after sam sax

“my brother, knowing my work well, asked i not / include any references to semen in the throat / in this poem i’m writing you—so i shant,” writes sam sax. Continuing on, they quip: “instead: semen in the books. semen / in the leaves. semen in the ground that grows the semen trees also / known as the callery pear.” Over Christmas, my mother and I see the Beyonce movie. Captivated by the fabulous costumes, incredibly high production value, and bouncing music, we were glued to our seats for over two hours. Afterwards, star-struck and dodging pedestrians on 34th Street, my mother turned to me. “I liked it, but why are all her songs about sex?”

sax, in protest of the limits placed on their writing, continues in the same poem: “semen in the boat / that carried our family here. semen in the waters / where we left our dead.” Crossing over into the annals of history, sax acknowledges not only the Jewish diaspora, but the role of semen in catalyzing new generations. My own Jewish mother, who can be judgmental, moved on to complain that all TikTok sensation Ice Spice did was shake her ass. “semen in the light / streaming through the stained glass of our synagogue, / the image depicting an ark in an ocean of semen,” writes sax. The repetition here gives way to rhythm, sound, history—the historical context gives this poem a depth and context that go beyond the simple repetition of a word or phrase.

sax may have had a limit put on their expression with a banned word; I suddenly felt as if I had to educate my mother. Going down the tracklist, I pointed out when songs deviated from a sexual theme. My mother was unconvinced.

Does it help that sax writes: “gossamer semen. octopus semen. garden of semen,” here, now?

“Maybe Beyonce’s music is not for you,” I said to my mother tactfully.

This is the point in sax’s poem where the rules begin to break down; my relationship with my mother was breaking down, too. She retreated, hurt, to the bedroom in my parents’ apartment.

“there are so many words for you children & / none of them are dirty—tho not all of them / are yours,” sax confirms. This poem, dedicated and titled as: “For My Niblings in Anticipation of Their Birth,” brings to mind the excitement of new life. sax is celebrating the joy and possibility of a birth in the family. Their tongue-in-cheek attitude begins to dismantle, and they reach the elemental, emotional core, bringing a depth to this poem—which has already addressed such a huge scope of human experience, surprising us with each new twist and direction. sax’s craftsmanship becomes apparent. As they switch gears, the form remains tight, the efficiency working smoothly, the production value nearly as high as Beyonce’s.

Here is what I didn’t tell my mother until we had left the soft, dark theater: in the first few minutes, as I began to take it all in—the expansive, enormous display of queer, Black and brown joy, I began to cry. I sobbed for the first half hour of the movie, joyous, until I could cry no more. Seeing this display of emotion moved me to tears, uncontrollable, random and surging. Finally it stopped. Emptied out, I settled in for the rest of the ride.

A poem is a kind of performance—sax immediately and perhaps instinctively goes for shock value, but then pulls back, showing us their control over the form. Later that night, feeling guilty and sorry, I apologized to my mother. She accepted my apology.

sax finishes their poem with this:

In 1971, just a few days before my mother was about to give birth to me, my parents bought a brand-new yellow Volkswagen Beetle. They had been married only a few years. They were starting a family, and they were full of ambition. So, like so many Americans before them, they bought a car.

But no family story is that simple. I refused to turn in the womb and spent the crucial few days before the due date lodged in a breech position, no straight way out. Those were the days of doctor confidence and quick Caesareans. They went in fast, spreading my mother’s stomach like wings. In the process, something happened—no explanation was ever given—but something sharp and metal dug into my skin. It left a scar on my right thigh, which I still have, even to this day. My father sat in the waiting room, smoking a cigarette, and anticipating the results of the surgery.

This was New York City in the 1970s. At some point during that evening, as the doctors cut my mother and my father smoked a cigarette, the Beetle was stolen. My father could not immediately apprehend what had happened; he thought he had simply forgotten where he had parked. He spent hours wandering the streets of Brooklyn trying to remember where he had put the car while my mother sat upstairs in a hospital room, recovering from major surgery. This, she told me later, was a strong indication that he was not, perhaps, an ideal candidate for marriage. They were divorced by the time I was three years old.


There are at least 350,000 known species of beetles in the world, though estimates vary by as much as 50,000. This much is sure: there are far more kinds of beetles than any other kind of creature. (For comparison’s sake, there are only about 5,000 known species of mammals combined.) Take four quarters and place them on a table. One of those quarters is a beetle. The other three are every other moving thing on the planet.

Aristotle gave them their scientific designation. When he was not busy writing the Poetics, with its three fixed unities of drama, he also defined the world’s most varied species. He called them coleoptera, a joining of coleo (shield) and ptera (wing). This is Aristotle’s unity of the beetle, what they all have in common. You see, instead of the standard four wings associated with flying insects, beetles carry only two. The outer wings, once delicate as any insect’s, evolved into a hard case that sits over and protects the remaining fragile wing set. When they fly, the shields swivel open like the doors of a sports car, and the wings unfurl and flutter. The beetle takes off into flight. Here is the similarity that somehow finds a way to manifest itself in 350,000 distinct variations. Here is the flag of the beetle: the shield and the wing.


Beetle study seems to produce a kind of rapture amongst its practitioners. Coleopterists write with an unsettling level of emotion about the discovery and observation of new beetles, especially for a group of people normally connected to staid scientific inquiry. “Happiest are those days in which I have wandered far and wide through field and woodland, adding here and there some specimen before unseen,” writes W.S. Blatchley, author of a 1910 index of beetles. His two-volume catalog of the native beetles of his home state of Indiana runs a combined 1,400 pages, complete with hand-drawn illustrations on every page and meticulous descriptions. (“Elongate”; “broadly oval”; “oblong-oval”; “slender-bodied”; “robust, but tapering behind.”) For all that work, he probably found fewer than ten percent of the beetles that crawl and flutter in Indiana’s fields and woods. There is always another beetle.


To consider insects at all is to consider how small and few we are in the context of our planet. Ants represent far more physical mass than humans, most of it invisible, underground. We see only a few cells of their enormous collective body when they thread a line into our house or when their scouts reconnoiter our picnic. But those tiny, hidden creatures are emissaries of subterranean city-states, nations of constantly crawling borders, continents of movement. We are standing on a world of ants.

To consider beetles, by contrast, is to consider how uninventive humans are, at least in our bodies. We are all the same, basically, in size, in strength, in speed, in skin color (despite what we think), in our capacity to live only in the narrowest, safest conditions. But beetles are different.

Here are some of their families: there are tiger beetles and leaf beetles, flat bark beetles and tumbling flower beetles. There are carrions, scavengers, pills. There are lizards and stags, spiders and soldiers. There are the ant-loving beetles and the pleasing fungus beetles. There is a family known as the death watch beetles, and a smaller family known as the antlike stone beetles; there are beetles who are not what they seem: false tigers, false blisters, false long-horns. There are ones named for where they live (mud-loving), how they feel (soft-bodied), what they do (whirligig); this is only a sample.


Because they are so many, and so widely distributed, it is no surprise that beetles have entrenched themselves in human myth and religion. The scarab beetle (30,000 species) is known for its role in Egyptian theology; the periodic sudden appearance of the black scarab on Nile River mud (a normal part of its life cycle) led the Egyptians to notions of rebirth and immortality. The beetle moved via cultural trade to the Romans, who fashioned scarab rings for their soldiers. (The lowly dung beetle is a type of scarab, by the way—beetle cousinhood does not obey boundaries of propriety or social class. Either that, or scarabs consider dung rolling a high art, or at least an honorable profession.) Some scholars say that Egyptian fascination with scarabs came from the dung beetle; the small insect rolling its ball of dung at your feet was seen as a manifestation of Ra pushing the sun through the sky.

Judeo-Christian mythology, on the other hand, embraced the ladybug (4,200 species). In German it is Marienkäfer, Mary’s beetle. In French and Dutch, it is promoted to God’s beetle. In Hebrew, the ladybug is called parat Moshe Rabbenu, Moses’s little cow, since European Jews apparently imagined Moses leading both Israelites and beetles to freedom across the Sinai desert.

