A Running, a Retching, a Reaching by Courtney Elizabeth Young
I am twelve, and I am running. I am running because it is all I know how to do anymore. I am running down the dark street in a towel, my bare feet slosh and slip in the slush and snow, wet hair frozen, running from you. In this running I cross a border and have no other destination than away. I do not know what waits for me on the other side, but when you are running for your life, you do not care.
As I run, I kick up sediment behind me. I am changing the terrain of the world between us. Making, as you say, a mountain out of a molehill. My toes clamp down, finding purchase beneath the slippery slush on the hard edge of ice.
There is a stream of melted snow that is also running. Along the curb, into the sewer drain. If it were to reach a barrier it would stop, freeze into a hard edge of ice, but on it runs. Like a glacial rush of madness, a slow-reaching sadness, going the wrong way, going back toward where I came from, going back home.
There is a house I recognize, the neighbor’s driveway that I make a sharp turn into. There is the backyard, the screened-in porch I blow through, a floor upon which I collapse, a hoarse breathing. When I am away from you, I can catch my breath, and when I do, there is a part of me—there is always a part of me—that knows I am overreacting. I cannot seem to learn one simple lesson, accept one primal truth: I do not belong here.
Mr. Hewitt finds me on his floor. He wraps me in a blanket, he asks questions. I answer him in my head because I know my answers are stupid.
“What’s wrong?”
I forgot to close my bedroom windows when I was in the shower. I didn’t know the heat was on. Mom got mad at me. She started yelling.
“What happened?”
I don’t remember. It was an accident. I am an accident. I am sorry.
He shouts for his daughter to get me some warm clothes. “Who is home?”
Mom. Dad is on one of his business trips.
“Are you okay?”
I am sorry. I am overreacting. I am stupid. I am fine.
He doesn’t ask me anything else, after a moment he sighs. “You can sleep downstairs with the girls you like.”
Later, lying in someone else’s dark, I lie to myself like I always do. I tell myself I belong. Here at the Hewitts’ house, back at home, anywhere and everywhere. I think of Dad. Dad on important business trips, for business more important than our business here at home: helping the Susan G. Komen foundation help women with breast cancer. I think of all the places Dad goes, like Colorado, New York, Utah, and in later years places like Egypt, Aruba, Italy. I think about how he might feel a sense of belonging in far-away places, and how one day I might feel a sense of belonging in places far from home, too.
When I am sure everyone is asleep, I leave quietly, I go back. I am always going back. I am a continental plate convergent, pushing my way across water, forcing myself to fit back together, past the negative space.
You always leave the back door unlocked, and that is your acknowledgment, your admission to guilt. It is an apology, one I accept by turning a handle, tip-toeing to my room, crawling into bed, and never speaking of times like this again. Inside of me there is a sadness that congeals, growing furiously until it hardens, like a burl.
But this night, when I try the handle, the door is locked.
I stand, I stare, I notice I am starting to freeze. I go back up the street to return to someone else’s dark. I look at the stream. There is still a rushing, a reaching, but it is soft in its running. Underneath it, a layer turns to ice. Like a glacier separating itself from its continent, in its heaviness it slips away, dragging debris, scratching its scar of a stitch into the world beneath it. An abrasive eroding, heavy. Something that burdens but does not ground.
Something stiffens inside me. This is when I stop hating myself and start hating you.
Mama, I am no longer running from you. I am no longer running at all because of where I am now: bald head lolling over a toilet bowl, legs splayed before me. I am too weak to swallow the spit that froths my lips, so I hang my head and drool until the next wave of nausea comes. There is a violent emptiness in me, like there has always been a violent emptiness in me, a paradox that crushes me, that burdens but does not ground. There is my drooping neck, my hand falling to flush the toilet, my crawling across the hall, dragging myself back to bed.
Mama, I am no longer running. I am writing, and I am writing to you. I am writing to you at six, and thirteen, and twenty-eight, and every age in between, because although I am now thirty, I am still six, still thirteen, still twenty-eight. I am writing to you because my body, it suffers because it remembers.
It remembers that I am five, and I am running, because you said, “God bless it!” when I spilled a cup of orange juice, and God bless it means something very, very bad happened—or is about to happen. So even though I hear you yell, “Come back here and clean this up!” my body kicks into a run, and so I run, away from you.
I am six, running downstairs because I am sorry. I am always so sorry. I stop running when I hear you talking to my sisters: Sweetie and Pud, about me: Little Snot, Mistake.
