Today I Wonder What if No One Finds Her
by Emily Perez
Today a grown girl in the woods, up the hill from Columbine. Today a grown girl head filled up by Columbine. Yesterday a one-way fare, a flight across the nation. The day before a one-way fare. The day before a one-way fare. Every day she plans a trip to Columbine, alerting all the FBI. I’d sacrifice my privacy. I’d sacrifice my right to self-defense. I’d sacrifice my right to a militia. Today a grown girl wearing black and camouflage. One rumor says she’s naked. Today will we be hostage to a corpse, a girl with arms, a girl with rights to bear those arms. Today a manhunt for a teenage girl. Today a teenage girl becomes a man who’s hunted. Maybe with a wild look. Maybe quiet in the back, as her classmates knew her. Today 400,000 kids stayed home, and mine were fine. Today I told them someone wanted to hurt schools. And the police and principal had talked. And we were safe at home. Today their father told them crazy woman and pump-action shotgun. Today both kids refused to go run errands. Today they cried when I said stop acting crazy. Today they played an online game with guns. Today was like a snow day, only anxious and no snuggles. Today an Uber driver took her up the mountain road. The news report says she hiked through feet and feet of snow. Today my yoga teacher says where there is chaos, there’s a lesson. Today I tell my older son that everything’s okay and he replies there is no time that everything’s okay. Today they find her shotgunned near a copse. Today a girl gone in a field. I wonder about what shoes she wore and if her feet felt cold. One day not far away the snow will melt to columbines.
Note: “Today I Wonder What if No One Finds Her” draws from the events of April 17, 2019, when a teenager traveled from Florida to Colorado based on her obsession with the massacre at Columbine High School 20 years earlier. She purchased a gun shortly after arriving in Colorado. Her actions, deemed a “credible threat” by the FBI, shut down hundreds of schools in the Front Range for the day while the police searched for her. She was found dead by suicide the next day in the mountains near Denver.
On Loss of Memory
Maybe I was the one who found that beautiful Heid Erdrich poem, or maybe it was you. A few days ago I read it like I’d never seen it before but this morning when I awoke I thought this poem is deeply familiar and I could picture where I was when I first came across it.
In my late teens and early twenties I prided myself on having a mind like a steel trap; I kept no calendar, could memorize names and dates, took notes in class, but rarely needed to study because the act of writing them inscribed them on my mind. My memory was not photographic, but strong; I could retain and revisit.
My boyfriend called me “Ms. Memory,” and I basked in my capacity to track every moment of our bliss, to remind us both of how the story kept clicking into place.
In the days and months after our break-up, an event that set off one of my first major bouts of depression (though there had been tremors and precursors), I cursed my strong memory. It was memory that took me wading in every moment of perfect, undying love, every fleeting doubt, the unexpected and awful end. In remembering I experienced evisceration over and over, and I longed for forgetting.
If only I could forget! How could I endure such an exquisitely persistent memory!
I listened recently to a podcast about people who have moment-to-moment recall, how hard it is for them to move on from certain hurts. A fifty-year-old woman with this kind of mind flared in anger as she spoke of the day her mother threw away her special calendar. She seethed, and I felt it, too—the betrayal, her treasure gone. Then I learned this wound, so bright, so fresh, occurred when she was six. But with a perfect memory, how could she forget?
Within a year of that breakup, I re-read my diary and found that what I thought I’d remembered so precisely, the way the metaphorical knife had canted toward my heart and carved, was wrong. The angle, the time of day, the sounds uttered. I’d misremembered.
Or had I? I remember now that sometimes I would lie in those diaries, or soften the present, wanting the record to reflect a kinder history. I’d pre-forgive, trying to make those who had hurt me sound better so that someday the story would just be a blip, would fit the happy ending I so wanted.
Scientists say that each time we revisit a memory we rewrite it. Memory is ever pliable clay, molded with each new touch. How many times had I handled that memory, and what hands had I used? What else had I rewritten?
Older now, and having worked hard at both forgiving and asking for forgiveness, I wonder, is forgiving always active as rewriting, or at times, is it just forgetting? Now I forget which friends’ husbands have had affairs, whose father died of what disease, the percentage of girls and women who will be assaulted each year. I hear the news as if it’s new, but also something from the past. The distance stills the sting.
Now my memory is soft-focus, imprecise. I remember feelings and gists and figures fading into the mist. I conflate conversations; I twist plots and twine my children—which one likes mangoes, which one hates tickling. I have blocked out many fights from my marriage and yet certain triggers summon a terrible undertow.
Now I do not want to read those diaries, kept since I was ten, unearth those letters still boxed in my closets. I do not want to view the pictures, listen to the recordings, watch the videos. I need not revisit, re-immerse, rewound. Even happy memories bring a kind of pain—nostalgia.
