I give for canceling plans or being late to work.

But today, I can’t deal with jokes. I am too tired, and the walk up those ten steps felt like it was killing me

But today, I can’t deal with jokes. I am too tired, and the walk up those ten steps felt like it was killing me. I have told my students bits and pieces about my illness before. I have even said at times that I have cystic fibrosis, but they are fifteen, and they don’t know what it is, and even more important, they can’t fathom that the person who stands in front of them every day bitching at them to pay attention or proofread could actually die. But I am dying, and I spend a good portion of my life either trying to acknowledge that fact in some sort of authentic way so I don’t waste time—reminding myself that to do good in the world and make the most of life and all that shit—or trying to ignore it. And when I cough, and I do indeed feel like I’m fucking dying, and the chorus of apathetic teenagers keeps saying what I’m hearing in my head—“You’re dying”—I snap. And then I am sorry. I am sorry not only because I feel bad for making them feel bad but also because I have said over and over again to anyone who will listen that I would teach until my last dying breath, and right now I feel like a liar. I am an imposter. Most days, I don’t feel sick enough for that statement to be true without a qualifier. And, to be honest, I have more important shit to think about. Because fuck that. I’m not the dying girl. I’m Ms. Rolfe.

 

Bree A. Rolfe lives in Austin, TX, where she teaches writing and literature to the mostly reluctant, but always lovable, teenagers at James Bowie High School. She is originally from Boston, Massachusetts, where she worked as a music journalist for ten years before she decided she wanted to dedicate her life to writing poetry and teaching. Her work has appeared in Saul Williams’ poetry anthology Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, the Barefoot Muse anthology Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer’s, the Redpaint Hill anthology Mother is a Verb, and 5AMMagazine. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.​​

Photo by Cynthia L. Miller