In European folklore, the beetle even has the capacity to make a man pregnant, though the method is more proctological than miraculous. In the 12th century, Marie de France, considered the first female French poet, wrote a subversively feminist tale in which a peasant falls asleep with his backside exposed to the elements. A beetle enters him (always in search of new habitats, these beetles) and takes up residence. As the beetle grows, so does the man’s belly, and a doctor declares him pregnant. The townsfolk gather to witness the coming miracle. At the critical moment, the beetle exits the way it came in, none the worse for wear. Thus the vanity and limitations of men are revealed.


A lowly beetle also figures prominently in one of the more curious episodes of the Cold War. In June 1950, Czechoslovakian newspapers declared that American airplanes had been spotted flying over the countryside, dropping pallets filled with potato bugs onto farmers' fields throughout the area and as far away as East Germany. In a classic set of Soviet metaphors, the fields of the proletariat, used to feed the masses, were under siege by insidious American influence, aided by capitalist technology and beetles.

Czech poets published verses in newspapers comparing the destructive insect to the parasites of Wall Street. American diplomats issued official objections to their Czech counterparts, but the Czechs could not be persuaded. The modest potato bug (properly known as the Colorado potato beetle, having been discovered by entomologist Thomas Say along the Missouri River in 1822, and described in the literature as “oval, robust”) became connected throughout Eastern Europe with the vilest strain of American imperialism. Patriotic Czech children spent as much as two hours in the fields every day, crushing potato bugs underfoot. The rumors lasted for years.


The same country, Czechoslovakia, has an important role in my parents’ brief marriage. At the time, my father was a Ph.D. student in film and television at Northwestern. His research took them to Romania, where one of his professors had connected him with the unique opportunity to study the Communist television news apparatus in those crucial days of politics and war.

The year was 1968, three years before I was born. My parents had been in Romania only a week when Soviet tanks rolled into nearby Prague, and televisions throughout the world flooded with the stampede of tanks, Soviet soldiers glaring from the turrets. Panic spread through the major cities of Eastern Europe. My mother wanted to stay—imagine what my father could learn, observing how the television news would respond. Would they back the Soviets? Or become a site of resistance? He had a vantage point few Americans could match. It would make a marvelous dissertation, a book, a career. But no. My father thought it prudent to leave. They returned home and he never finished his degree.

You see, she would say to me. I should have known then. Then she would tell me again how he lost the Volkswagen Beetle the night I was born.


Literature’s most famous beetle is the one who shows up in Gregor Samsa’s bed. The species is a matter of some debate; Kafka avoided specifying the exact bug into which Gregor transforms, and begged his publisher, bitte, to not include an illustration of any insect whatsoever in connection with the story. (“It can’t even be shown in the distance,” Kafka added.)

But Vladimir Nabokov (a noted lepidopterist, not a coleopterist, but still) believed that Gregor had awoken to find himself transformed into a beetle. One of Nabokov’s best-known lectures to his Cornell literature students was about The Metamorphosis, and drawing on his famous knowledge of butterflies and other insects, he would begin with an analysis of Gregor’s anatomy, the famous flailing legs, the segmented stomach, and crucially, the hard round back that immobilizes Gregor on the bed. (The Metamorphosis is not the only literary classic that Nabokov read for beetles; in his thousand-page commentary on Eugene Onegin, Nabokov chides one English translator for rendering as a cricket what Nabokov claims is clearly a scarab beetle.)

For Nabokov, Gregor’s immobility is also, potentially, his freedom. Here the author of Lolita would draw the beetle on the chalkboard to illustrate: this stiff back on which Gregor trembles in his bed suggests the hard shield, the wing cases. “In beetles, these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight,” Nabokov told his students, “Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back.” If only Gregor had embraced his beetle-ness, he could have flown out the window and avoided his sorry fate. But, as Nabokov suggests, we rarely recognize what we are.


I always found it curious that my parents bought a Volkswagen. We are a Jewish family, and the Volkswagen company’s relationship to the Nazi regime is not a secret. Hitler loved cars (though apparently he never had a driver’s license); he spent much of the 1930s, when he wasn’t busy enacting laws against the Jews, focused on the German auto industry. He formed the Volkswagen Development Company to realize his dream of an affordable car for every German family. He built a factory with government funds. His engineers developed the prototype for the Beetle and the SS supplied drivers to test the vehicle on roads across Germany. When the war started and the factory’s workers were called into service, they were replaced with slave labor from concentration camps, even from as far away as Auschwitz.

Still, in 1971, my parents bought a Volkswagen. And my father promptly lost it.


I do not know if my mother ever took any particular notice of beetles. On the subject of insects, she had a lot to say about mosquitos (they bit her constantly and made it difficult to be outside in the summer), ants (she preferred they stay out of the kitchen), and horseflies (one bit my younger sister on the nose while we were on vacation, and it became an important story in the family the way these things do.) But I can’t say if she ever took notice of beetles, even though they are everywhere.

After my parents’ divorce, my father moved across the country to Los Angeles. Before he left, we sat on the floor of my room as he pulled out a map. He wanted me to know where he would be, so his finger traced a long parabolic arc from New York to LA, a plane flight on metal wings.

He found work in the television business, having left academia long behind. He moved from show to show every few years, always in the same basic role, making schedules, telling people where to stand, a small part in the big, expensive machine of television. I saw him maybe once a year.

By then I had become an avid reader of comic books, with their brightly colored heroes, their wonderful catalog of names. I sorted and collected them like a scientist, my first interest, perhaps, in the phenomenon of repetition with very slight variation.

My mother had moved us to rural New York by then—she was desperate for a change in habitat—but as a result, I lost access to the neighborhood comic book store. There wasn’t even a spinning rack in the local drugstore. My father, however, lived in a big city, with a fully-stocked comic book store right down the street. When he called, I would list the names and issue numbers of the comics I needed, and he would dutifully write them down on a small pad. His main presence in my life became the packages that would arrive in the mail every couple of months. I would open the envelope and the superhero comics would spill out, each one the same length and price, each story a variation on the same tale of heroes and villains, only the covers slightly different from one another.


I grew up with my mother. My father was a distant figure, barely noticed. I went to school, traveled abroad, came back, started a family. Then, three years ago, at a relatively young age, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was visiting us in Ohio, playing happily with my children (she was one of those grandmothers who adored her grandchildren, would not stop talking about them to her friends—their every utterance was fascinating to her). But she told me that she felt tired. Also, sometimes, she felt out of breath.

When she returned to New York she visited the doctor. The spot on her lung was impossible to miss.


In his marvelous—and slightly mad—essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz discusses what he calls the “family resemblances” of a well-written sentence, the way that we “should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share.” (Here I add: like looking at beetles.)

He says, “The words in a sentence together create a community of sound and shape.” Community. Repetition. Variation. The well-written sentence. Beetles. Your family.


The chemotherapy did not work. The cancer, paused briefly by the drugs, soon spread from her left lung to her right, then into her thyroid, and from there was given free passage to the rest of her body. Like so many cancer patients, her life became a daily negotiation of nausea versus hunger, trying to maintain the body under siege from medicine and itself. When treatment failed, she descended quickly.

She became cachectic—that special term for the thinness experienced by cancer patients in advanced stages of their disease. As the tumors grow, the body shrinks. In her last days she was too weak to make it from her bed to the bathroom. She had lived in that house for thirty years, had taken that trip thousands of times. (Growing up, in my sleep, I heard her visiting the bathroom in the middle of every night.) Now everything was impossibly far away; she could not even crawl there. We obtained a toilet that wheeled into the bedroom, but she had to be helped out of the bed so she could use it and relieve her swollen bladder. She was bone thin and completely naked. I stood behind her and held her elbows.

In my mind, now, she looks, of course, like a beetle, shriveled and elongated, her sharp protruding shoulder blades like a wing case across her back. But underneath there were no delicate wings, only terrible lungs shredded by tumors. She died at five a.m. the following morning, while I slept next door, in my childhood bed.


There are so many species in the world, already too numerous for us to count, hundreds more added each year by exhausted, intrepid scientists.

But each of us, human and insect, has one origin story, and one only. In my case, I was pulled out of my mother and marked on my leg by a doctor’s clumsy hand. The scar always makes me think of her, that moment long ago, when my body was connected to her body. Now that shield of her body is gone forever.

There are so many of them, and so few of us. Soon, any moment, another beetle will be known to the world. It will be different, in some important way, and yet it will be of a piece with every other beetle on the planet. We are all repetition, somehow, with infinite variation. I don’t know what this beetle will reveal. Something new.

