While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

"Fair is one more thing I've given up."
———Toni Morrison
——--Song of Solomon

My brother’s plane was late. I passed the time by pacing, exchanging hellos as I navigated through the mob. I expected Wayne to roll through the gate in his chair. When it came to expanses as long as airport concourses, he usually wheeled. Around the house, he walked. But he showed up at the gate on foot, backpack and coat piled on his wheelchair.

“Hey, Wayne, that looks pretty funny, you pushing your backpack.”

“Tired of sitting on that damn plane. I need to walk.”

I tried to imagine a six-footer like him folded into those seats.

“Well, hell, I’ll ride in the chair and you can push me.”

I plopped myself down and set the backpack in my lap, twisting around in the seat to gossip while we made our way to baggage claim. When we arrived at the carousel, he parked me and then waded in to wrangle his duffel bag.

A man popped out of the crowd, heading toward me. I opened my mouth to say hello. At the last second he averted his gaze and hurried past. A woman approached. I smiled up at her. “Hi,” I said. Her head bent in my direction, but just as our gazes were about to intersect, she turned away. One after another, they glanced away, their gazes bouncing off the top of my head like basketballs hitting the rim.

“The weirdest thing happened,” I said to Wayne. “I’ve become invisible.”

“Yeah. Welcome to my world.”

When my husband offered me the dark chocolate his friend had brought him from Paris, I wasn’t even tempted. I’d given up my favorite treat, because it triggered migraine, instantly, with the pain intensity in direct ascending correlation to the quality of the chocolate. At the time my husband offered it to me, that French chocolate was as appetizing as mud.

However.

Someone … somewhere … sometime … said something to me with ridicule in their voice. The details escape me; what remains is the heat in my face and the trembling of my lip. I wanted to climb into a hole.
There was no hole, but there was chocolate.

In the back of the cabinet, behind a jar of tomato sauce, under a package of ramen noodles, the candy bar lay in wait. The label read 65% cacao. Less than expected. 70% would definitely be deadly, but 65%, no problem.

A nibble would be safe. After all, it takes two simultaneous triggers to produce a migraine, and even if that chocolate were a trigger—which it probably was not—a tiny experimental bite would equal only one half of one trigger.

I slipped the prize from the wrapper, my mouth watering at the sight of the naked bar, cool and slick in my palm. Shiny as a new dime and scored into squares. I snapped off a square, carried My Precious to my writing room, and closed the door. Leaning against the door so my good sense couldn’t barge in, I broke the square in half and then broke the half in half. I placed the thumbnail-sized shard on my tongue like a tab of acid.

And then, it was gone.

I checked my hand to be sure I wasn’t still holding it.

It had slipped down my throat too fast to provide the tactile pleasure of chocolate melting in my mouth. Too fast to overpower the shame I was trying to outrun. Too fast to deserve the emotional logistics I’d committed to this exercise.

Still, I'd eaten chocolate without getting a migraine. I’d have to settle for that victory, as tiny as the shard.
I tossed the remains of the square on the desk and drove off on an errand. Seven minutes later, the migraine exploded. My skull squeezed down on my brain as my stomach lurched, and I struggled to see the road and remember the route home.

I’d have to take a pain-killer, and the insurance company only allotted nine each month to relieve the eighteen headaches I got each month, and now I’d have to take one for a headache I’d caused myself, but by the time I got home, I needed to take two, which left only three till the end of the month, still thirteen days away. Math intensified the migraine.

I collapsed into bed, waiting for the relief I did not deserve.

Stupid stupid stupid began to rise to my consciousness, but I had too little energy to fuel self criticism. Recrimination sank under its own weight.

I imagined the people whose poisons actually provided a couple hours relief—whether it be from chronic pain or chronic reality.

Here’s to us, who couldn’t say no. To Dawn who ate the candy she knew would split her skull, to the homeless man who bragged he’d get himself a beer with the money I gave him, to the mother on the 6:00 news who sneaked another OxyContin even though the court would take away her kids.

To all of us, I say, It’s okay, dear heart. We’ll try again.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.


*****

“Even the clearest memories become wind.”
———Hanif Abdurraquib
——--A Little Devil in America

Yolanda’s voice comes to me by way of a network of cell towers that stretches across the country. “Agnes died this year.”

I burn with embarrassment. “Who?”

Yo and I lived across the hall from each other through most of undergrad. She’s the keeper of our details, given the trauma-induced dissociation of my Pomona College years. Even though we’re elders now, she often mentions Dr. Agnes Jackson, whom I’m ashamed of not remembering because Yo is reverential when she speaks of Agnes.

During another of our regular calls, Yo laughs with recognition at a comment I make. “You learned that from Agnes.”

I did? “Agnes … I vaguely remember…” I want that to be true. I feel like a failure, not knowing how to remember.

I didn’t know how to be a college student, how to give answers in American Lit Seminar or live independently in a dorm. I ran away a lot, skipping American Art & Architecture to sneak home on the Greyhound, even though home was more painful than campus.

Yo says, “You never missed Agnes’s class. Girl, you had that head down, going across campus to spend time with Agnes.”

I sense the shadow of an almost memory—books in my arms, the motion of my body walking in the direction Yo describes, toward a safe place hidden in that shadow.

“Agnes said you were a writer.”

She did?

And how does Yolanda know? Did I confide it to her over every-Friday dining hall hamburgers? My constantly swirling shame settles. I grip the phone tighter, craving Agnes. When my mind reaches for her, it closes around empty space.

Agnes aches like a missing limb.