Find Layla

by Meg Elison

Life is hard and complicated and messy. Life is parasites that live in your gut and brilliant scientists teaching a gorilla to use sign language. Life is moths that drink tears, and the flu virus, and nothing you can control. Life is sometimes using a knife to comb your hair, because absolutely nothing else works, and life always finds a way through. I want to tell her what I always tell myself now: that’s life. It cheers me up and it calms me down. It reminds me to focus on what I can do rather than what I can’t.

That time I experimented on my own hair with a knife and dish soap in the bathtub wasn’t the first time I knew there was something wrong with my mom. Or wrong with me. That we were doing it wrong. But it was the first time I realized that help was not on the way. It was the first time I went from being a subject to being an observer—to really doing science. It was the first time I just took care of it myself.

What we have is symbiosis: that relationship between two organisms where they both get something they need out of it, like clown fish and anemones have. Like the anemone, she’s got secret sharp places. Like the clown fish, I’ve got better defenses than most of my kind. It works.

It’s not even dark outside yet, but I am done with the day. I lie there trying to hold it together until the day is done with me.