You shift on M’s bed to sit cross-legged, a little closer to her. Her hair is creeping into a mullet, the kind that sneaks up on you during the grow-out. Candlelight paints her leg hairs gold. You watch her gesture with her slender, marker-stained fingers, watch the words tumble from her lips and flit before you like a hummingbird.

M. tells you the Greeks have three words for love. Eros, as one loves a lover. Philia, as one loves a friend. Agape, as one loves a God. 

Outside the canvas tent, coyotes scream to an impassive moon.

---

You met M. in a class your junior year of college. You spoke a handful of times, but these conversations aren’t what you remember. What you remember is seeing her across the dance floor at a student band performance around Christmas. They were playing “Sunday Candy,” and you were swaying with your boyfriend, who stood behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist.

Now, you think that she must have been dancing, but you only remember catching her eye, the way she held your gaze, her smile, almost a smirk.

After graduating, you remained connected only by the tenuous, erratic thread of your Facebook feeds. You saw that she moved to Philadelphia. That she shaved her head. Then, she didn’t post for a long time. There are some people that the mind relinquishes easily, like ripe fruit off the vine. There are others that, for reasons inexplicable, cling there long after the harvest.

---

Six years later, you wind up working on the same vegetable farm in the Pacific Northwest. You get there in June, and she arrives in July. You go there because you have been flying too close to the sun and think you need to spend some time on the ground, bent low with your hands in the earth.

What happened was this: You were 25 when you were diagnosed with lymphoma. When you were 27 and your hair had regrown past your ears, you read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and concluded it was your civic duty to pursue your authentic “yes,” to carpe the fuck out of the diem. So you quit your government job and broke up with your boyfriend and booked a flight to Colombia.

You see, you wanted to live on your edge: to scream and dance and fuck and let your heart bleed. To dissolve the boundaries of your reality and stare into the chasm. This way, you wouldn’t ever forget your mortality. This way, you wouldn’t arrive at the end of your life like a sleepwalker stirring at sunset. 

You intended to travel for a year. But a few months in, the fear of dying caught up to you. So you went to an Ayahuasca retreat where maggots crawled out of your skin and you burned up in flames and met God and understood what it would be like to die. It would be blissful, a coming home. You left thinking you had transcended your fear of death. But then you fell inexplicably ill with what the doctors thought might be the cancer and you blazed out of the sky.

It wasn’t the cancer. But then, this: You were back in the States with no home and no job and no idea what to do. You had fallen off the edge.

Hence, the farm: room and board and a purpose.

---

There are seven of you on the farm: four young workers and a family of three. The four of you live separately on the property and cook meals in the main house. You live in a tiny shack near the compost pile and M. lives twenty paces away in a big canvas tent, in a clearing where you will later slaughter a goat and have a dance party on grass still wet with blood.

M. strikes you as intense and sensitive, palpably fragile. She alludes to histories of trauma and neglect and abandonment. She came to the farm to heal, too.

M. speaks earnestly about energy healing and chakras and Spirit—the sorts of things you feel both curious about and skeptical of. You were raised by staunch atheists but in the past few years you have started to wonder if there isn’t more to the “energy of the universe” thing than you thought. You go to Burning Man and do breathwork meditation and dance barefoot in your yard, but you also use LinkedIn and buy things on Amazon and listen to Ezra Klein rather religiously. 

M.’s first week, you teach her to prune tomatoes: how to choose one or two promising stems to trellis and prune the rest. At first this feels like butchery, but then you learn it’s more like mercy. Unpruned plants lack airflow and grow vulnerable to disease; they also over-invest energy in their foliage, producing fewer and smaller fruits. You both agree this is good advice for life: Invest energy in a few important things and prune the excess. It’s not something you’ve ever been good at. Commitment to any one thing feels too much like death.

M. prunes slowly, handling the branches like a tentative lover. When she clips a main stem by mistake, she gasps and bows her head before its severed spine like a widow at a gravestone. By evening, she looks like a child after a long day of play: knees muddied, pale face marbled with dirt, sandy hair spooled around sticks. You think that you have never seen somebody look so peaceful.

---

After work most days, M. changes into a blue one-piece and hurries to her car, a ratty sarong draped over her shoulders. It’s one of the only occasions that she moves with something like impatience: on her way to go swimming. Her wheels churn up gravel as she backs out from under the apple tree and careens down the road toward the lake. When she returns hours later, her skin is dry and rosy, her face serene.

M. feels to you like a river: one moment bubbling with fast-flowing fervor; the next, languishing in brooding eddies. She surrenders to the swell of these currents in a way you rarely do: She ripples her shoulders, shakes her hands, blows air through her lips like a horse. She screams her frustration, dances her joy. When she laughs, she covers her mouth with three fingers while her eyes roll up into her head in pleasure—as if she just ate something delightfully decadent, as if she’s thinking, if only you knew. Some days, she spends the whole day in bed because she’s so sad. You have never been so sad that you couldn’t get out of bed. You have never even considered that this was an option.

One night at dusk, M. runs with a bowl of grain yelling “COOOOME ON,” as you bring the goats back to their pen from the pasture. She is running in front of the herd and you are behind, trying to ensure Trixie doesn’t stop to chomp on the flowers, and you are both squealing, stumbling over the uneven ground and feeling the breath of night on your cheeks. You hate this chore and you usually do it alone, but right now she’s laughing and so are you, and you’re marveling that she’s doing this in flip-flops, which you would never do.

“Cinnamon is my nemesis,” you say as you watch the goats jostling in their pen afterwards, referring to the alpha goat who always bullies the others out of the grain. “Oh! I love her,” M. responds, “I love her the way…that you love something! You know? It doesn’t matter what they do, you just love them.”

You feel slightly ashamed, and you look at Cinnamon again and reconsider. You want to love things like this, too.

