upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

Karen Rile

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1998 Leeway Award

The worm of memory burrows through my brain, surfacing in unexpected places. Why is it I still taste the mealy, disappointing apple I plucked out of my trick-or-treat bag on Halloween night 1969, and yet thousands of other apples have traveled down my gullet quite forgettably, before and since?

Or perhaps I have never really eaten an apple.

How can I say with assurance that I have eaten apples all my life when I remember specifically precious few? So many apples lost.

It took me all morning to write that paragraph; it is entirely true and absolutely false. By the time you read this paragraph it will have been revised ten, no a hundred times. (In the previous sentence, the word "paragraph" used to be "sentence." Which is better? Both. Which is truer? Neither.) It took me ages of tinkering to arrive at this, the truth, or at least as close to truth as I can get.

I attempt, I struggle -- I essay -- to write, not because I think that I am special, but because I know that I am not. Serious writing arises from a belief in the commonality of human experience. I am trying uncover who we are.

 

My children spiral away from me, my little untold stories. Unborn, they were me, in me, part of me, woven into the fabric of my being. And then, for that frozen eternity between the twin reflexive moments of first inhalation and exhalation, I was the world.

Why did I allow it? Why did I let them push ramrod inside me, splitting me apart? Eyes awake, I unbuckled my body and my mind, and opened myself so wide I barely recognize my new shape. I must have seen it coming a mile away. I'd had plenty of cautionary examples: my own mother, her mother, my father's mother. I'd read Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing. I had a head start -- so why didn't I save myself, turn on my heels and run the other way? But the memory dims. That other world, slim larval girlhood, endless grazing in green pastures, the tireless sense of self-determination, it's all been blurred inside the chemistry of the chrysalis. There's a fond recollection of dew. Whereas for now I am all aflame. The rest, I forget. I forget who I was. I am augmented and diminished, exploded to the edges of universe. I'm so large now, my new colors so blinding, that I've become -- quite invisible. The borders between Me and Them shimmer and dissolve. It hardly seems to matter who I used to be, I am so caught up in this new state of being which will be, must be, is, essentially, a progression of detachment. Motherhood is liquid paradox, a long slow trickle of loss.

 

from The Blue Stain

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