Dad is a robust Texas geezer with a bald head sewn up like a baseball. He’s a man of crooked spine and lazy eye. He’ll gleek some spit hard if you dare stand too close after pissing him off. He knows how to jump the cue ball and light a fart on fire. He threw my shoes on the roof when I left them in the hallway, taught me how to fend off boys bent on popping the bra strap, called me little miss shit when I fell off my bike, and dared me to drive five blocks home backwards when I couldn’t parallel park. He trained me how to bluff like a class-act player, then slip out a sneaky grin right in time to remind the world how much it loves me.

A lot of these things I believe he did while drinking, while hungover, or while craving a swig. I used to refer to him as a drunk all the time. I’d say it in a jaded way that now embarrasses me—because I’m suspicious of any story that eclipses a person’s tenderness, and because I now have my own kid. This isn’t an essay about her, except to say I can recognize that my daughter, currently a toddler, will one day have a different version of me than I have of myself, perhaps a different version than what I aim to give her. Knowing this complicates perceptions of my own parents.

So, these days, I say Dad “used to drink.” I’ve adopted this from my mother, who says “your father”—pause—“back then."

Just say it Mom, I’d think when I was young. Say drunk. Say alcoholic. Don’t flinch from the truth. But these days, I follow her example.

“My father”—pause—“back then.”

It’s grace. It’s a gift she’s offering. It’s not meant for me.

The Austin I grew up in, the Austin my father taught me to love, is South Austin. The mid-90s.

Our neighborhood was middle-class and artsy in that dusty, junk-in-the-lawn kind of way. Dad had a catamaran he kept in the front yard. All the lots in our neighborhood still had their original houses built on them. We were a small family: Dad, Mom, me, always a herd of cats. I’ve always thought of the cats as evidence that, once you’re in their life, my parents are going to find a way to take care of you. These days, they have seven-and-a-half cats. Growing up, they never had less than four. We’ve had Prindle, Nackey, Hisser, Mouse, Grey Girl, Cali, BB, Booger, Girlie, Hollywood, Belly, Benny, Al, Onyx, Boots, Louie, Swan, Spice Girl, and Turtle. They all eat three meals a day and most of them have lived into their late teens. Mom gets a discount at the vet. There’s a lovely pet cemetery in our backyard with decorative stones and ceramic markers commemorating animals who’ve passed.

When I was young, Mom worked irregular retail hours, so Dad and I had a lot of time together. When mom worked late, we’d heat up frozen dinners and watch Nova together, or else go to Luby’s Cafeteria on East Oltorf, where I’d claim I was six years or younger because little kids ate for free. At Luby’s, Dad would read the Austin-American Statesman and hand me the comics. I’d eat bowls of fried okra and blue-cubed Jell-O while he picked at his plate of roast beef. I remember this one time we were at Luby’s and an elderly woman in a chair came up to us. She held my face in her hands. She stared at me for what felt like five minutes before releasing me and announcing to Dad that she was Divinely Gifted and could tell that I had a strong aura and that I was a special person who would surely enjoy a lot of success in life and bring greatness to the family.

And Dad—certainly drunk, with his plate of barely touched roast beef in front of him—put down the paper, took the woman’s hands and said, “Ma’am, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

It’s quite a skill, really, the ability to immediately see vodka in the face or hear it in the voice—a certain tilt perceptible only to people whose senses have been finetuned in the art of drunk-detection. I just knew. It didn’t matter if he’d had one sip or half the bottle.

I think about this a lot now, especially when I’m drinking myself.

I drink myself now, sometimes.

And when I do, I think: Can people sense it on me, even after one taste? I remember how Dad would start looking around with these glassy eyes that shielded him off from me. Even his breath changed, as if Dad had his own special air, meant just for his lungs. It felt like something precious I couldn’t be a part of.

It usually began in a room full of music. The game was to have fun. Not so hard at first: you sing The Stones and Savoy Brown and Janis Joplin. You play air guitar to Hendrix. You dance on the furniture. You flip coins and count out poker chips. Mom’s busy at work, so you keep distracting him from calling her. Listen to his stories. If he decides you’re hungry, let him make you a TV dinner or drive you to Luby’s. At Luby’s, you eat a lot of fried okra and blue-cubed Jell-O. Don’t ask him what time it is or when Mom gets off work. Don’t interrupt him. Don’t stop smiling. Don’t yawn. Don’t let him see you’re not having fun anymore.

The game is to help him stay happy forever.

The fun almost always wore off. While drinking, he wanted companionship. When I couldn’t give it to him because I was busy or tired or, as I got older, had access to wheels and didn’t need to be stuck in the house, he’d turn nasty.

“You’re chicken shit,” he used to yell when I was a teenager and slipping out the front door, “you’re a coward, little girl. You can’t stand up to shit.”

I understand now that he yelled those things because I was leaving him, because he didn’t want to be alone. But his lines always cut deeper than whatever moment I was running from. I felt he was right, correct about me in a way no one else would ever be. I was convinced drinking enabled him to get to the base of a person.

I’m grown now. I know he didn’t mean to call me mean names. But I hate that the drunk version of Dad still lives in me.

And then, this other layer of resentment: I hate that, because of my father’s treatment of me when he was the worst version of himself, he’s given me the ability to replicate a cruelty he would abhor.

His version of me still lives. He created her. Or maybe, I sometimes think, I let him. That’d be just like me. A milquetoast, a flincher. I know her. She curls inside of me, spineless. She elbows the walls of my gut when I mess up. Chickenshit, she whispers from somewhere inside of me. You’re so weak.

The moments he hurt me, he was often black-out drunk, not in full possession. I have memories he doesn’t have of himself. I’m sorry to him for that. I’m sorry to all us parents who—because we are all capable of ugliness—accidentally bear these parts of ourselves to our children. I am sorry that, especially when I am drinking alone, I can still call myself all the names he called me, and himself too.

I’m trying to be in charge of the choices I make.

But drunk can feel comfortable. Drunk can feel like my best friend. It is a familiar place, a lying place, as if going there takes me to the real version of myself—the one Dad saw—the hungry little person I hide.

He never harmed me, not physically. Once, when he was yelling at me, I hit him. He started to hit back, then caught his own hand and cried, kicking me instead. I laughed at him. I looked down at him on the floor and grinned. I don’t know why.

I’m so sorry for that now.

“Was I bad to you?” Dad asked once, over the phone. “Back then?”

“I always knew you loved me.”

He was in Austin. I was living in Florida at the time, walking home from work. Summer. The world felt plump and tropical, wrapped in a globe of Spanish moss and marble sky. I missed Texas, but Florida had a curative lush magic all its own.

He said, “I don’t think I was that bad.”

“You were a different person when you drank.”

“I don’t remember that stuff,” he said. “But I’m sorry if I did it.”

Meanwhile, the sego palms in front of my Florida house were so big. Entire ecosystems lived inside, something I loved to consider. There were vines in there, and insects, and tiny singing birds I listened to in the morning snuggling next to my beloved, a man who commonly opened a beer only to forget about it, noticing only hours later that I had finished it for him before having three more.

“What matters is you loved me. I always knew that. I know that,” I told my dad. “You love me.”

I thought, We’re all responsible for something.

There’s also the time Dad packed a Ziplock full of dead cockroaches for me to empty into a school bully’s backpack, the time he dropped everything to drive overnight for an old buddy’s funeral, how he remembers everyone’s birthday, commemorates the anniversaries of his long-time married friends—even me and my husband’s wedding anniversary before we think of it ourselves. For all these occasions, Dad will send you flowers and call you to leave a long, sappy message on the answering machine letting you know just how much you give to the world. He has a limitless capacity for acknowledging everyone else’s specialness. And there’re the many times he’s somehow been the first person on the scene after a terrible accident, pulling the limp body of a truck driver out the cab of an overturned eighteen-wheeler while other people rubberneck by. How he invites people into his home for a drink and some air conditioning, how he taught me to offer what I have when someone needs it, to back up my words with actions, to be proud of doing my best. This father has always been here too.

My husband, daughter, and I like to visit my parents in Austin. Everything is the same. Nothing is how I remember it to be.

I like to follow Mom around in the morning while she waters plants. The men and my daughter are still sleeping.