---

Like you, M. is a writer. She writes about swimming in the ocean in winter. She says that while others dive under without hesitation, she wades in slowly, gripping her belly, her breasts. She wonders why she must draw out the entry, why she can’t just throw herself under. She says, “I realize it’s the initial transition into the known unknown. The choosing, leaning into, surrendering to—abyss.” 

At her suggestion, you start a two-person writing group.

That first night, you walk to her tent with your computer, your heart like the hoofbeats of goats running out to the pasture. The canvas tent is musty and dark and cartoonishly large to contain just her bed and the two of you. She lights candles and you sit on the edge of her bed while she reads you a piece about a female pleasure ritual that she attended. She’s obsessed with rituals, with processing grief and honoring growth and reclaiming power.

Her voice is like straw: wispy and stiff. She clears her throat. Whispers “sorry,” her cheeks pink like sunrise. She starts reading again and her voice strengthens as she recounts grinding her hips, awakening her erotic animal. You close your eyes because you can’t focus on the words with them open. You keep your face still, feel your heart quicken. You don’t want her to ever stop reading because then you will have to say something.

Later that night, she texts you a piece she wrote about grief. Grieving her childhood, her unrealized potential, her young body. In it, there is an old photo of her with her top off. She’s wearing high-waisted tights and nothing else, and she holds her hair as she spins toward the camera. Her breasts are like bright little moons and you can’t take your eyes off them.

---

Partway through the summer, you and your long-distance boyfriend break up during a weekend away from the farm. “Boyfriend” and “break-up” are both the wrong terms: You were together then apart then together and then you left to go traveling. He’s the kind of person who folds his clothes right after they come out of the dryer and keeps up with bike maintenance. He shaved your head and read you Harry Potter while you were sick. He’s kind and funny and safe and you always felt like something was missing.

You can’t commit, and so you relinquish. It’s soft and sad. A halting pair of shears taken to a bright green stem. You return to the farm on a Sunday and M. is cooking zucchini fritters for community dinner. The kitchen is full of people and crackling oil and laughter and she sees your face and holds her arms out. You fall into them.

---

“What do you desire?” M. asks you one day at the lake, her amber eyes boring into yours like midday sunbeams. She invited you to come swimming, and you feel as though you’ve been granted entry into a realm that is secret and sacred. 

You close your eyes and pause, the way her presence allows. “To feel connected,” you say. “To belong somewhere I feel seen, where I have a purpose.” You open your eyes and look at her, your face a question. “What do you desire?” The words feel thrilling, forbidden. You don’t think you have ever spoken them aloud before. Want, yes, but desire? Want is a child holding out a palm for a Tootsie Roll. Desire is an arching back, a thrumming pulse, heat pooling under the tongue.

She sighs. “To roll around on the ground. To play! I just want to play.” She sinks back and leans on her hands and you have the surprising and overwhelming urge to tackle her to the ground. To show her you can play.

Instead, you listen while she recounts a theater production she once saw where the friends on stage stuffed Oreos into one-another’s mouths and they all had Oreo spit dripping down their chins and she said that was what she wanted life to be like: messy, intimate, covered in Oreo spit. “People here,” she says, “They’re not like this. They’re gray. They choose comfort and practicality over color and self-expression, boundaries over connection. They’re allergic to physical touch.” 

You wonder if M. perceives you as gray. You hope she doesn’t, but you picture yourself shoving a handful of Oreos into her mouth and it pains you how out of character it would be. You feel like an artist who has spent twenty-eight years sculpting a masterpiece and now you want to smash it to bits and start over, and in your mind you are pulling your hair, punching through plaster, screaming and throwing tools at the walls. But to M.’s eye you are just sitting there with your hands in your lap, your face cloaked and impassive.

---

The farm holds a talent show and M. asks to borrow your black pants for her costume. She wears them with a suit coat and a white button-up and paints her face like a French mime, complete with a pencil moustache. She has you record her performance, which is a theatrical interpretation of a French song about a woman in grief. Her commitment to every emotion and movement is so complete that you feel in equal measure embarrassed for and in awe of her.

When it’s your turn, you approach the stage to read a series of haikus you have written about farm life. But simply reading them seems dull in the wake of her performance, so you spontaneously decide to also interpret them with your body. You perform the first one, which is about getting attacked by the rooster, and M. laughs and claps her hands in delight. You feel giddy.

Another coworker announces a surprise lip sync performance of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” Everyone joins in for several Les Mis tracks, and you close the evening beating your chests with the fervor of the French revolution, and crumpled under the weight of Fantine’s broken dreams.

---

While harvesting sweet onions one afternoon, M. mentions a friend, a woman she fell for at a music festival. She speaks about this woman’s beauty, about their chemistry on the dance floor and about sudden, overwhelming desire. Your stomach twists with envy.

You tell her about women you’ve had crushes on too, but you say that you’ve always been too scared to act. You don’t look at her as you say this, instead focusing on cleaning an onion. You grasp the outermost stalk and pull it down toward the bulb, carefully sloughing off the withered slime to reveal the gleaming, virgin flesh underneath.

---

At a backyard party you attend with M., she starts dancing before there is music. When you turn on a speaker, she throws herself on the ground and performs a dramatic floor routine to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover.” She crawls and rolls and arches her back, coating the pair of your pants she has borrowed with grass. Then suddenly you are on the ground with her, and as the bass thumps and the party swirls you feel strangely unselfconscious—not as though no one is watching but rather as though everyone is, and that what they are seeing is you together with M.

On the bike ride home, M. doesn’t have a bike light so you ride behind her, and she is delighted by the shadow projected onto the trees, her figure a hundred times larger than life. When you get back to the farm, she wants to go see the bioluminescence down at the beach. It’s late and you’re exhausted, but you say “Let’s go!” after weighing your want for sleep with your desire to keep spending time with M. She gets a mug of strawberry ice cream and you climb into her car and put on “Fill it up Again” by the Indigo Girls.

