Jill Christman - If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Dont cry

the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for lifes not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E. E. Cummings

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the bodys mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fianc was killed in a car accident. Walking into the sea, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth. Mottled and filthy, he hung by his meat-hook claws not five feet above my head in the cecropia tree. He peered down at me, his flattened head turned backward on his neck.

Here is a fact: a sloth cannot regulate the temperature of his blood. He must live near the equator.

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slowthe snail, the tortoisethey move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

The decision to return to the island began with the dreams. Chad was back, and this time he hadnt come just for me. He was after my nine-year-old daughter, Ella.

Part of me had always known this would happen.

In my twenties and thirties I had tried to write Chad if not into complete obliteration then at least into insignificance. Here are the facts: As close as I can align the memories and the photographs with the markers of timebirthdays, moves, my mothers sequential boyfriends and waitressing jobsChad molested me, regularly and sometimes violently, from the time I was six or seven to age twelve, when the arrival of my period and the fear of pregnancy scared me so much I finally made him stop. I locked myself in the only room with a phone, and I hissed through the crack in the door that if he didnt stop, I would call my mother at the restaurant.

And he did. He stopped.

Was it that easy?

Chad was seven years older than me and twice my weight. He carried his wallet on a chain and a folded knife in the pocket of his saggy jeans. The feature I remember most about Chads body is that he had no hips, no ass, nothing to hold up his pants, and so he wore a thick, brown belt with a buckle hed forged himself (it had something menacing on ita serpent? a skull and crossbones?), cinched tight on the bones of his pelvis.

When I think of Chad physically, I see two things: His hands, which were never clean because of the work he did on engines. Even in deep memory, I feel the hands more than I see them, sandpapering the soft skin of the childs body I inhabit there, scratching audibly across the denim of my overalls. In close-up, there are the black whorls of his fingerprints as if hed come, every time, from a booking at the station.

And I see him walking away. I think this is from all the times hed cross the sandy field between his garage and our house, a straight view from my bedroom window. I would hide in my room while he knocked on the front door, hide without breathing, a rabbit in the grass, and then, when I thought it was safe, I would peek out from the lower edge of my window.

I wanted to watch him go.

I dont know how tall Chad was, but he loomed, a shambling Lurch from The Addams Family, shoulders hunched forward, pants hanging in a straight line from his belt down to his dirty sneakers, long legs moving in pendulum swings across the sand. He could cross a lot of ground with what appeared to be very little effort. Is there such a thing as an ambling lope? A stride both low-energy and efficient? Yes, I think so. This is the locomotion of a wolf, or a big cata predator.