Rough Draft: A Memoir

by Katy Tur

nothing beats television when the news is big and ugly and unfolding by the minute.

And this was the day they chose to tell me their marriage was done? My graduation day

From so many thousands of miles away, your decisions take on a distant, almost alien quality, like they were made by someone else.

I worried and all my worries braided in with my fears and the entire thing seemed to trail me everywhere.

I have a warehouse or two somewhere in my brain full of these balls of trauma delayed, feelings denied. All the terrible sights and sounds and behaviors we’d all witnessed and somehow had to absorb for 1,800 days and counting. All the stuff I’ve had to take in and translate to a public, half of whom don’t want to hear it, don’t want to see it, hate me for mentioning it.

life is never one thing at a time. It’s always giving and taking, not in turn but all at once,