Now, I drop a penny into a well and perhaps I watch as it falls, perhaps not. Perhaps I re-enter the well at some later date with a dredge and that penny comes back up. Or perhaps another penny winks a light that rises to the top.
On Lack of Imagination
I read someone’s opinion on the internet that in my generation there are Narnia people and Wrinkle In Time people, and though in some ways I am both, I longed to be a Narnia person. I say this not because of my rootedness in religion over science—I had both in my life—but because I wanted, wanted, wanted that kind of magic to be real. I wanted to be able to walk into my closet, or any one of the closets in my childhood home in South Texas, each with a distinct smell (some a mélange of scented candles, others dry cleaning bags, one with my mother’s perfume, one with mouse droppings and old luggage, one a dead rainbow boa), and to enter another realm.
I knew such things did not exist and yet I wanted my imagination to be strong enough that I could place myself there physically. I felt the same after reading The Secret Garden. I tried to imagine my sweltering backyard into a dewy, British festival of sun-dappled petals, full of sweet pea and lavender. I tried to be what I imagined of other girls, in love with horses, and I tried to imagine my bike as one. I tried to imagine an imaginary friend for myself, and when I was given baby dolls I found them boring, but I tried to imagine them into needy beings that I might someday imagine caring for.
I knew other people had this power and that perhaps if I ever wanted to be a novelist I needed this power. I’ve heard novelists on many occasions describe their characters “appearing” to them, “speaking” to them, going on long road trips with them—and yet, that vision, that voice, that capacity eluded me. I could imagine myself imagining, and that was as far as I got.
I read last night in Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis that God creating man in his own image shows lack of imagination. And I agree. And that’s my fear for my own writing, that it’s woefully limited by my own lack, that I may sit all night in a closet of coats too heavy for any Texas winter, and never see a lamppost, never lose sight of the outline of my own hand.
On Vulnerability on Stage
Last night I took part in a reading fund-raiser for reproductive justice: thirteen readers—twelve women and one transman--each coming at the subject matter from a different entry point. I expected the variety of topics, many triggering, complete with trigger warnings. What I did not expect was the number of people who prefaced their readings with the words “I have never read this before,” or “I have never said this before on stage,” or “I have never talked about this to anyone.”
The slam poetry genre skews confessional in such a way that the performance of profound pain, violation, and loss are expected parts of any given show, and the topics and style are defined enough that they have been parodied many times. The parodies, however, grossly simplify slam and its transformative power, the use of voice, tempo, and body as instruments to build, crescendo, and hush.
Slam poets are among the riskiest risk takers, often laying out their drama in first-person, not clinging to the page-poet’s insistence on the separation between the “speaker” and “writer.”
Last night’s reading was suffused with risk and vulnerability, but it did not make use of slam’s tones and techniques. The poems read were written for the page, and if seen on the page would have been transformative for their use of space and movement, their deft leaps through language. Most cloaked their true topics: assault, miscarriage, abortion, rape. It was the reader’s spoken preface that clued us in to context: “The first of these poems I wrote before my abortion; the second, after.” Readers said things like, “I have never been more nervous to read,” and “I’m not nervous about the poems, I’m nervous about what I have to say before the poems, so I wrote it down.”
The room filled with each reader saying the thing she had not written for publication, could not say in the saying of the poem. On their own these poems were gorgeous, powerful, and sometimes funny. But each poem’s raft was buoyed by an ocean of the author’s preface.
“I am a womb-man,” announced one reader. “I walked in this world as a woman, and now I pass, often, as a cis-man.” And then, “as a woman I experienced assault.”
Several months ago, I was called for jury duty for a sexual assault case. Before voir dire we potential jurors were asked to fill out a survey trying to gauge our opinions and experiences on assault. For the question, “Do you or does anyone you know have experience with assault?” I answered, “What woman has not experienced assault?” I wondered if this question was really for the men. Were they aware that nearly all the women in their lives had been assaulted? I realized during the beginnings of the #MeToo movement that I’d never discussed my assaults with my husband. Was he aware?
And what did it do for us, for the audience, for the world to speak the unspoken from a stage?
On stage, as a chorus of women and former women we spoke. We did not all live as women, we did not all have wombs, we did not all have children, we did not all share skin color or age or poetic style. But we all supported a woman’s right to autonomy over her body, a right that signifies her basic freedom and humanity.
And knowing that everyone who would come to this reading supported that as well, no matter the shape their bodies took on that particular June night, we opened new doors.
What is it about a belief in full humanity that enables saying?
About the Author:
Emily Pérez is the author House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo and Ledbury Emerging Critics fellow, her work has appeared in journals including Missouri Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. You can find more of her work at www.emilyperez.org. Twitter: @emilytheperez
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