I am seven, running toward you, because you called for me. You called for me because you needed me. You mop your brow with the sleeve of an old sweater, while I stand curious, dutiful, attentive. “Lift up the couch so I can vacuum underneath it.” You turn the vacuum back on without waiting for a reply, because the only reply you need is my scurrying to the edge of the couch, scrawny arms pulling, little fingers gripping. I slip on my heels, land wedged in the trench under the sofa, my bum absorbing the shock on my face. Your hot magma mouth screams with the vacuum, “I wish I never had you!”
I am eight, standing before you in head-slunk sadness. You berate, you snarl, your temper. You say in disgust, “Get out my sight.”
I am nine. I share a room with Mary, who knows everything, so I ask her the question burning at my core beneath the brittle crust of me. Me—breath hitching, hands convulsing, eyes flooding, asking, “Does Mom love us?”
“No, obviously,” she sighed. Obviously was her new word.
“Yes, yes she does, she loves us,” my words are thick chops. But I know as if I have always known, that you do not love me, and you do not like me. And I feel what I have always felt: a big black hole, an abyss, Mary would say, opening inside of me. I fear the holes I have started to feel because they keep getting bigger and bigger.
I am ten, scrubbing the floors so I can go play in the pool with my sisters, but I am moving too quickly. I tip over the bucket of water. I watch wide-eyed with gritted teeth as it spills down the vent, freeze in fear when I hear the clatter and clamor of the broom you drop, the dustpan you throw, as you erupt from the basement. My convulsions match the stomp stomp stomp of your earthquake feet. On soap I stumble and slip, dragging myself into a closet until I stop crying, until I fall asleep, until Dad comes home.
I am eleven. I watch wide-eyed with gritted teeth as the blood spills down my wrist. Trying to end the pain I am to you more than end the pain I am in.
I am twelve, in the bathroom, screaming. I didn’t even feel it when it happened, but I shit myself. I do not know that some of the first secretions of womanhood are not bright and red and new, but old, discolored, brown. Dull, dark. Blood the body has been waiting to shed. You barge in, see me sobbing with soiled pants around my ankles, half naked on the toilet. You squat, then rifle under the sink, pull at my hand that tries to hide the mess I have become, smack something wrapped in plastic it. “This is a pad, use it,” you walk out. Slam.
I am thirteen, and while Dad waits in the car, I am in Walmart in the underwear department, where at its periphery grown men on their way to automotive or grocery look from me to the merchandise I slide quietly along the rack. What do the numbers mean? What do the letters mean? I take something off the hanger that looks like it will fit, smash it between my hands, walk toward the register. Shoulders up to my neck, the ball in my hands pulses to breathe while I remain hunched, compressed. The eyes of men somehow forcing mine down.
I am fourteen, no longer wearing black baggy t-shirts—instead, tight tank tops and short shorts. You get cosmetic surgery.
I am fifteen, helping you move your things to an apartment off a country road, two blocks from a strip club like the one where I will work in two years’ time.
I am sixteen, interlocking my fingers against my ratty hair while the SWAT team aims their guns at the back of my head.
I am seventeen, calling Dad in his kitchen while he is in Iraq. I tell him that inviting you to return to live with us while he is away is the worst thing he could have done to me. Your nails claw my wrist in attempts to take the phone away, which you do, but not before I hear, “Your mother does not love you and has never loved you and you need to just accept that!”
I am eighteen, standing in my cap and gown with the extra graduation ticket I saved for you that you did not want, staring at you from the driveway as you sit in the passenger side of a Corvette with your boyfriend: a man who I hate, who hates me. I watch you princess-wave down the road, out of sight, away.
I am nineteen, living in Jack’s basement after he bailed me out of jail. Jack who is retired and has a shamrock tattoo on his neck and a NO TRESPASSING sign on his door, who helps me stay clean by giving me a place to stay, who takes me to the diner every Saturday morning if I bring him an Oreo McFlurry when I get home from working third shift at McDonald’s.
I am twenty, moved back home with Dad since he has been back, since you have been gone—working in Iraq like Dad was. I am trying to find you in the places I once saw you. I am in what was once your backyard, in what was once your garden, planting flowers like you used to. Ripping weeds from the root like you used to.
I am twenty-one, running to catch up with the procession that one follows after earning two associate degrees in two years. What was once a running from finally becomes a running to. A cycle righted. Let me show you what I mean.