At the beach, you strip down to your underwear. You aren’t wearing a bra, and you hesitate for a moment before peeling your halter top off and walking to the water’s edge. Your toes curl as they cross the icy threshold, gripping smooth pebbles and shards of shells.

In the shallows, the bioluminescence is faint, but as you wade out farther you find yourself in a glittering galaxy. You take a deep breath and dive into the darkness, into the light.

It’s the kind of cold that knocks all the breath from your lungs and wrings screams from your marrow. When you surface, you try to take control of your breath. You inhale through your nose and then push slow, shuddering exhales through pursed lips. After a few breaths, you relax into the cold and stroke out into the starry expanse.

“You have to see how cool that looks!” M. squeals. She braces herself and eases into the water, gasping. Swimming, she looks like a glowing sea creature, some mystical being. She swims out past you and dissolves into the night. 

Now numb with the cold, you swim back to the shallows. You stand and scan the horizon nervously, seeing nothing.

“Sara?” she says after a couple of minutes, the sound so small in the vastness. “Here,” you say, your voice cracking.

As you swim back to the shore, you notice a figure watching you from the beach. Your breath catches. You imagine a beach-goer discovering your naked bodies in the morning, your skin cold and necks slit with a knife. “There’s someone there,” you hiss.

“Hello?” M. calls out, her voice friendly and fearless.

“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to be creepy,” says the figure, their speech slightly formal and stilted. It’s a teenage girl, and the relief leaves you dizzy.

“Are you guys dating?” she asks once you have both waded out of the water and stand shivering, coated in salty gooseflesh. You say nothing, and the pause swells like a balloon that might lift into the sky. “No,” M. finally answers, laughing a little. Why the laugh? The balloon pops and splutters. “No,” you repeat quickly. 

“Oh,” says the girl.

You ride back to the farm in silence. When M. pulls into the gravel lot, she turns off the engine and you sit there together in the spaciousness. It’s the moment you have had before with so many men, when the engine dies and in the silence the car is charged with the energy of potential. You look at each other. “Oops, the mug,” she says, pointing. The strawberry ice cream. It’s tipped over. You pick it up. Your mind is buzzing and blank but you manage, “We ate enough so it didn’t spill.” The moment, if it is a moment, passes and you both turn away and climb out of the car.

---

M.’s ecstasies are cut with her melancholies. She grows anxious and moody. She mourns being wronged by old lovers and gets caught in spirals of victimhood. She was supposed to be an artist, she says, and she resents never having the support from her family to pursue it. She feels judged and misunderstood. She feels tortured by the evils and apathies of the world. She feels perpetually abandoned. She feels that years of her life have been lost, that she is 28 with no career to speak of, just disparate clues leading in different directions. She feels that the strength of her passions and desires is unmatched by the people around her. She wants to move to New York, where people know creativity, or to France, where they know pleasure. 

You can’t relate to much of this, and you think that this is the point: She doesn’t believe anyone can. But you are particularly unsuited to the task. You have never felt abandoned; you feel loved by your family; you tend toward optimism and forgive easily; you have had your share of hardship, but you have also been lucky. You don’t doubt the extent of her suffering, but you also don’t know how to hold her bitterness.

---

Near the end of the summer, M. goes on a vision quest in the mountains and fasts for four days. When she arrives home, feathers are strewn across the floor of her tent, likely the work of a cat. An intact bird heart sits in the middle. It’s still red and wet and alive-looking, and you think you have never seen a heart laid bare like that. She squeals and recoils so you pick it up with a paper towel, feeling the blood moisten your finger pads. You carry it out of the tent and throw it into the compost pile.

Later, you look up “why does cat not eat bird heart?”

The internet says that some do. It depends on the cat, and on the heart. You suppose this makes sense: Not every cat is prepared to take on every heart.

---

Come fall, M. finishes her term on the farm and moves into a nearby apartment. You have said nothing to her about how you feel. You convince yourself that you are better as friends. You indulge your desire only in dreams.

One evening, she comes over because she wants you to show her a breathwork meditation. It’s October and freezing but she’s wearing a flowered, royal blue dress that swishes against her thighs and scoops low on her chest. Her fingernails are sparkly and her hair is drawn into a half ponytail that sprouts from her head like a broccoli. You’re wearing long underwear and an oversized red knit turtleneck.

You roll out two yoga mats and lie down side by side on the wood floor. You turn on your speaker and start the meditation. The audio guides you through rhythmic breathing and breath-holds, and you breathe together as the familiar buzzing energy builds in your body. At the end, the energy climaxes and explodes into bliss, like a full-body orgasm. After, you roll on your side to look at her.

“How was that for you?” you ask.

“Good,” she says.

Her face is strange, charged with something you can’t decipher. It has the quality of a foggy, rain-soaked window, transparent but impossible to see through clearly. She isn’t crying but you think she might, that perhaps she didn’t like the meditation or that some trauma has resurfaced, and you are already qualifying, saying, “This isn’t my favorite one, I forget that it goes a little too fast…” you trail off. She doesn’t respond.

Then she says, “Don’t be mad,” and she leans in close, opens her mouth and devours you.

Her lips on yours are eager and hot and your mind is blank except for the word yes, and your tongue finds hers and your hands seem to work on their own, finding her waist, her hair, her chest, as you draw her closer, inhale her.

You have never been with a lover so soft. Everything is circles and curves. She kisses all over you slowly, exploring your neck, your ribs, your wrists. She kneels and takes your foot gently against her shoulder, puts your big toe in her mouth. 

Tasting her, you’re reminded of iron and moonlight. You find that being with her feels like play, like you’re two cubs rolling through the grass. After, she texts you: “Words are eluding me.”

Then,

“ok they’re coming now

You’re beautiful

You’re beautiful

You’re beautiful”

---

After you sleep with M., your infatuation inexplicably melts into a kind of peace. 