More than a thumb, my mom has a green body. Her breath on a plant seems to make it sprout. We pause to admire a mango tree that has grown out of her compost pile, physical proof that life grows strongest if first planted in well-loved dirt. She is telling me, for what feels like the millionth time, that Dad is different from how he used to be. I take deep breaths to stay patient as she recites the greatest hits from his bad boy life. Problems learning at school while growing up. A gloomy, glamorous mother whom I’m told he relentlessly loved throughout years of her alcoholism. The Marine Corps and a brain injury. Depression. His own strong dependency on the bottle, of course. Motorcycle accidents and a lifetime of roughness with his body. Then multiple back surgeries and the pain pills that came from them, and, more recently, his elliptical attempts at getting a handle on the pills. I’ve heard the stories a hundred times, told a hundred different ways.

The first thing I learned about having a Dad who no longer drinks is that there’s not an easy place to store the blame anymore. It had been so convenient to point at the liquor cabinet as an explanation for why I didn’t want to be home, why my parents made me angry, why I thought everyone leaned heavy on the storytelling rather than looking reality in the face. Then Dad was clean of booze, but different. Sometimes he’s lopsided in body and spirit. After his back surgeries, he moves like a spinning top. He sold his motorcycles. In the years since his most recent surgery, he’s been in a long battle edging himself off the pills. I wonder what that’s like for him. I wonder how he sees his own addictions. And, at the same time, his pain is very real and beyond what I can imagine and so, more and more, I try not to judge him.

“You don’t remember Dad back then, but I do,” Mom says now.

We’ve moved past the compost pile and are standing in the pet cemetery. A clay cat face is inlaid into the ground at my feet, marking Hisser, an orange tabby who was famous in my family for incredible sweetness despite an affected, tough-guy exterior.

I almost say I do remember. I can remember all the versions of Dad: drunk, sober, mean, kind. The dad who took us to Yellowstone and Moab and the Redwoods and made sure to stay sober for every trip until we ended up in Vegas. The dad who convinced me to trade my teddy bear for a toy car when I was four, then refused to give my bear back for what felt like two months because he wanted to teach me a lesson about playing fast-and-loose with love. He’s my same, weird dad, and he’s here in my stories just as much as anyone else’s. Yet I also accept that my mom knows other versions of him. I respect what it means to be next to someone you love for many, many years. We get wrinkled and slow, and our bad habits catch up with us even after we’ve grown strong enough to kick them away, because time is always coming and time is the bitch, the chickenshit, the stubborn fucker. Time crouches, bitter, inside of you, elbowing at your insides until you’re more scar tissue, more a mountain of past than a present body. But stories slow things down. Stories let us linger, let us dig our heels in and say hey, but listen to this—

Mom turns to me, backyard goddess amid a sea of sunflowers and golden cosmos.

“He’s annoying, right?” she says, smiling.

And I laugh back because he is annoying, like a five-year-old with ants in his pants one second and a depressed old man the next, and it feels good to joke about it rather than get freaked out by how dramatically a person’s whole demeanor can change so quickly. I think about my sleeping husband and wonder how sickness, tragedy, addiction might warp us in the future, no matter how decidedly we plant stakes in any notion of consistency.

These days, when I’m in town, Dad and I drive down East Oltorf and point out where the Luby’s once stood. We both wish we could go back there for more blue Jell-O, fried okra, and roast beef.

I recently brought up that story about the clairvoyant old woman who said I was special. I’ve always hung onto how much Dad believed her. But stories have a way shifting through the years. They get chewed up by so many different mouths that they turn into something else altogether.

He cracked up when I retold it, rolled down the window to spit outside and ash his cigarette.

“Shit, girl,” he said. “That sure sounds like something you would make up.”

I opened my mouth, ready to provide him with more details that I thought would jog his memory. Dad spoke first.

“But if you want me to back you up on it,” he shrugged, “I swear, I’ll remember your lies.”

Black History Month. February 1987. Pilgrim High School. Freshman year. Art Class. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the snow-covered slave burial ground on the side of the school. A Black-and-white analog clock reads five past one in the afternoon. Students sit in the front of the class painting, glazing their pottery pieces. I sit in front of the potter’s wheel, my left foot pressing the pedal, making the wheel spin, trying to mold a piece of brown clay into a mug—the class assignment. Before my eyes, I see myself: the brown clay as my body and I am molding it into white America’s construct in my desperate attempt to be accepted by them.

I had decided that morning, after many nights of contemplation, to remove the pain of all the racism I had experienced, and to counteract the feeling of living dead that overlooked the place where pain and deprivation are common. Oppressed children believe what their oppressors tell them and face the danger of believing the myths that are attached to them by their oppressors. Because of the racism that remains today a metaphor for the spiritual meanness of white America, which both fears and ignores, at a young age I was already exhausted and believed I was the Black parody, my white classmates’ caricature, like the main attraction at the circus. Step right up, folks! Don’t be afraid. Witness the whimsical, the outlandish, the macabre Negro jump through ice, hopscotch over fire, and walk a tightrope between freedom and death. This degrading view began in the first grade at the age of six after a boy classmate I went up to said to me, “My parents told me I’m not to play with niggers.”

That first racist incident showed me the strange abject fear that whites have of Blacks and the unnerving tectonic plate between the races. I began to understand I had the ability to alter the spaces I entered. That white boy’s flight taught me that I was indistinguishable from anything scary. A kid who was terrified to leave my mother’s side, who cried every time she dropped me off at the school's front door—what that boy did not know was that I was more afraid of him than he was of me. I was embarrassed by my Blackness. I wanted to be liked and to be liked meant to be white. I became a contortionist, walking around with a half-filled tank of emotional resources, to break free of the racist stereotypes that were imposed upon me. There were times I believed I had the wherewithal, but I was blocked everywhere I turned, even in my family. My mother would say, “easy, son,” and it was “gonna be aight.” I tried to believe her. I truly wanted to believe her. But I already knew what all full-grown Black men know: when you are being hunted, your mother cannot save you.

So by the time I entered the ninth grade, the racism I had experienced in my predominantly white neighborhood and schools led me to give up on life and quiet the silent scream in my throat. I couldn’t envision a life that excluded racism—I was prevented by the ever-present shadow and effects of racism from getting what I needed most: my birthright and my identity as an individual rather than as a member of a race. Rather than leverage what it was like to constantly look over my shoulder because of racist whites’ insistence on superiority, and believing I could be picked off with a gun, eradicating me from the country, a lot of my identity had been stripped away as a result of the constant assault on my Blackness. How sick I was of waking up in fear every morning and then going about my day fighting racist whites who were trying to censor my existence. When I suffered racism it felt like a behaviorist had crawled inside my head, corrupted the neurons and synapses, and digested them. My Blackness was a victim of the chronic disease of racism; suicide was the embodiment of the nurturing antidote to that virus.

When no one was looking, I got up from the potter’s wheel, walked to the back of the room where no one was, stood in front of one of the wall-length window panes, and with the razor used for shearing ceramics, I slit my right wrist. Blood trickled down the palm of my dangling hand and dripped onto the tile floor. Everything went blurry. Everything went dark. My sadness disappeared as if I was going through a bloodletting, ridding me of the spiritual blackout I’d been experiencing. I felt lighter, airier. Then, in the dripping blood, I heard the crying; I felt the dying running free from the encasement of my body. I had done it. I had murdered the part of me gripped by agony—my Blackness. I couldn’t negate my Blackness because white America had provoked my negations. A short, stout, freckled girl saw what I had done, came over to me, and laughed. It brought home a precariousness that left me hanging in a kind of void. She sat me down behind one of the long wooden tables that all the students sat at during class lectures, to hide what I had done from the teacher. She grabbed some paper towels sitting on the side of the sink, wet them, and held them against my wrist. Her kindness was like morning dew cooling the burning thirst of racism.

