Hello. Two things today: an essay by writer Amelia K. and a reminder that there are, somehow, 48 hours left to submit to Talk Vomit’s summer edition. (Theme: Girlhood) Submission details linked here.
Without further ado, please enjoy the meditative essay Certainly by Amelia K., whose work has appeared in Skylight 47, Hobart, Dirt, and others. This essay appeared in TV SPRING ‘24, which you can peruse here.
By Amelia K.
As a child, I loved, and deeply misunderstood, the story of the judgment of Solomon. Two women – harlots, actually – bring a baby to King Solomon. Her child died in the night, says the first woman, and she replaced my living child with hers. A sleight of hand: when you wake up and you don’t like the story that’s been given to you, write a new, softer one. No one needs another story about death. But maybe the woman feels she is not smart enough to write her own story, or not allowed. So the woman says: we want you to decide what is to be done with the child.
King Solomon says, very well: I will cut the baby in two, and you can each have half.
Okay, says the second woman. No! says the first woman. Let her have the whole baby. Let him live. And Solomon, in his infinite wisdom, understands that the first woman is the real mother, who would never want her child to die, and she leaves with her son intact.
But I thought the second mother was the real mother; her certainty swayed me. I thought it was a story about how we needed each other, like Aristophanes’ story of soulmates. I imagined comparing my half child to another person’s half child, raising them together. For whatever reason, I did not understand that the baby died when it was cut in half; I thought it simply went on living, torn in two but still whole.
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For seven years, I vacillated between certainty and uncertainty. My boyfriend is abusing me, I would write in a hidden journal, and the next day I would cross it out, flush the page, eat it. I love him, he is my salvation, my angel; I hate him, he is trying to kill me, no amount of blood is ever enough for an angel. Looking back at these journals, I am struck by what I did and didn’t record. There are things I remember I didn’t write down, and things I wrote down I don’t remember. I wrote, multiple times, about a baby bird my ex put back on a branch; I found it, dead, in the same spot, three days later. I drew pictures of it, a half dozen; it was a house finch, and I was obsessed with the symbolism of its death. Don’t forget this, I wrote, don’t ever forget how this feels, but I did.
Sometimes, uncertainty is the strongest indicator of truth: abusers are never uncertain. They abuse you because it is right to do so, what they did is not abuse, or what you say happened never happened at all. Very rarely are any sort of allowances made. I may have gone too far once in one specific instance that has never and will never repeat itself, they will say, or: if it happened to someone else it would be abuse, but because it’s you (and you deserve it / asked for it / started it / egged it on) it’s not abuse, and anyway: that isn’t what happened. Remember when you said your elementary school’s slide was red, but when I looked in the yearbook, it was yellow? You thought you got your tonsils out at age 8, but your mom says you were 10. You thought you set your phone on the counter, but it’s actually here in my pocket, where you asked me to put it. You don’t remember? You don’t even remember your own unlock code. You changed it last night and forgot so many times you locked yourself out. Why would I do that? You did it to yourself. You don’t know yourself. But I do. I am the wall that surrounds you, keeps you safe from yourself. I am the support beams of reality itself. Let me take care of you.
How do you fight a wall? You don’t. You plead with it, record it, play it back. You accept whatever interpretation it offers you: gifts are gifts. You flirt with it, and hate yourself for it. You cry, you shake, you stop making sense, even to yourself. Eventually, you lean against it, defeated, because it’s warm and breathes steadily, no matter how upset it made you, and it puts its arms around you, and you feel nothing but relief. Certainty soothes. The weight of translation is no longer upon you. You are free.
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My ex abused me while calling himself a feminist – he still does – and never expressed any sort of cognitive dissonance over what he did to me, if indeed he even felt it. His actions were internally consistent with his beliefs: namely, that women exist to entertain or nurture. (Ingrained in this belief is another, stricter belief in binary, opposing genders, and binary, opposing sexualities). Any woman who does not nurture or entertain is not a real woman, and there is no reason to treat someone who is not a real woman (or man) with respect. (Real men have earned their respect through physical prowess, sexual conquest, or both). He could and did express very real grief at abuse he had witnessed, but could not connect his father’s actions to his own, because his mother performed her role as a nurturer and I did not. He spoke out against abuse that women in the public eye were facing, then logged off Instagram and perpetrated the exact same abuse against me without irony or hesitation. I was not always entertaining to him; he could not turn off the film or song of me when he wanted to disengage. I was not always nurturing to him; I responded to our son’s needs before his. I cared too much about my family, my politics, my friends, when I was allowed to have them, and my own interests, when I was allowed to have those. I wanted to engage with and create art he disliked, I wanted to take walks and showers alone, I wanted to talk to people he didn’t know or care to know. If I was guilty of anything, it was being human. I was neither the cloth nor the wire mother. I was the flesh mother and I was real, with needs and wants and actions that were not fixed, and this was untenable praxis.