She says that for her, your physical intimacy is like another layer of friendship. Though your ego bruises, you’re also relieved. Maybe because you knew that to date M. would be to conflate chemistry and compatibility. Because you would have resented chasing her kite string, would have resented always being the one on the ground.

You see M. a couple more times, but shortly thereafter you move away and gradually fall out of touch. But you still read her blog, where she writes about surrendering to ocean depths and about a girl becoming fire. She writes about her ex. She writes about her boss, a man who she falls in love with but can never tell. You scour her blog for clues of you, but you find none. You suppose that no one writes about the ones who chase the kite, who lend the pants, who shave the sickly heads. 

Still, you think that you loved M. a little like a friend, and a lover, and a god. But something else was truer: You loved her in the way of breathwork and solo traveling and Burning Man. She made you feel alive. 

She was an edge, where the world yawned below and you felt like if you leapt you might just fly.

But you’re learning that the edge is often rendered equally in light and shadow. You’re learning that the fullness of a shape emerges not only from its edges, but from the spaciousness contained within—from the nothing that is also everything. Not just when the sun trumpets over mountaintops or blazes like pink fire atop oceanic glitter, but when it hangs languid at midday. When time unfurls like a green tomato yellowing: unhurried, unremarkable, unwasted.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Orienting yourself to the new landscape: After leaving JFK Airport, look out the car window as you zoom along the enormously wide, open roads you’ve seen only in American movies and in the photographs your father sent with his letters. Notice that one hour passes, then another, and still you have not encountered one single traffic light. Do not get unsettled. This is called a highway.

When you look out the kitchen window of your new apartment, you will not see the familiar twelve-story bloks with colorful balconies looming all around; there will be no more view of the distant Baltic Sea. Instead, you will have to adjust to the sight of a squat, red-brick apartment building a stone’s throw from your own. Put a Pop Tart in the toaster, and when it’s done, sit with your back to the window.

Over the next few weeks, prepare to have your senses bombarded. You will find that everything in America is different—from the bright green street signs and the postal vans and the squirrels scampering outside, to the sound of lawn mowers on Sunday mornings, to the hot humid days and the hum of the air conditioning unit in your apartment. You will be introduced to crinkly packages of chewy, sugary gummy worms. The sickly sweet smell of the laundry detergent that snakes up your nose and chokes you.

Try not to listen in on the adults’ conversations, because otherwise, you will learn that there are people and places to avoid in America, like the church down the street from Babcia’s apartment, which isn’t Catholic, or the neighborhood where the Portorykanie live. You will learn to fear. You will learn that Americans are so free they have the right to shoot you if you trespass onto their property. Images of shooting scenes from movies you accidentally glimpsed will flash through your mind. You will walk past the houses with their neatly manicured lawns, wondering which of them has a gun somewhere inside it.

And when you see your mother sitting on a tree stump in Babcia’s backyard, her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking, freeze. Briefly make eye contact when she lifts her head. See the skin she moisturizes nightly with dollops of Nivea cream; register the red splotches now covering it. Quickly slink away. Coming to America was supposed to be a good thing, so pretend this never happened. 

---

On the first day of school: Put on your Catholic school uniform while buzzing bees swarm under your skin, and in your stomach the alphabet cereal with marshmallow swirls. While your mother drives you down the streets of your new American city, practice the four English phrases you know: My name is Magda; Thank you; I’m sorry; I don’t speak English. 

When you arrive, try not to get overwhelmed by the loud, pullulating mass of red plaid in front of the building. Keep your eyes focused somewhere between the ground and the curious faces as you and your mother attempt to locate your teacher. She is young and has a kind face, and although you cannot understand what she is saying, her voice is gentle, falling onto you like soft snowflakes. She calls a few names across the parking lot and soon three girls appear. “Cześć,” they say to you in Polish with smiles. The buzzing bees underneath your skin settle. 

Do not panic when your mother leaves you. Fall into line and allow yourself to be led into the building, down the creaky wooden floors to your third-grade classroom. Marvel at how there is a space inside your wooden desk for all the heavy textbooks your teacher hands out. Gaze through the window when the principal’s voice sounds from the intercom, rough like the sponges your mother washes pots and pans with after dinner each night.    

Sit up straight. The first activity is beginning; one of the Polish girls explains to you what it is. Watch your new American classmates go up to the front of the room one by one, and listen politely as they relate what they did over summer vacation. Try to pick out words you might know from their monologues. Pretend the boy with dimples is telling everyone about riding his bike in the woods, or that the girl with curly hair and glasses is talking about going swimming. When your interest wanes, sneak peaks at the children sitting nearby. Try to figure out who you might want to be friends with. Try not to picture the faces of your classmates back home. 

 When the teacher calls your name, with the a inside all stretched out like a guma that’s lost its elasticity and can no longer be used for Chinese jump rope, look up and freeze—but do not think to disobey. You are a good Polish girl who knows her manners and respects her elders. You’ve been taught well. Ignore your dry throat and your queasy stomach and your legs like cooked noodles as you make your way between the rows of desks. Frantically sift through the images of summer flashing in your mind: the excitement of the flight to America; the time you, your mother, and older sister took a shortcut through a cemetery to get to the lake and almost got lost; the picnic organized by the factory where your father works, with Coca-Cola and hot dogs, Popsicles and potato chips (such purely American treats!); an inground swimming pool with the clearest, bluest water you splashed around in for hours in your new, tie-dyed bathing suit from Kmart. 

At the blackboard, turn around to face your classmates whose eyes pin you in place like an insect on display. Stare down at the worn carpeting. Wishing you could sink down into it as if it were a lake will not help you, so think. Just think. Try as hard as you can while your heart thuds madly in your ears and your face grows hotter and hotter. 

Accept that you cannot conjure a language you do not know from thin air. It is as if the teacher is expecting you to perform a magic trick you haven’t yet learned. In your mind there is a brick wall. You are expected to get words through it but no one has given you the instructions yet. All that you are, all that you’ve seen, everything you have to say is stuck behind this wall. 