My eyes drifted over toward the windows and peered out at the cemetery. In a leafless maple tree with snowflakes clinging, a red cardinal sat singing. I stared into its eyes and saw my Black body running. I ran from my house, from my divorced parents who couldn’t protect me, from the school that taunted me, from my slave ancestors who haunted me, though they’ve been gone for centuries. I ran from the churches and the synagogues that were unable to save me. I ran past the things that are better left unsaid. I ran from the contents of my head. I ran from my country, from its noise, and from its silence, from the unkind words that kept falling from its mouth. I ran from the tears I shed, from the fears and the dread, from the words I never said. I ran from the books I never read, from the path I’d never tread, from the dreams that misled. I ran from the years and what they represented. I panned the skies for the joy that it spreads. I tasted my death. I smelled my rotting flesh. The ground shook beneath my feet. Air became breath. And the forgotten-named tombstones crumbled onto earth’s bed. I stared and I stared. I saw the years my enslaved ancestors had spent. I saw their whipped flesh. A grave opened before me and stared up at me. I ran and I ran. I was looking for me.

It wasn’t until the 2020 racial justice protests that my suicidal thoughts ended. I learned then about an eleven-year-old Black child, Jamari Dent, who hanged himself on February 18, 2019, because a white teacher at his school, the Carter G. Woodson Elementary School (named after scholar and author who wrote The Miseducation of the Negro) called him “a dirty little nigger.” Jamari was subjected to racist slurs from another white teacher who called him “dirty” and “nappy-headed.” A third white teacher asked Jamari whether “his brillo hair was the reason he couldn’t read,” and the classroom erupted in laughter. Jamari’s suicide attempt left him with permanent brain damage and relying on a ventilator to breathe. He died in 2021 from his injuries or, more accurately, from the pain and trauma of racism. That same year, November 3, 2021, ten-year-old Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor of Draper, Utah attempted suicide and died from her injuries three days later. She was the only Black student in her class at Foxboro Elementary School. Her mother, Brittany, suspected something was wrong when her daughter tried spraying Febreze on herself before school. Her mother coaxed out of Izzy that a white boy in her class told her she stank. Brittany informed the teacher, the school, and the school district, but nothing was done to stop the racism.

Izzy’s suicide came just weeks after the Justice Department publicly detailed in a report and settlement agreement that Black students at the Davis School District were racially discriminated against for years, and officials deliberately ignored complaints from both parents and students. The DOJ investigation uncovered hundreds of documented uses of the N-word and other racial epithets over years in the district. The probe also found physical assaults, derogatory racial comments, and harsher discipline for students of color. Black students throughout the district told investigators about whites referring to them as monkeys and apes and saying that their skin was dirty or looked like feces. White students also made monkey noises at their Black schoolmates, and told them "to go pick cotton” and “you are my slave.” District officials admitted to the investigators that their discipline data revealed that staff treated Black students differently than white students, and the district did nothing to correct these disparities. They also acknowledged that the investigation revealed incidents that “were not handled appropriately.”

After reading this, I came across a video of James Baldwin in his last public appearance. It was at the National Press Club in 1986 when he explained why he left America. “I went to France in 1948 when I was quite young. I went there with forty dollars, no French, and a one-way ticket. Or, in other words, I was getting out of here. I didn’t so much go to Paris as leave New York. And the reason I left New York was I knew one fine Tuesday somebody was going to call me nigger once too often, just once too often and somebody was going to die and I didn’t care which one of us it was. So I split. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in Paris, but I knew what was going to happen to me here.”

Jimmy first thought of suicide when he was thirteen. He spoke at length to a friend about it as they stood on a shabby Harlem rooftop. That tenement building was where Jimmy lived with his family in the summer of 1937. Jimmy didn’t act upon his suicidal impulse until December 1949 when he was arrested during his first months in Paris for stealing bed sheets at the Grand Hôtel du Bac where he was living. He became mentally, physically, spiritually deadened by the audience in the courtroom laughing at him after his case was dismissed. He wrote in his first essay, “Equal in Paris, An Autobiographical Story,” that was published in March 1955 in the magazine Commentary, “It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it anymore. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.”

Upon his release from jail, Jimmy returned to the hotel, where he was greeted by the landlady, who told him to pay his bill in an hour or leave immediately. He went to his room, tied one of the dirty sheets to an overhead water pipe, stood on a chair, tied the other end of the sheet around his neck, and stepped off. The pipe broke and water burst out. Jimmy was laden with laughter, as the water felt like he was being rebaptized.

Jimmy again attempted to kill himself in 1956. He swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. His friend Mary Painter rushed over when he called her on the phone and confessed to taking his life. She forced him to regurgitate the pills, stopping his death. A few months later, in October, upon arriving at Corsica, he walked to the sea, finished his brandy, and tossed the glass into the ocean before walking into the water, ready for it to take him under. Standing waist-deep, he changed his mind. It was as if the ocean didn’t want him, and spat him out like a cork. His purpose became clear: he must continue to endure the suffering and tormenting of racist white America and live to tell it by way of his writing. “For every James Baldwin, there are a lot of corpses, a lot of people who went under,” he once lamented.

To Jimmy, I feel a kinship—a spiritual affinity through our having dealt with the constant, consistent presence of racist white American’s anti-Black homophobia. In some asymmetrical way, I always knew my future would bear the scars of James Baldwin’s future because I, too, am a Black gay writer who attempted suicide when I was a teenager.

By tidying up the legacy of Blacks combating American racism, we undermine and doom ourselves to repeating the fight as much as the accomplishments, and if we continue to aestheticize the trauma that racism causes, we risk making it nothing more than an abstraction—part of the rubric of having a story to tell. The only children’s book that Jimmy wrote, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, about his nephew, Tejan Karefa-Smart, offers a glimpse into the joys and challenges of Black life in 1970s Harlem through the eyes of four-year-old, TJ. Jimmy referred to his book as “a celebration of the self-esteem of Black children.” His niece, Aisha Karefa-Smart, who’s the inspiration behind the character Blinky, spoke about her uncle and explained what she learned from him that’s needed for us Black folk to thrive. “It’s very important in the development of the self-esteem of Black children to have books that celebrate who they are,” she said during an interview with The Conscious Kid. “It’s very important to plant those seeds early in a child’s consciousness. My uncle always talked about that. He wrote an essay titled ‘A Talk to Teachers,’ where he speaks about the importance of building the self-esteem of Black children and Black children being educated by people who love, understand, and celebrate them.” Aisha finished by saying, “My message to young writers and to young artists is that the darkness is what compels us and pushes us to become better human beings. I think that’s the example he left for me, that he left for the world.”

After learning about Jamari, Izzy, and Jimmy’s trying to kill themselves because of racism, I was ashamed that I’d never written a word about how racism pushed me to be a suicider. Having had my first racist experience at such a young age, I apprehended that racism would reoccur throughout my life and remain beyond my control, but I didn’t apprehend the comfort and support Black kids born after me would need. It’s sinister that us Black folk’s fight to end racism eclipses the toll it takes on our psyche. But publicly acknowledging my suicide attempt has given me a measure of compassion for how difficult it is for Black kids to retain life, functionality, and humanity. I’m determined to live because I see now that my living is a protest against racism.

We are at a Mexican restaurant we’ve frequented since my brother was in high school, more than ten years ago now, back when I was trying to get his friends’ attention while they shoved the free chips into their barely-stubbled mouths. There is no other way to say this; my brother, Tom, is what most people would call a nerd. He was a nerd in high school and remains one, plugged into a microphone headset most nights, beyond the earliest hours of the morning playing Magic: The Gathering Online. But the social nuances of high school cliques and factions didn’t yet matter to me ten years ago. Older men were older men. And after lunch specials at El Vaquero, I would ride in the back seat of my brother’s truck—my father’s truck, really, loaned to my brother every Friday night in 2010—to The End Games and sit in the corner drinking the free Sprite while Tom and his friends entered Magic drafts that lasted for at least three hours. I fiddled with the iridescent twenty-sided dice that extended for yards along The End’s back wall. He and his friends forgot I was lingering there like the lone, meek chaperone at a middle school dance. If anyone was made to guess, surely they would think I was there for a reason of logistics. I must not have had anywhere else to go. I was effectively scenery, a piece of furniture, another folding plastic chair. If I did catch the occasional wandering eye of a pale young man, I would shape-shift into a doe on a dark road found suddenly in some headlights. Or maybe I was behind the wheel of a mammoth diesel truck, and it was he who was frozen there. We were both surprised and suspended until one of us eventually averted our light-blinded eyes and bounded away into the safe shadows.