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As an educated and even, to him, progressive couple – he tolerated my bisexuality, he let me talk about going back to college, he admitted something was wrong in the relationship – we were not going to be like other people in our town. We were not trailer trash, throwing chairs and hollering out broken windows when NASCAR got to be too much. I went to therapy for my so-called neediness. I read books about relationships and took detailed notes and Effexor. I used “I” statements. I asked questions, so many questions, the primary food source of our arguments, don’t you ever stop? What you are doing is hurting me. Why are you hurting me? Why do you hurt someone you love? Do you love me? Why not? Why do you hurt me? I asked these questions because I did not understand that hurting me was the point. I thought I needed more intellectual, more candid, more lovely words, that I would someday unlock the perfect combination of honesty, precision, and beauty that would cleave away the part of him that hated me, the not-real part, the accidental half.
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For a while my ex made me sign contracts, an idea we (he) adapted from a relationship advice book we (I) read, when we were still pretending I was the problem and not his abuse. The contract included things like not texting or calling more than once a day, not telling him I loved him more than once a day (and later: not looking at him “with love”), waking up early, dressing “nice,” not drinking caffeine or eating “unhealthy” foods, et cetera. My requests were for him to give me one kind touch and tell me he loved me once a day. Even this attempt to level out our relationship (he acknowledged that he had power, but not that he abused it) was uneven; he only had to comply with my requests if I complied with all of his. That meant that if I wasn’t up and beautiful and uncaffeinated at 7 am, regardless of whether he and my son were awake, I wasn’t getting a hug. Somehow that hurt worse than not getting an I love you, which I didn’t believe anyway. I look back at this era sometimes with more humor than the other eras, mostly because it felt like a really sad retelling of Sisyphus: One must imagine Sisyphus with straightened hair. The demands were impossible and hypocritical by design — you could serve iced coffee from my ex’s veins — and I knew that, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the prize, pupils glutted, ever the martyr.
I have yet to meet someone who knows how to look at me all the way through, to see into but also beyond the things I’ve been through; to view me as anything other than leftovers. (As though flowers don’t grow at crime scenes. As though the body never sheds itself.) The disclosure of my abuse is always the death knell of the relationship. I am both coroner and autopsy subject at once, murmuring into a tape recorder, running my fingers over my body. And what happened here, I ask, knife poised above my heart, ready to cut my most precise Y, as if I don’t know.
I want to say something beautiful that will make it all mean something, anything. I want to ask where it went wrong, but I’d rather see where it was right. I want to write something that gets it all down, the stone that captures the last bird of its species so that I never have to mention it again. I want to have sex with someone who won’t retreat when I mention that I was abused, or: won’t be so interested in my past degradation that it’s clearly a fetish. I want to cut away the hurting half, curl up wanted against my Mama. I want to feel the way I felt when I would carefully explode my ex in my mind in great detail, but the fantasy always ended with nobody but me to mop up the blood, and I was just too tired. All I want is all of it. All I feel is tv static; your hand would crackle if you touched me. But you won’t.
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Another story, another two women. It is a time of famine in Samaria. In the market there is bird shit, there are animal heads, seed pods. But it is reasonable to assume these women do not have money, for:
We could eat our sons, one says. Why don’t we eat yours first?
Certainly, she says. But tomorrow we will eat your son.
Certainly, she says, and they boil and eat the woman’s son. But tomorrow never comes: the other woman hides her son. And the first woman takes to the street, calling, O my king, help me. O, my Lord, O help. And the king witnesses her pain, but does not help her. What can he do? He has no food, no wine. He tears his clothes, he cries out. But the woman’s belly is still full of her son. Do you understand me? Against the wall she calls, she wails, she keens, but tonight she is the fullest woman in Samaria.
Amelia K. is an award-losing writer who lives in Georgia. Her work has been published in Skylight 47, Hobart, Dirt, and others. Her website is bio.site/ameliak.