Look timidly up at the front row of desks, where one of the Polish girls sits, her hair blond and crimped. The name tag on her desk reads Caroline but her real name is Karolina. She is watching you with sympathy, and the understanding in her eyes is a lifeline. Take two steps forward and lean down to her. Whisper, “Jak powiedzieć że spałam w namiocie?”      

Stand up straight and try to repeat her words to the class.

“I…slept…in tent.”

Do not worry that this isn’t exactly true. Do not worry that this isn’t true at all. Because at least there was a tent, pitched by your father on the narrow strip of grass behind your apartment building. There was a tent, in which you spent a few happy afternoons playing alone with your Barbies. There was a tent, in which one day you found a strange girl with your dolls and got scared, because the girl was speaking in English and you did not know what to do, so you yelled for your mother, who rushed down from the apartment and shouted in Polish at the intruder to get out, to leave, right now. 

But of course, like the rest of your summer experiences, this is too complicated to try to explain in English. 

So settle for the half-truth because it is easier to translate.

Settle for the half-truth because you will need to learn how to be less than whole for a long while. 

But there was a tent.

There was a tent. 

There was a green tent. 

---

Snack time and recess: Open your blue Mickey Mouse lunch box and take out the pasztetowa sandwich your mother prepared. The liverwurst is from the Polish deli in town and not nearly as good as the homemade kind in jars back in Poland, with white fat solidifying on top and needing to be scooped out with a spoon. Look around at your classmates, at their alien foods: bags of unnaturally orange, crunchy triangles; small plastic barrels filled with green liquid; rolls of stretchy red stuff. See them looking at you and your sandwich. See them looking and snickering. Learn your first lesson: in America, a liverwurst sandwich is not an acceptable snack choice. 

The next day, open your Mickey Mouse lunch box and stuff the sandwich into your desk, between your phonics and math books. Plan to throw it out later. Turn around when you hear your name. Into your empty stomach, swallow the humiliation as a girl sitting diagonally behind you points to the sandwich sticking out from your desk and laughs. 

Outside on the strip of pavement between the school and the small grassy hill leading up to the convent, attempt to join a game of what looks like tag. Try not to notice that you do not get chased. Smile in relief when one of the Polish-speaking girls approaches. Listen as she tells you that you are not allowed to play the game since, unlike her, you do not know how to speak English. 

Go ahead, start to hate her. You are too young to know that she is only trying to diminish her own sense of otherness. 

---

How to learn English: When your teacher finishes speaking and everyone around you springs into action, do not let the awful, sinking shame of being the only one who is clueless drag you under. Look around. Observe. Take out the same book as your classmates. If they are writing on paper, look at the blackboard and copy down whatever you see there, no matter if it doesn’t make sense. Stand up if they stand up. Line up when they line up, and don’t worry about where you are going. 

Do not long for your old school in Gdańsk, where you sat with your best friend Dominika and excelled at every assignment Pani Walczyńska gave. Do not open the book of poems by Jan Brzechwa your teacher gave you, nor read what she wrote inside the front cover: To my best student… Do not cry alone in your room after school. Do not tell your mother that you do not want to go back.

Instead, sit at your desk and soak in the words your teacher speaks in that quiet, gentle way of hers. Gather them like the pink daisies you used to search for in the grass in front of your blok. Weave them together and soon, you will be able to raise your hand and participate, show your teacher that you are smart after all. Soon, she will move you up to the best reading group in the class. Soon, you will be asked to read at the Thanksgiving mass to showcase how much you’ve learned.  

But for now, take the first-grade phonics workbook your teacher gives you. Open its bright red cover and try to ignore the fact that it singles you out in the sea of honey yellow workbooks your classmates are using. Look at the pictures inside. Color the ones that begin with a w. Color the ones with a short e in the middle. Skip the ones for which you don’t have names even in Polish. 

In the evenings, lie in the bathtub and repeat your favorite new words. To-ge-ther. To-gether. Together. Relish how the word rolls off your tongue, especially the sound inside it, which Polish does not have. Try to teach your parents to form it. Tell them to just put their tongues in between their teeth and say th. Tell them it’s easy. Laugh along with them when they cannot do it. Feel a nugget of pride settle inside you because you can. 

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Your first school fundraiser: Like everyone else, take home the big white envelope stuffed with papers, which your teacher placed on your desk at dismissal. Hand it to your mother when you get home and proceed to your room to play Super Mario on your brand new Nintendo. Forget about the envelope. Make Mario run and jump and stomp on the brown mushroom men. Run. Jump. Stomp. Repeat.

Over the next week, notice students bringing their big envelopes stuffed with papers back to school and handing them to the teacher. Notice that each time this happens, an exchange occurs—one envelope for one small toy: a fuzzy, sparkly ball with googly eyes, antennae, and sticker-bottomed feet. 

At home, ask your mother for the envelope. Put it in your backpack and, eyes shining bright, give it to your teacher. Watch her take out the papers, which have not been filled out by your parents. Concentrate very hard on the words coming out of her mouth as she points to the blank spaces on the white pages. She is saying something about selling magazines. 

Selling magazines. Do not strain your mind trying to understand what selling magazines could possibly have to do with school; you have no schema for this concept. In Poland, magazines were sold in kiosks by sullen women, not by children. In Poland, children did not have to sell anything to raise money for school. 

Besides, who would buy a subscription from you, even if you did understand how to do it. Your Polish aunts and uncles? Your Babcia? 

Forget it. Just take the envelope home and throw it into the trash.

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Halloween: You will find out about this American holiday at the last minute. When your Ciocia Zuzia, who lives next door, knocks on the apartment door and asks if you want to go collect candy with your cousin and some of the neighborhood kids, jump up and down and say yes. Take your aunt’s advice and run up to your room to see if you can find something to use for a costume. Spot the art project you brought home from school the other day—a three-dimensional jack-o-lantern made out of strips of orange construction paper, with triangular black eyes and a mouth with two pointy teeth pasted on. Have your mother cut open the back and fit the pumpkin over your head, affixing it with safety pins so that it will stay on. 

