By Addie Rahmlow
And this is what loneliness is: looking up at the sky and feeling nothing. Nothing at all. And this
is what pain is: tracing the circles on your palms and wondering if all the women before you
looked down at their bodies and wondered what it’d feel like to peel off their own skin. To be
lonely is to watch the Honda Civic outside your window pirouette on black ice and gasp, to be in
pain is to imagine yourself inside the vehicle, imploding like some distant star.
*
The first time I felt lonely I was surrounded by so much water, Grandma. All stories start with
pain: mine started in an ocean of God’s spit. I remember pinching the red out of my cheeks, skin
all saggy and gelid, my stomach spilling out into the waves of Kachemak Bay. The sea cradled
us like an angry mother that day, the vessel listless as if drugged in a slippery bubble of amniotic
fluid. I didn’t know where we were. I couldn’t tell the shoreline from the sky. How funny is it
that you can be surrounded by so much life yet still feel utterly and completely alone?
To be honest, I do not know why I am writing this to you. Right now, it is snowing and it looks
as if the moon has shattered into a million tiny shards. I want to go outside and dance in it, to
kiss the flakes as if they’re craters. You see, this is what I do, Grandma. I take pieces of wholes
and place them together into pretty sentences as if they’re meant to be poetic. I am a liar. I hate
the snow. To be honest, I am writing this to you because I am trying to explain, but I don’t know
what I am explaining. (Liar). I’ll try again.
I don’t remember anything else from the day I vomited over the side of my grandpa’s boat except
for blood. It pooled red like fat strawberries and flooded up the metal dock grates. I didn’t know
that it was possible for a fish to even carry that much blood in its limp body. I didn’t know that it
was possible to look so languid in death. I didn’t know anything at all.
Six summers ago I got swimmer’s itch from the lake off Highway Z. My skin was raw for weeks
and there were little welts sprinkled underneath my forearms. I had curled myself up like a fetus
in the shallow section, the muddy water slipping all around my eyelids. I don’t think I moved for
minutes, content just to bob in place as the sky rocked above me, a midsummer storm pulsing on
the horizon. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I had floated into the lily pads and the
rain had started to trickle down. By the time I ran back to the car my breath had returned, but my
skin was already starting to crawl.
That’s why I’m afraid of water, Grandma. I’m afraid that I’ll forget I’m drowning.
*
Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I imagine seeing my own ghost. The professor at a writing camp
I went to two years ago called it negative capability. Half-consciousness. He smiled a half-moon
smile, and highlighted a line of Whitman’s (half-moon smiles are always the worse, Grandma;
you can’t tell if they’re real or not). Do you want to guess which Whitman line he highlighted? I
contain multitudes. I smiled a half-moon smile back.
Contrary to his opinion, I don’t think it’s negative capability, Grandma. I’m tired. That’s why I
imagine seeing my ghost. (I think she’s tired too). When she looks at me, I can see it in her eyes:
deep and endless and wandering like a pair of lost planets. She’s exhausted. She’s trying to
breathe.
I imagine she hates the sight of her own body yet spends too much time in front of the mirror. I
can tell just from looking at her. She kneads the skin on her cheeks and lets it loll between her
fingers. She stays up past midnight staring at the ceiling, and says yes when someone asks if
she’s okay. She’s not.
She’s not?
The first time she sees a beautiful girl she bites down on her tongue so hard she swallows a
mouthful of her own blood. It’s not a cliche to say the world stops, because it does. The sun
swells up and sinks heavy into the horizon, watching her as she stands on the yellow linoleum of
her school hallway, thinking a thousand things at once. In this moment, she drowns (she’s always
drowning). In this moment she decides she does not want to feel what she’s feeling. She chews
on her cheek until it goes numb. The sun balloons like dough and the sky glows and still she
stands there. She hugs a binder of Whitman’s poems. (She’s tired again). And this is how she
dies, Grandma: from convincing herself she’s someone else.
*
Even when I was born, I wasn’t breathing. I came into the world purple and wheezing and with a
ghost. I came into the world already hating everything in it.
The only thing I remember from that first year is the sound of my mother’s voice. Like metal:
shiny, but not untarnished. It’s my voice now, but all the shiny parts are gone. I don’t have much
of my mother’s, but I have her voice.
I could tell you more, Grandma, but I think you now know everything about me that you need.
The hurt, the loneliness, the ghost. I could tell you about how, when I was five, my dad would
play Lord Huron on the living room TV. I could tell you about how I cry now whenever I hear
one of his songs, how I cry every time I see the taxidermy deer at our neighbor’s house, it’s ugly
molten face reeking with death. I could tell you about all of the times I cried, yet how I didn’t
feel a single tear slip down my cheek at my great-grandfather’s funeral.
But what about you, Grandma? You seem like the type too composed to cry, but I know that’s
foolish. In the only picture I have, your face is glowing like a cloud of phosphorus, which is to
say that of course you cried, because of course you felt something. Remember how I said I didn’t
know why I was writing? I think I know now.
I am writing to give you my story. All of the pieces of it. All of the bloody parts, all of the dead
parts, all of the parts that lay on carpet floors and stare at ceilings, all of the parts that dream of
beautiful girls and all of the parts that hate the world. All of the parts where I am a liar, all of the
parts where I call myself a writer and all of the parts where I look up at the sky and feel nothing.
Nothing at all.
I am writing because it is all I can do. I do not know your story. They buried it. All of it. They
buried it because they were ashamed of a woman who knew her place, whose hands were like
sourdough—soft and chapped and sturdy—whose voice was like gold (not metal): gleaming. I do
not know how your voice sounded, but I imagine it was this way. Unfaltering.
Grandma, I am writing to you because I don’t know where you’re buried, but if I did, I would
buy a whole bushel of roses and then you’d know that someone remembers you. That you’re
living a little bit longer. I am writing to you because we are not that different. We’ve both
drowned.
So here is all of it. For you.
Here is the fish blood, here is the whisper of my grandfather’s voice, here is the chill of
Kachemak Bay (like the inside of a churning stomach).
Here is the little girl suffocating in the shallow section of an infested pond, here is the thunder
cracking across the sky, the burning mid-July rain.
Here is the ghost of a girl crying in a school bathroom, sucking in her stomach and squeezing her
eyes shut, here she is wondering if it’s possible to love someone else.
And here you are, seven generations lost, staring up at the same sky.
*
And this is where loneliness halts for a second: in the press of a hand to a windowpane, in the
flicker of a star. And this is where pain trembles: in the remembrance of another time. All stories
start and finish with one or the other: loneliness, pain. Yours ended with both, mine started there.
I am writing, Grandma, but my story is still unraveling. I have so much more to tell.
Right now the sky is all covered in fog and smoke and snow. Somewhere, behind that fat
cumulus, I think I can see your face. But I might be imagining it, Grandma. I am a liar.
Addie Rahmlow (she/her) is a teen writer, editor, and student from the Midwest. She can often be found stuck in a state of perpetual writer’s block, making iced tea, or attempting to romanticize her life by going on runs at sunset. Her work can be found in Interstellar Literary Review and Ice Lolly Review, among others, and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She hopes you’re having a wonderful day!
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