The Magic drafts are a dim memory, unlodged only by the vinyl seats of El Vaquero’s booths. “How long would you say it takes you to finish a story?” my brother asks, scraping a broken tortilla chip into some guacamole stuck to the inside of a faux molcajete. “I’m talking start to finish, including edits.”

“It depends,” I say. I don’t actually know the answer, but I know the point he’s trying to make. The slogging execution is the part of writing that the current language models are poised to replace.

You
Should I, as a writer, be afraid of AI?

ChatGPT
Writers should be intrigued by AI's potential to enhance creativity, automate mundane tasks, and offer new storytelling tools. However, ethical considerations, potential job displacement, and the risk of AI-generated content saturation warrant careful awareness. Striking a balance between embracing AI as a valuable tool and preserving human expression is crucial for writers navigating the evolving landscape.

“I have nothing to add to this conversation,” my brother’s girlfriend says. “I know nothing about AI.”

We look at her. Tom sips from his Coronarita which is the size of a helmet. “Okay,” Tom says, “Have you considered not saying anything at all?”

He laughs at his own sarcasm, but I bristle like there’s some dangerous electricity hidden in the air. I am reminded of the way my brother used to straddle multiple social spheres in high school. He was a nerd, yes, but he inhabited an intersection of brains and brawn, floating between linear algebra and varsity baseball practice. He should be evidence of the way individuals can thwart cliches, but my brother sometimes manages to display the most stereotypical qualities associated with both crowds.

You
Why do I feel afraid?

ChatGPT
Fear of AI often stems from concerns about job displacement, ethical implications, and potential unforeseen consequences. You may fear losing control.

Our conversation at El Vaquero is one in a series of discussions about artificial intelligence, it being some common, shallow ground for us. The first of these conversations was during the summer of 2020. Remote work had unhinged me from any one location, so I stayed with my parents for weeks and spent more quality time with my brother than I had since 2010.

Among headlines distilling the news of COVID-19 deaths, lockdown orders, and murderous cops were headlines about machine learning. My brother was working remotely from my parents’ house, too, and I had the feeling we were both fleeing our tedious jobs—me, from trafficking advertisements for an agency in charge of marketing Lockheed Martin’s jets, him from fine-tuning the codes running the machines manufacturing Ivermectin—and our shoddy home offices in which we binged updates from the breaking and broken world. Language models were the rage, I remember: Natural Language Processing technologies, a subfield of AI specialized in understanding and responding to human language. Chatbots. I listened to technology podcasts as I ran in circles around my parents' yard, and when I came inside, sunburnt and agitated, I told my brother what I had heard. He fielded all of my questions, challenged me to philosophical debates, and we wondered in tandem about the movements of a mind, what could be reproduced. From him I discovered that these technologies learn a lot like humans do: recognizing repetition and responding to rewards. They absorb a vast piece of the internet and mimic its patterns, taking a guess at the next right word, over and over again until a sentence forms.

You
Why do I fear losing control?

ChatGPT
Humans often learn to fear loss of control during experiences that evoke vulnerability or unpredictability. Traumatic events, sudden changes, or situations where individuals feel powerless contribute to this fear. It can also emerge through societal shifts, technological advancements, or personal crises, triggering a sense of insecurity.

That summer, my brain’s capacity for mimicry was astounding in the moments when I could recognize what was happening, the fissures forming in my life, the deepening grooves of looping neural paths. There was nothing to do but run in circles, read the news, have the same conversations about AI, and get embarrassingly drunk. My brother and I both had a habit of binge drinking even before the pandemic, and being isolated with the internet was like dryer lint tossed into my swelling heat. We’d begun to frequent small, outdoor concerts hosted by the parents of one of my brother’s high school friends. It was there I disappeared, blacked out, and the bleary image of being undressed by an older man—a baseball friend of my brother’s—was implanted into my otherwise blank memory.

You
Why do I remember frightening experiences so well?

ChatGPT
Humans remember scary events due to the amygdala's role in processing emotions and forming memories. The emotional intensity of fear triggers a strong memory formation, helping individuals recall and learn from threatening situations for survival and adaptation.

The final weeks of that summer were white hot, like I was ever-pressing my hand to a burner on the ancient stove in my studio apartment to where I had fled, hunkered down. But the wound I sustained was unlike that of a burn. The delay between contact and pain was slower. The numbness that occurs in the time it takes for pain-sensing neurons to ascend a message to the brain lasted for months, and when the pain did snare, I had already decided not to yell as my body spasmed and collapsed on the cool floor of my bedroom. I shut my blinds and told no one. I did everything I was already doing tenfold.

I ran loops around my apartment building that abutted a stream, mud-smelling and dried now to a trickle. I spiraled the paved riverwalk and the same five or six neighborhood blocks until I was shaking and breathless.

My diet consisted of one brand of yogurt, the kind I once ate only for breakfast.

I drank.

I read the news.

You
What if I’m a person who does not aid in their own survival? Is there a word for that?

ChatGPT
Yes, such a person might be described as exhibiting self-sabotaging behavior, acting contrary to their own well-being.

I don’t know when it was exactly, but I read an article about Elon Musk’s brain-chip enterprise, Neuralink, and his long-term vision of merging the human brain with artificial intelligence. I read about the use of flexible, gossamer fibers implanted into the supple folds of gray matter. Eventually, the fibers will transmit your brain-data to a personal device, such as an iPhone. At the image of Elon Musk dragging, dropping, and downloading the contents of my brain, my metaphorical wheels rattled off and rolled into the four dusty corners of my bedroom-sized apartment.

Though my mind at that moment was short-circuiting, ill and trapped in recurring memories or in the behaviors I employed to avoid them, I experienced a lightning strike of rationality like I was flying a key-weighted kite: my plan to bury this story was not going to work. Every freeze-frame sliver of it would end up belonging to something like an external hard drive, and I had no control over who could watch, what they would say.

You
How do I know if I’m sabotaging myself? At what point does someone realize they're self-destructive?

ChatGPT
People often realize they're engaging in self-destructive behavior when they observe repeated negative consequences, experience emotional distress, or encounter repeated obstacles in their lives. Recognition may vary, but a critical turning point is acknowledging the harmful impact on well-being and seeking help or change.

I stopped running along the path that traced the river because all of the faces on it became strange and threatening. I couldn’t see a face and keep myself from wondering about life behind it, what harm it was capable of.

I ate less.

I blamed myself for the middle-school tendency I had to look for male attention, for offering my glazed eyes to be interlocked with.

I Googled my questions, over and over again. I would type into the search bar “Why am I so afraid of everything?” I would type "What if I had sex I didn’t want to have?” I would type “Karmic punishment,” “How do I get out of thought spirals?”, “Elon Musk download brain,” “STD testing,” “Covid testing,” “How do I know if I need to talk to someone?”, “Why can’t I sleep?”

I read more of the news.

ChatGPT
People often realize they're engaging in self-destructive behavior when they observe repeated negative consequences, experience emotional distress, or encounter repeated obstacles in their lives. Recognition may vary, but a critical turning point is acknowledging the harmful impact on well-being and seeking help or change.

ChatGPT
People often realize they're engaging in self-destructive behavior when they observe repeated negative consequences, experience emotional distress, or encounter repeated obstacles in their lives. Recognition may vary, but a critical turning point is acknowledging the harmful impact on well-being and seeking help or change.

ChatGPT
People often realize they're engaging in self-destructive behavior when they observe repeated negative consequences, experience emotional distress, or encounter repeated obstacles in their lives. Recognition may vary, but a critical turning point is acknowledging the harmful impact on well-being and seeking help or change.

When I saw my brother over the holidays that year, we screamed at each other. I proclaimed Elon Musk to be Public Enemy Number One. He responded that Teslas are the only cars to appreciate in value. I shouted that Elon was a misogynist, a huge loser with kids who won’t even claim him despite his billions. My brother described a bell curve of intelligence in which men were the outliers, the geniuses, he said. I called him sexist and said his girlfriend was complicit in this, a rising lump in my throat. And we all sat stunned-cold while flickering red pillar candles flung shadows on our faces.