Do not be embarrassed by your incomplete, improvised costume, or by the fact that instead of the orange Halloween buckets everyone else has, you collect your Milky Ways and Kit-Kats in a plastic shopping bag from the grocery store. Stand there with the other kids. Mumble, in your Polish accent, “Trikotreet,” whenever someone opens the door.

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Learning new handwriting: Forget completely the cursive Pani Walczyńska taught you. Forget the beautiful, almost perfectly formed letters nestled politely between the lines on each page of your small Polish notebook, their loops and swirls and edges stopping exactly where they are supposed to. Forget the eloquent descriptions of spring and the May holidays and Mother’s Day poems.

Forget all of that.

Open your American notebook with its solid and dotted lines spaced too widely. Watch your teacher forming alien letters in white chalk on the board. Figure out an entirely new system of connecting those letters, some of which don’t even resemble their printed counterparts. Retrain your muscle memory, so that your hand will not constantly want to write the r and the z the way you have been for the past two years. Retrain the pathway from your eyes to your brain so that you can recognize, once again, a capital I and a capital G. 

Forgive your teacher, someday, for giving you a C+ in handwriting on your first report card. 

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Writing letters to your older cousin Irena in Poland: Ask your mother for help with the Polish orthography. Fill pages of stationery with cheerful descriptions of your new life. Leave out the parts about how hard it has been to fit in and how lonely you are. Instead, tell your cousin about all the wonderful things in your room. A pink-and-purple Lego house. A red Walkman. The double cassette player your sister bought for your birthday. Your closet inside the wall, your white boots with a silver buckle, your faux fur coat. Don’t forget to mention the assortment of Barbie furniture and vehicles you now own, like the red Corvette and the pink camper. 

But do not tell your older cousin Irena, for instance, about the birthday card you received from your Ciocia Terenia in Poland last week. Do not tell her how, when you opened the card and a tinny, melancholy tune began playing, it pulled at your heart so intensely that your entire body flooded with sadness and a strange, aching yearning. Do not tell her that you ran up to your room and shut the door as hot tears streamed down your face. That you sat there looking out at the foreignness of the landscape outside—the parking lot with its big American cars and beyond that, the houses with their clapboard siding and those porch windows side by side that all of a sudden looked terribly ugly—listening to that heart-wrenching melody and crying. 

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Calling an English-speaking friend: Ask your sister if you can use the phone in her bedroom. Sit on the pink bedspread with the slip of paper your friend gave you. Practice what you will say, then grab the receiver and dial. Wait while your heart pounds and the ringing pulses in your ear.  

When a man’s voice answers, panic. You haven’t rehearsed what you would say in this situation. Search your brain for the English equivalent of, Czy mogę poprosić Jennifer do telefonu? Strain with all your might to find it, only to realize it’s like squinting your eyes to see something that is too far away to be discerned anyway. 

Finally, stammer, “Can I…can I have Jennifer?” Feel your face burning as the man repeats your words back to you. “Can you have Jennifer?”  

Do not imagine him raising his eyebrows and smirking. Quietly say, “Yes, please.”

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Your First Holy Communion: On a sunny Sunday in May, put on a lacy white dress and a veil, just like the bride you can’t wait to be someday. Take the fat, yellow candle your mother thrusts into your hands—your Baptismal candle from Poland—and enter the church. 

The pews are overflowing. The First Communion class is already up at the altar, facing the parishioners in three neat rows. Rush up the aisle to join them as shutters click and light flashes, feeling the weight of eyes on your back. 

Slip into the back row. Notice that you are the only one with a candle. Lower it as far down as you can. 

Remember that moment of rushing up the church aisle. This will be the way it will be—always a step behind, struggling to catch up, desperately wanting to understand and be a part of the American world.

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Moving into your first house: All your life you have lived in apartments. Now your parents have bought a house, a ranch with cream siding and a large grassy backyard at the end of a long, quiet street.

Marvel at the turquoise carpet you were allowed to pick out for your room. Feel its soft plushness with your bare feet. Make the space your own. 

Go outside and run down the deck steps. Run up the small sandy hill that borders your yard. Run through the thicket of knee-high pine saplings to the shadows of the woods beyond. Find a tree with a ladder of branches and a thick trunk, its gnarled roots forming a sort of ledge on the small incline where the tree grows. 

Sit on this slope. Look up at the tree towering over you, almost as high as the bloks of your past. Touch the rough bark, so solid and old, so permanent. Feel the quiet, sacred wisdom vibrating deep within. Lean your body into the trunk.

Breathe. 

There is no America to contend with here. There is only the tree tethering you to the earth. The sunlight filtering through pine needle branches.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Apply primer. 

When the bruise is at its darkest—any shade between red and violet—apply green concealer first, then regular concealer, one shade lighter than your foundation. Once it begins to yellow, substitute lavender concealer for the green. Then foundation, repeat; cover in powder, setting spray. Make every effort to ensure your makeup can outlast tears, sweat, the various liquors and juices that form a thin, sticky film on your skin that remains after you return home from your closing shift. Check every angle of your face—first in the bathroom mirror, then in your phone camera when you get behind the bar to test the lighting. Remember which angle makes the bruise the least visible when you’re talking to her.

She wants to help you. She’s a good friend, and you hate her for it. She’s a lawyer, and she acts like one, studying you with pleading eyes from behind her beer when she sits at one of the iron stools surrounding the horseshoe-shaped bar. Avoid being alone with her, getting cornered. You know you will cry. You always do. 

The truth comes out when she asks you to share a Pall Mall just outside the warm, cheerful brewery on a cold night in early February. She starts crying, and your own eyes begin to sting. But you quickly fight the tears down, walk back in like nothing happened and pour yourself, and any of the regulars who desire one, another drink. 