I pull my computer close to me—me under the sheets, sheets soaked in sweat from medically-induced menopause, sheets I am too tired to change. I move my mouse while fumbling blindly for what feels like the right bottle of the right medicine—the medicine that is supposed to help me stop throwing up—that I just threw up. I tongue a mouth sore torn open from my retching, stare at my face in the black screen—lifeless, listless, still—as I click on the slideshow I made for myself. I watch the wheel spin while it loads, and when the pictures begin their procession, I feel my body’s impulse to kick into a run, an impulse I cannot fulfill. My legs limb-twitch toward the life they have been severed from as it sprawls over the screen, just like I used to, all over the world.
I am twenty-three, falling into step with children in the United Arab Emirates who dance around the camel just crowned as the most beautiful. I am twenty-four, running along dirt roads in Ghana before going to work. I am twenty-six, floating over a bait box far off the coast of Australia, throwing up a shaka as the sharks swim around me. I am twenty-seven, laughing over a beer while standing over a waterfall with the friends I made on a hike through Colombia’s Sierra Nevada. I am twenty-eight, sinking into a seat on the Ferris wheel in Finland watching the sun set. I am 30, flying in a biplane over a Mexican jungle. I am twenty-nine, dancing on a rooftop in Morocco with the owner of the hostel, laughing into a sky full of stars. Everywhere I go, the composition of constellations is different. Everywhere I go, I am the focal point affixed, yet still moving, still running.
I am screaming color tearing through oceans, through borders, through the world. This is how I make a world once one, one once again. My body, becomes a bridge. The images flicker into one another, my wary smile cracking scabbed lips, my eyes drooping drowsily, staring at who I once was: a whole woman, a woman whole. Wild, waist-length hair flying free. I am smiling until the computer dies and the photos fade. When they do, the screen becomes a black mirror, and face to face with who I am now my smile dies, too. I have no eyelashes to keep my tears from running—running much like I used to. I have no nose hairs to keep my nose from running, much like I used to. There is no flush in my skin from this running, no crease in my cheeks from laughing. There is only a bloated moon-face of medicine and steroids. There is no hanging my head out of some strange bus flying down some strange road in some strange country, because there is no bus and there is no road except for one that feels like an end, and there is no country outside of the small island I have become. There is no wind-whipped, red-raw chill because there is no wind. All is still.
And so still, I write to you. While looking out the window to the soft milky light of morning, glinting pink in the pre-dawn sky; a lazy knife cuts the world open, bleeding.
I shut my eyes to it. I roll over and away from it. I pull the sheets over my head. I pretend my sweat is amniotic fluid. I pretend I am in a womb against the world. I am trying to go back. I am always trying to go back, back across waters of negative space, but now I am both an island and an ocean all my own. I ebb, and I erode, myself.
But I am no longer twenty-one, hacking coconuts with a machete in Hawaii. I am no longer twenty-two, visiting Dad—enjoying the life that came after the life he left behind—sand-boarding and belly-dancing in the Arabian Desert. I am no longer sitting in an elephant footprint watching the big beasts bathe. I am no longer riding crocodiles or horses bareback along beaches. I am no longer sneaking into the Great Pyramids of Giza during a Taliban ransom warning. I am no longer twenty-six, zig-zagging through the streets of London, at my heels the stepsisters who would never become my stepsisters, also running. I am no longer twenty-seven, watching the Irukandji jellyfish bounce off their bubbles in Australia, nor am I twenty-eight, in a little black dress for a night out in Bogota while I smoke cigars with the old men as I laugh and dance.
I am no longer twenty-nine falling through a fissure in my hallway, when my doctor called me and told me what would split me in two, wide down the middle, wide enough to make room for you.
I am 30, and I am still. I am still because I am waiting for you. Waiting for you to take me to the hospital, to my doctors, to the sharp edge of a blade.
There was once a continent, a super continent, that made the entire world one. Pangaea comes from the words pan, meaning all, and Gaia, meaning Mother Earth—together meaning entire, whole.
Together, meaning.
There is proof.
There are fossils of the same animals and the same plants found across continents, from species that could not travel across oceans. This means the land masses were connected. This means that in a geological past, the world was once one.
But through subtle shakes and shifts there was friction, there was heat, there was movement. The land broke, separated, drifted until they were fragments estranged.
But the strongest evidence of Pangaea are the serrated edges of land that, across their negative space, take the shape of each other. If we were to close oceans between continents, push the pieces back together again, they would fit together almost seamlessly.