I wish I could say that I stood on top of the kitchen table and announced that my brain would not be downloaded under any circumstance, and it was then my family realized just how sick I’d become, and everyone dropped their plans to help me find the psychiatric help I needed. Instead, we cleared the ruined dinner from the table, and my brother started a game of online Magic after I refused to watch the most recent M. Night Shyamalan film with him. My dad approached us individually to say he believed we were both really, really smart. In the kitchen, as we cleaned it, my mom said it looked like I lost weight. My mother isn’t condescending, her heart incapable of it. She said this with the same face someone might have when they tell you they’re so sorry your cat just died, when they really mean it.

You
How do I seek change?

ChatGPT
Reimagining our lives involves intentional reflection and storytelling. Identify key experiences, values, and goals. Craft a positive, empowering narrative by focusing on growth, resilience, and lessons learned. Share your story with others, fostering connection and understanding.

My family never questioned nor discouraged me when I told them I was pursuing writing, quitting my suspiciously well-paid work-from-home job to go to graduate school. I’m lucky for this, I know, and I know it was their way of reading the signs, seeing that it was something I needed to do.

My brother offers a new idea for a novel every time I see him. (While driving to El Vaquero, he said, “You should write a novel that’s all dialogue,” and I said, “You mean a play,” and he said, “No, a novel that’s all dialogue.”)

You
Why should I share my story with others?

ChatGPT
Sharing your story with others can foster connection, empathy, and understanding. It creates a sense of community and can inspire or support those facing similar challenges. Additionally, verbalizing your experiences can be therapeutic, helping you gain insights and perspectives while contributing to personal growth and resilience.

“Well,” I say to break the silence that settles inside the tension between my brother and his girlfriend. “I just don’t believe ChatGPT can write a more emotionally resonant story than a human being. It’s literally just derivative language at this point.”

“Right now, sure, but it will be able to write a believably emotional story pretty soon, most likely,” Tom says.

The waiter gently interrupts us, sweating from his hairline, his arms covered in hot plates. It takes us so long to claim our dishes, sort out whose pile of sizzling fajitas is whose, that there’s nothing else to say, nothing else to do but burn our tongues on cumin-scented peppers and onions like my brother and I have been doing for a decade now.

You
Does it matter that the story I’m telling is my own?

ChatGPT
Yes, it matters because sharing your lived experiences, feelings, and insights allows for a deeper connection with others, fostering empathy and understanding. It reflects your unique perspective, making your narrative more impactful.

My brother’s girlfriend is the first to compliment the food, and we agree. She is genuinely excited to eat at this run-of-the-mill, B-Grade Americanized Mexican place just because it's where my brother grew up. She told me once—that afternoon at the concert, before I blacked out and disappeared—that my brother doesn’t talk about his past, his emotions, or his ambitions. “So I’m really excited to finally see where he grew up, your parents’ house,” she had said. It was her first time meeting them and staying in my brother’s childhood room. At her description of my brother’s emotional unavailability, I remember wanting to take her by the shoulders and scream, THAT’S NOT NORMAL! How can you even say you know each other? What do you even talk about? But I was two tallboys in and about to accept a jar of homemade moonshine from that friend of my brother’s. She and I didn’t finish our conversation.

“Tom always says he’s eating here when he’s visiting home, and now I finally get to try it,” she says.

“How much time do you think you’ve spent at El Vaquero?” I ask him.

My brother and I are laughing. “There were days when me and Alex came here for every meal.”

She’s looking on, waiting with her mouth-corners quivering like she’s going to join in on the joke but needs some explanation. Tom launches into stories of Speedy Gonzales—Lunch Special #4—and the best dessert on the menu, xangos. There was that one time, when his friends got so mad because one stole some Magic cards from the other, they started slapping each other with flaccid palms across the wood-carved table, over-top the painted ponies and dozing cowboys and round bloom of prickly pears. They did this in front of the whole restaurant, stopping only once Manuel, the owner, had asked,“You okay, amigos?” We talk about driving from El Vaquero to The End. We talk about how one of Tom’s friends, the younger one, developed a crush on me, and I tell them about how he would message me on Facebook all the time to ask if I was going to be at the Magic draft that night.

“I didn’t know that,” Tom says.

“He was harmless,” I say.

“I would have brutally made fun of him.”

This, I know, is my brother’s way of saying, I would have fucked him up if he ever tried anything. I know, too, that ruthless, intellectual scorn is the most pain he could inflict on another person. I usher out the thought creeping in of the night I disappeared and all the texts my brother sent, looking for me, that I found when conscious again in the not-quite-morning. In the present moment, I decide to accept my brother’s way of brothering, and I release the impulse to wonder what more he could have done that night, wonder if he would have done anything at all. I know, now, he would have, and I finally place some blame on the one, blame-worthy person: not my brother, not myself.

You
Will AI eventually be able to recreate or replace my story?

ChatGPT
Recreating human stories is challenging for AI because stories are deeply intertwined with complex human experiences, emotions, and cultural nuances. AI lacks genuine emotions, personal life experiences, and the innate human touch that make stories authentic and relatable. AI's lack of a physical body and sensory experiences impacts its ability to tell stories authentically. Human stories often draw upon sensory details, emotions, and physical experiences, elements that AI, without a tangible presence or firsthand encounters, may struggle to comprehend and convey.

I want to tell my brother there’s a lot we don’t know about each other, and he should write his novel in dialogue, and he should tell his girlfriend everything she ever wanted to know.

As we leave El Vaquero, the night’s been pulled like a curtain, and a soft autumn rain is just beginning. I drive us home because my brother still has the luxury of drinking (I, a couple of years sober, do not). He DJs in the passenger seat, queues the same music he’s listened to since high school, and plays it at full volume. His girlfriend tells him to turn it down, and he does, until the next song rises in the speakers and he has to turn it up again, singing along so poorly that she has to laugh.

I try to recall the summer Tom went to El Vaquero every day, the summer before he went to college. I don’t want the minutiae of events but their accumulated feeling. As I drive, I imagine heat lightning slinging itself across the sky, the clouds backlit by a force beyond us. I imagine the wet air, the smell of cut grass and jasmine and exhaust gas drifting through the open windows. The ringing of wind in my ears. The frightening freedom of going home so late, my first real taste of being untethered and the unawareness of just how scared I could be. But safe, then, and with my brother.

You
Is our body what makes us human? Our ability to be wounded?

You
Or, is it those memories that only we know?

You
Or, maybe it's the intersection of these things, telling the stories of our scars.

My brother was the one driving us home then, while I laid my cheek on the truck’s center console sticky with spilled soda, seconds from sleep if not there. But the last night of that last summer, driving home from The End, I was wide awake: head down but unresponsive, stricken with sadness of which I couldn’t place a cause. Sometimes, my brother can be surprisingly tender. Usually, he is a safe bet for a joke, always disarming in his humor. But there’s a mode of his where he can combine the two, not pushing away sadness but making room inside of it for lightness. In a silly, nudging voice, he asked if I was okay; “How ya doin’, bud?” I said nothing, typical for me, for the both of us. But atypical was his response to my silence. “I really didn’t want this summer to end,” he said. I’ve always thought my brother could be a writer if he wanted. Frequently, he has articulated things that felt, to me, previously wordless. We were quiet beneath the radio, I’m sure, as we drove the rest of the way to our parents’ home—just as we are now, though we’re louder and there’s three of us—realizing it was all entering memory, stories to be recalled, told, downloaded, forgotten even, which, too, can be a gift.

My mother died, and I was not there but I remember her face, the way the creases of her skin smoothed into stillness, rooted from her eyes and mouth, etched into silence. The way her eyes emptied into pools on our hardwood floors.

She accumulated objects both significant and abstract—a torn envelope with my brother’s and my baby teeth scattered in her drawer with her stockings and socks. Hallmark cards from memorial occasions—both the good and the bad—in shoe boxes, cabinets, and littered on tabletops. Christmas ornaments and Halloween costumes spilling out of storage boxes, lonely in the darkened basement.

She died and I was not there. But I remember her face.

Aphantasia is an inability to produce imagery in the mind. Those with aphantasia cannot visualize—a sunny beach, a childhood doll, the face of a lover.

Her mother’s paintings, landscapes textured with acrylic pastels, faces blurred with a hardened brush. Receipts from car purchases, furniture purchases, house purchases, dated back four decades. Barbie dolls, teddy bears, Hot Wheels cars, agonizing to the barefoot when gone unnoticed.