You move into the spare bedroom of her house by the end of the month. She keeps it too cold. You wear wool socks to bed, hug your knees to your chest under layers of quilts and it’s still not enough. You think about the first night you met him, how out of nowhere he appeared as you searched your backpack for a lighter. The way the flame, and the sudden glow of his smile appeared in the dark. You don’t sleep. You toss and turn in a bed that is not yours, in a house you’ll never be able to afford. You remember the night you both searched his apartment at three in the morning for his birth certificate, motivated by copious amounts of cocaine and a desire to find out his birthtime. Defeated, he sat on the worn futon, and you on the concrete floor, your head collapsed onto his bony knee, his fingernails tracing mandalas on the back of your neck.

You don’t want to be here. You don’t want to be anyone’s charity case. You’ve always done exactly what you’ve wanted. Each time you’d go to him, you couldn’t wait to leave your life behind: your boyfriend of two years, the home you were building with each other. Your hair would stand up on your neck when he opened the door, your flesh crawling with the illicitness of it all. Eventually, you confessed the affair to your boyfriend, and now you live in your friend’s spare bedroom, making promises of never seeing him again. You lie, more than ever. Only this time you’re doing it while you’re eating her food, drinking her expensive coffee, living in her house. She gives you clothes that no longer fit her: well-worn T-shirts advertising restaurants you’ve never been to, cities you’ve never even passed by. You wear them, like you wear the guise of a girl that is changing, but inside everything pulls you back to him.

The first time you sneak back to his place while she is at work, he takes your phone from your hands. When you go to reach for it, he slaps you with the back of his hand across your face. His ring collides with your cheekbone and leaves a mark. She asks you about it. You lie, smudged makeup. She looks at you defiantly: “Gal, that’s a bruise.” 

Be careful of what you say over text messages.

Ever since that first morning you woke up in his apartment, you feel the space between your legs swell when you see his name on your phone. You texted through the days that followed: talking dirty, typing fantasies of bondage and submission. He’s more methodical than you think, or at the least, opportunistic. Now, he throws it back in your face: If you ever tell anybody, he will show them that he was only giving you what you wanted. 

Trust your gut. 

Only your gut builds cobblestoned paths straight to your demise, illuminates your endangerment in a soft pink light. Your gut placed you behind steering wheels when you were too drunk to walk, before you were even old enough to get your license. Your gut asked your friend for drugs when you were both in the back of a paddy wagon (on camera) on the way to the city jail. Your gut shared a home with a man who loved you, and kept leading you to the apartment of this one instead, for sex, attention, drama and other reasons you can’t name. Your gut would gleefully skip barefoot across a path of hot coals to pick up a one-dollar scratch off ticket on the other side. You know love is not this. You’ve had love better than this; you could count it on both of your hands. Your gut chose this instead. 

Come up with a safety plan. 

It’s not like it is in the movies. If you leave, he won’t stop you. He will never pursue you after you are gone. He will have someone else in his bed before you can sign the paperwork for your new apartment. You have nothing stopping you from never answering him again. You choose to stay, again and again and again. You once heard in a court-mandated AA meeting that some people are addicted to being sick. Sickness is a part of them as inseparable as flesh. Love isn’t strong enough for you unless it has you in a chokehold.

One June day, he confesses he’s sleeping with someone else. You had been too, but as always, you feign innocence. You slap him; he chokes you until you lose consciousness. You wake on your bed, with him, then run down the stairs from your attic apartment. He chases you, falls on his knees in the backyard and begs you to stay. That night, you take a pregnancy test. You don’t remember your last period, don’t remember much of anything. The months stretch behind you like a blank white hallway. It hurts when you swallow from where his fingers gripped your throat. You read recently that people who have been strangled by their partners are over 700% more likely to be murdered by them the next year; that seven seconds of occlusion of blood is when permanent brain damage starts to occur. As the second blue line begins to appear on the drugstore test, you are too stunned to pick up your phone. You don’t know who to call. 

Be prepared for bold people to ask you: “Why did you keep the baby?”

Not so bold people will wonder the same. You don’t owe them an answer, but what you can say is: “No matter what, I was ready to be a mother.” 

You don’t tell them about the first one. You were 18 years old; you scraped together the money your Irish Catholic father gave you for books that semester and the money you saved working Sundays serving pancakes to churchgoers at a Cracker Barrel. The procedure took 15 minutes, but you sat in the waiting room filled with downcast eyes and a heavy silence for most of the day. The ultrasound tech sounded like she had once sat where you sat when she said: “I legally have to show you the heartbeat, but you don’t have to look at the screen.” You looked at the screen, the creature swimming like a jellyfish. You never once regretted it, but you promised yourself you’d never do that again. 

Promises were made to be broken. You make an appointment for a date the week before it would be too late, just in case. You drive to the clinic in Denver still undecided. It’s a regular doctor’s office, in a regular building, without a protester to be found. Here you are, ten years later, feeling more lost than you were back then. You sit in your car for 20 minutes, staring at the black windows against the beige building, knowing for less than a thousand dollars, you could walk into those doors and walk out the same, a woman who only had to care for herself. A decade ago, you knew exactly what you wanted. Now, you are ambivalent, passive. You’d hoped the doctor wouldn’t find a heartbeat when you attended your prenatal appointments. You’d hoped to wake up in the morning and see blood. You’d hoped that something would happen that was out of your control, that would allow you a second chance to have your first child in the kind of healthy home you grew up in, a chance to get this part right. You, like always, longed to slip quietly out of this situation, blameless and innocent. 

You choose to be a mother.

Now, when his hands lunge for you, you must protect your stomach instead of your face.