Pangaea was not the first supercontinent to exist, but it was the last. The world we came from splits, reunites. This process has been a spiral, a cycle. The continents separate, come back together, then break apart, again and again and again.
I could not urge the Earth to move. I could not stitch countries and continents back together. The closest I could get is this running—through the trails of planes and tracks of trains, blazing across bridges, blowing in on boats. My body, running. My body, a bridge. Trying to get whole. Trying to get home.
In convergence, when two continental plates collide, mountains form between them. In divergence they separate, opening an abyss. In transformation, they slip past and strike the other. When an oceanic plate meets a continental plate, there is the sinking of the basalt, a going under. A disappearance, a disintegration.
Throughout the years, there were collisions—although they were slow. There were cataclysms of a latching and a letting go. The pieces drifted from each other. Maybe it was a fleeing more than a seeking, or maybe it was a going away instead of going toward. But when they separated, there were oceans that opened; chasms that grew and grew.
This geographical body is like the one we come from: a hard edge of ice that melted only through movement; that once refused to move. And these geographical bodies, they remember.
Since this treatment and its cognitive impacts, there are holes in my memory like there are holes in our family, but here is what my body remembers. Here are the memories have buried me like rubble, like rocks, that I hurl away from myself, trying to be seen beneath all the pain I am in. Here are the sediments I do not know how to hold, the stones I send skipping across the oceans first out of fury, then to try and reach you, bridge the distance of the lone, lost continents we have become. Here is how I try to reshape our world.
Here are the skipping stones I lose sight of when they sink, disintegrate to sediment, that do not become stepping stones. Here are the ripples they make, that can turn to tsunamis, that can hurtle the world into an upheaval. Here is me across the negative space, across the black holes that chose to hold oceans.
What comes after? This is a question I have asked many times, and ask myself now, staring out the window as the pink dawn bleeds out, like I imagine my body will when my doctors cut out my breast tissue to remove the cancer. What comes after?
Is it resurrection, or reincarnation? And what is the difference?
Resurrection is the returning of a body unchanged. Reincarnation is the returning of a body evolved; transcended.
You and I, Mama, we were once one body: continents cohesive, countries that coexisted, curled into the crescent of each other. We were once our own world together; a world once one.
Let this story be the one that we carry, that we keep, that we find immortality in. Let it reincarnate the sorrows as joys and the graves as gardens, fill our lives, full bloom. Let it live forever while I stare down the barrel of my mortality.
I will tell you what my body has lived with and lived without; of all the pain that without you, I could not pronounce. Let me bridge a distance too great for any bridge but words. Let me speak past the borders, the boundaries. I will throw stones, but because I need to build a bridge between us. I will speak of the oceans, the negative space: the depths of where we have been without each other. I will tell you the etymology of my body as I follow her pathology. I will tell you what my body remembers.
Story is the only thing I cannot be robbed of. It needs a voice to become. It needs a voice to live on if I do not. My story needs my voice and my voice alone, giving me the very power of reincarnation. I know you will not speak yet so please, allow me. But before I tell our story, I will tell another.
This is one you have told me many times: I am a baby, and you are holding me. When you speak this memory into existence, you look down at the imaginary bundle, holding it as if the entire world is in your arms. It is implied that I stare back at you: you, the entire world to me. Together, Pangaea. You are right back in that moment, your eyes glaze with guilt and grief, and landing on what would be mine you ask me, “Why can’t I connect with you? Why can’t I love you?” And then there is me, wide-eyed and silent, unable to answer.
You resorted to tears, and I resorted to silence, and together we formed a flooded abyss of silent separation. I want that to change, Mama. I have the language now, Mama.
Mama, this story is for you.
Mama, let me begin, again.
Courtney Elizabeth Young is a 33-year-old photographer, author and professional dog-walker and two-time triple negative breast cancer killer who holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction through Southern New Hampshire University. She has lived on and backpacked 6 continents and over 30 countries alone so far — but isn’t done yet. A proud owner of both the DRD4 and MAOA gene, she has lived out loud her wild ride through life on everything from cocaine to camels, from crocodiles to cancer. She was featured in the Battle Creek Enquirer for the harrowing tale of her life before cancer,as well as for her debut memoir. She won the Emerging Writer’s Grand Prize through Elephant Journal, the May 2021 poetry contest with Barren Magazine, was the featured travel photographer and writer in DRIFT Travel Magazine, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Palooka Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Inverted Syntax, The Write Launch, and Tipping the Scales’ She Speaks and Hour of Women’s Literature.
10 February 2023
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