I go to a bereavement group a few months after and sit with sadness. I am the youngest, and the group sits on hard chairs in a circle, avoiding eye contact. There is no room for chit-chat. A man says he lost his mother ten years before and he never fully grieved. I wonder what that means for me.

We are all going through the same pain in the group, but I feel that my suffering is more deserved. That my loss of her is greater than their loss. That my love is greater than their love.

I didn’t make any friends there.

Shoddy wooden chairs from strangers’ front lawns, chipped ceramic cups from garage sales, wasted fabric and wrapping paper, recipes in her handwriting, the blue ink of her scrawl smeared from the passing of time.

Those with aphantasia can tell you about images based on prior knowledge—an apple’s waxy skin, the shine in a gemstone. But they cannot see it. Their mind’s eye is blind.

Mind’s eye—figurative, intangible, intuitive.

The way her eyes emptied into pools on our hardwood floors.

I volunteer at a week-long summer camp for children who have known loss. I believe I can help them or, at least, understand them. The campers and staff wear different color ribbons on their shirts—blue for loss of a father, pink for a mother, purple for a grandparent, red for loss by suicide. The small campers act out in anger or clinging or bedwetting. The teens are solemn, turning their sadness inward.

I don’t know what to say to the campers to make them feel better. I never knew what to say to myself.

Hyperphantasia is experiencing imagery to the extreme. The mind can see so vividly that some have said there is almost no distinction between reality and the image. Between what happened and what was thought to have happened. Or, between the event and memory.

I go to a spiritual retreat in South America where I take ayahuasca on top of a mountain. I believe this will help me and believe I need to be helped. I sink into the cool earth as I weep; I miss her so much. I want to heal on a spiritual level, on a cellular level.

A shaman wraps me in wool blankets and puts me in the fetal position, my forehead and knees touching the dirt. I feel as if I am trying to return to the womb but I know I can never truly go back. If I’d even want to.

The hyperphantasiac’s imagination is so strong that visualizing something as simple as the tasting of a carbonated drink, bubbles rising to its copper surface, can induce a belch. They can read of a gory battle, a bayonet plunging into the heart of a soldier, bloody and violent, and the hyperphantasiac can faint from the intensity. Their mind’s eye is always alert.

Creases of her skin, rooting from her eyes and mouth, eyes emptied.

Photographs of yellowish hues, blinding whites, saturated landscapes. Photographs from one hundred years before, grayscale, pale faces, darkened expressions. Photographs of me, of her, of me and her, and now, just me.

Three tests can easily determine the strength of your mind’s eye:

Illumination: How bright or dim is the image in your mind? Has her skin dulled into gray from lack of oxygen? Has the afternoon light streamed through the dusty air shining over her body?

Definition: What is called into focus? The unblinking eyes or the emptiness of the room? The soul hovering, or the nothingness after?

Coloring: How does your perception of color compare to the legitimacy of the color? Is the red of the ambulance sirens a violent crimson or a prismatic scarlet? Does the white in your father’s face when he found her drift toward the ivory of the walls or the vista white of the sky?

I remember her face.

Signed autographs, trinkets in glass and porcelain picked up from places unknown, from people forgotten. Canned beans, moldy fruits, hardened sugar. Paper bags, plastic bags, bags of bags.

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not pathologies, rather a different way to experience the world. It is a variation of the mind, just as death is a variation of life.

Chromatic yearbooks, stuffed animals stifled in boxes, unused gifts ready for the giving. Love letters from a man who was her husband, love letters from a man who wasn’t. A Ziplock bag of soda can tops, fallen, scattered, for what purpose I will never know.

Those with aphantasia cannot “call up images in the mind,” just as I cannot call up my mom on the phone.

Wooden scraps decaying, rough indents from mice. Moth-eaten wool coats, musty and obsolete—

The stillness is paralyzing and I need to move.

I take a road trip in the summer to her old haunts where she lived in college and in her twenties, before me. I drive north and keep going. The air cools and the vast amount of verdant pastures is startling: wild grasses, infinite skies, herculean oaks. The nothingness knows no boundaries. It is limitless, open, empty, unlike her basement.

I see her best friend who reveals to me the lies my mom told me—some to protect me, others herself. I feel anger but I have nowhere to put it. It just reddens like flames in my amygdala, simmering underneath.

I know that the lies stemmed from a broken childhood, a broken family. I know that she never expected for her lies to be found out, that her secrets would remain with her always. I know that if she knew how not to lie, she wouldn’t have. But still, the anger is blazing inside of me.

It shouldn’t matter now. We all do things when we hurt.

I want to throw out her things—the news clippings, report cards, empty bottles of perfume, dried nail polish, tattered trousers. But I wonder where they will go. I know they will most likely end up in a landfill, underneath the dirt. Not seen but not gone.

I gather stories from her friends on my trip who say I remind them of her. They say this with adoration, with respect. The arch of my eyebrows, the rosiness in my cheeks, the vitality of my smile. Etched into silence.

Her face, my face.

I want to feel her here with me on this journey, visualize her walking along the wild fields of sweet cicely and bloodroot, stark white. I want to see her reflection in the windows of storefronts selling gourmet mustards and organic lotions, hear her shoes clacking on the cobblestones of our favorite city, drifting through time. Sitting on a park bench with her– blistering wood, blistering sun.

I walk to the far end of the street—the small town she once called home, the one I heard about in bedtime stories, in my dreams. I find stones near the lake. I cup them in my hands, clusters of blisters rising on my feet. I chronicle memories, lest I forget.

We are all collectors.

I am not part of them—those with aphantasia or hyperphantasia. My mind’s eye functions at an average level. I can see images in my mind, although objects and scenes are more difficult than faces.

Baby clothes bunched into fists, shattered antique glassware, faded newspapers inky and arid, scribbles of children’s art, scribbles of poems.

For hyperphantasiacs, life is without doubt a cinematic experience. For aphantasiacs, they must rely on other senses to get by. Language is what ties them together. I use words to evoke images, to evoke emotion.

I rummage through relics of her life, looking for…something. To feel connected to her, to myself. Reasons for her lies. Answers to questions I’ll never get to ask.

The root word “phantasia” is commonly understood as imagination, however, the Greek interpretation could also define it as “appear.”

She appears and reappears in my mind’s eye by its own volition, and I suspect (fear) that one day she’ll disappear.

I am haunted by so many things she left behind. The immense amount of stuff fills the walls of her house, my house, a phantom pursuing me. As her only daughter, her things become my responsibility.

On the last day of my road trip, I meet my cousin—her brother’s daughter—for an early breakfast. We have never been close, but an obligation stems from somewhere. We look nothing alike. Her face sharpened and angled, mine soft and round. Her foreignness constellates wonder in my mind—we are both related to my mother.

Creases, rooting from her eyes and mouth.

Letters to her mother from half a country away—I love you, I miss you. A coupon for twenty-five cents off for Baskin Robbins ice cream. Multiple Bon Appétit magazines from 1984 to 1986. Western Union telegrams—

Stop.

A common attribute for people with aphantasia is that they get over things quicker than those without it. Meaning, after a death an aphantasiac’s grieving time is shortened. This is not because they don’t love or miss the person who died. Of course, the pain of loss is universal. Rather, the imagery sector of the brain does not activate, and they do not have the constant repetition of images of their person plaguing their brains.

My mother died, and I was not there but I remember her face, the way the creases of her skin smoothed into stillness, rooted from her eyes and mouth, etched into silence. The way her eyes emptied into pools on our hardwood floors.

It is not memory that is killing us but our imagination, and more so when it’s liberated.

I was not there—but I remember her face.

I tell my cousin about my mom’s things. The insurmountable, overwhelming number of things. She says her dad has things, too. Boxes and bags of things. Things overpowering space, no room to breathe. So much so that he had to buy a storage unit to house them. He had to find a home for these things.

I wonder if I am destined to follow them, cling to the absence by filling it.

The things she amassed suffocate me. It takes painful hours, days, years to comb through what is valuable and what is not. What is worth remembering. And even as I push my way through the mountains of objects, I feel that I am not making any progress. I am stuck, unable to move backward or forward. I’m not sure which is more painful—forgetting or remembering.

In one of my mother’s letters to her mother I find, she writes, “Sometimes in life you have to do things that hurt people in the present but are for the best in the end.”

I want to be liberated.

But I’m not sure if liberation is freedom to remember or freedom to forget.