You try to make the best of it. You act meeker than ever, pick his clothes up off the carpet and fold them after he throws them to the ground in a rage. You twist yourself endlessly to fit into what you think he wants. You watch the animated version of The Addams Family on repeat, sinking deeper into the well your body has created on the king-sized mattress on his bedroom floor. He rubs your feet. Starts to smoke his cigarettes outside. Makes you bubble baths with off-brand dish soap, applies clay face masks, massages shoulders, cleans your skin when you don’t have the strength. He grabs your face, goes to smack it, his hand remains in the air; he throws a pot instead. He’s changing. He promises you he has changed. As your stomach grows, the walls close in. You stray further and further from the woman a younger you wanted to become.

You leave his apartment for what you promised yourself would be the last time. 

You’d made a plan. You go to your 20-week anatomy scan. The ultrasound tech shakes your stomach to try and get the baby to move. She asks if you ate breakfast, says the baby must be in a food coma. You hope that’s all it is, the first of many worries you will have for the life growing inside you. She has you walk around, change positions, go pee. Then she checks your baby’s every body part, wordlessly typing notes that make no sense to you. It’s a boy, what his father has always wanted. He’s healthy, a relief to you. You watch your son kick on the screen and feel his tiny feet against the wall of your uterus. You’d been feeling that flutter for weeks, but chalked it up to your anxiety. 

The day after your appointment, you drive east. You have a financed car, $2,000 in your bank account, clothes, and six black and white sonogram pictures of your child’s body parts: his long limbs, his feet, his testicles labeled “IT’S A BOY!!!!” You are afraid to face your family. You are ashamed: first in a long history of devout Catholics to be pregnant outside of wedlock, by a man they’ve never even heard of. You drive to Kansas City, pay for two nights at the cheapest hotel you can find. It is luxury to you, stretching into crisp white sheets, stretching into silence. You watch reality TV for two straight days with the lights off and the blackout curtains drawn, order sushi and BBQ and have them leave it outside the door. 

When you arrive back in Kentucky, the state you’d left five years before with no intention of returning, you sleep on an air mattress in your little sister’s spare bedroom. You deliver food from Applebee’s and Chick-fil-A in red insulated bags over and over again for laughable wages until you’re welcomed back to the same restaurant where you worked during college. You work doubles; you work seventeen days straight. Your feet swell. You buy new shoes. Now you can afford an apartment. Your mother and your two sisters take you to Target and they split the cost three ways. You leave with a metal trash can, plastic plates, and a vacuum. In front of the cashier, you shuffle back and forth in your oversized Sketchers and sheepishly dribble out I-can’t-thank-you-enoughs. You’ve become their charity case.

February comes around. Your wrists and fingers swell so much you can’t grasp a pencil. You wear a carpal tunnel brace to bed. Your belly can no longer be mistaken for extra weight. People you know and those you don’t congratulate you constantly. At home, you cry; you feel like you made a mistake. You swallow pregnancy-safe over-the-counter sleep aids. You long for dreams better than your reality. You long for a time machine. You long for stronger drugs. But, you already live for the boy growing inside you, now taking up enough space you can sometimes see his hands or feet from the other side of your translucent winter skin when you lay in bed at night. You work. You save. You make coffee at home. You only buy meat on sale. You are becoming disciplined. Still, lonely, you call your baby’s father. He’s always drunk and often with someone else. You fill your new apartment with the same old thundering screams from both ends of the phone, insults thrown from both sides like tiny darts in a dimly lit bar. You cry. You long to be seen. You should not be carrying this alone. But, you left. You knew this is what would happen.

Whether you’re ready or not, the baby will come. 

He’s born on his due date. His birth, like his conception, you cannot remember. He arrives violently, with an infection that ate your epidural in the middle of a C-section after two days of failed labor. You’re knocked unconscious with ketamine. You hallucinate through the delivery, sherbet colors, people you’ve hurt saying they forgive you. You wake up an hour and a half after he’s born, alone in a room with an oxygen mask over your face, shaking as you detox from the drugs. When it comes time to meet him, you tell your nurse you aren’t ready. You don’t realize she wasn’t giving you the choice. 

You video chat his dad from the hospital, he says that baby ain’t fucking his. When he is six weeks old, his dad tells you he’s found someone who will be a better mother than you are, and you scream and punch a wall with your son in a baby carrier, sleeping against your chest. He doesn’t wake up. He feels so safe with you, it’s your job to keep it that way. You promise this is the last time.

Six months later, his father comes to meet him for the first time. When he’s in your apartment, the shrinking begins again. Every move is scrutinized. You count down the days until he leaves. One night, while you’re sleeping, holding your son in your arms, he snatches him from you. He drags you with one hand to the kitchen outside your bedroom door, holding your cellphone in the other hand, upset about unanswered Facebook messages from your neighbor. He pins you to the linoleum floor. You hear your son start to cry from your bed. You know to shrink is to survive. Your eyes closed, you apologize and repeat, calmly, again and again: “Please, go get the baby.” The minutes feel like hours. You promise this is the last time. It is. 

Even if you don’t feel happy, you can find serenity in being alone. 

Your mom kindly suggests that maybe you could meet a nice single father to date; you know she worries you will never find a proper father figure for your son. Friends tell you to get the baby out of your bed so you can find your sexual self again. But you have everything you want. You find comfort in the rhythm of your days, lulled by the routine. You find peace in the sound of the dishwasher running at night. You are calm; you do not surf someone else’s mood swings like waves.

When your son’s laughter fills your apartment, you actually feel joy. Him in his highchair, you on a step stool in front of him, juggling clementines. He does not see any of your imperfections; he does not know any of your mistakes. You are the only thing he knows, and you are ridding yourself of toxic behaviors, wringing them from you like dirty water from a sponge, so that one day you may feel you deserve that kind of love. On weekends, you sip hot coffee and watch your son play. You make him scrambled eggs with sprouted wheat toast for breakfast. Most days, you don’t apply makeup. There have been weeks you’ve forgotten to look in the mirror at all. You keep your eyes on the next step and keep faith that he will grow up feeling secure and loved. That he will feel like each choice you made was the right one.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson