Everything Here Is Beautiful

by Mira T. Lee

This . . . this feels impossible.”

A delusion will not go away by reasoning and therefore needs no discussion.

Anosognosia. Impaired awareness of illness, also termed “lack of insight.” Some part of the brain, anatomically damaged, such that it could no longer recognize its own malfunctioning.

Each of these psychotic episodes was toxic to the brain, resulted in cognitive decline, and it was impossible to predict how much of a person might be irretrievably lost each time. It would be a long, long road.

But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.

To live is to suffer

When Esperanza was born, a pair of serpents lived inside my head. Their job was to warn me of the dangers of motherhood, which boiled down to this: If you touch your baby, she will die. My body, commandeered, a vessel of evil, was leaking evil into my child. The serpents spoke in opposite voices. If one was soft, the other was loud; if one politely reminded me to keep my hands to myself, the other said I deserved to have my arms lopped off for not listening. They scrutinized my every move. She is removing the baby’s diaper. She is wiping the baby’s bum. The baby is crying. See, the baby is no good. Cheap. Defective. Don’t touch baby like that! Chop it off! Return to the proper authorities for a refund. Twelve touches, they said. Twelve more touches. Then my baby, contaminated, would die. I didn’t tell anyone. First, it was a secret. Second, I was ashamed. Third, I couldn’t stand to hear the human population’s efforts to convince me it wasn’t true—you’re sick! you’re sick!—that was all part of the plot. So I wore thin cotton socks over my hands, dressed my baby in layers, cocooned her in blankets, avoided her skin coming into contact with mine. If I did as I was told, I hoped they might spare her. But it was hard to be a good mother like that.

“Isn’t that, like, irresponsible?” I overhear one of the Westchester housewives say, and I kind of hate her forever right on the spot.

Well, why not, I figure, because if pain and tears were correlated, surely we would’ve all drowned by now.

“It’s really hard,” I say. That’s usually the best thing to say. It occurs to me that no condition covered in the DSM-IV is ever followed by the word “survivor,” but I don’t mention this.

I tell Nipa I used to cry all the time, too. She asks why, but I can’t bring myself to say. Even the thought of it makes me feel ashamed.

The doctors say I have insight; I can talk about the past, recognize something was wrong. But the truth is, I’m still not sure how to tell what’s real—because when you’re inside it, it’s your reality, and if your own perception of the world isn’t valid, then what is? Here’s what I do know: I spent a total of forty days in Crote Six. I missed my baby’s first laugh, first solid foods, first tooth.

querencia. It refers to that place in the ring where a bull feels strongest, safest, where it returns again and again to renew its strength. It’s the place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are—where we feel our most authentic selves.

“Why you are not crying?” he said. “Your mother is dead. You are daughter with no mother.

But were you happy? Happy? Aiya, Xiao-mei, you want too much, don’t be greedy. This is too much American.

There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place. “An indolent dreaming wistfulness” is how I’ve seen one writer describe it.

velleity. The weakest form of volition. A mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.

Only later, much later, would he understand. Later, in hindsight, they would come together on this: to wonder when it had become impossible to distinguish which parts of Lucia fell under her own jurisdiction and which belonged to her illness.

“She has an illness, for God’s sake. It’s not her fault, Stefan. It’s not his fault either. Please, have some compassion. You’re a doctor, after all. My sister has an illness of the brain.”

Stefan rarely raised his voice, but he raised it now. And later, much later, when she could view this part of their lives through her husband’s lens, Miranda would invariably cringe—because this is what he knew: that the hospitals, Ecuador, these episodes destroyed her every time. That she would not eat or sleep; that the stomach pains would wake her at all hours of the night; that she would become angry, irritable, and any opinion he offered, regardless of how gentle or solicitous, would be wrong, dismissed, and she would snap or yell or burst into tears, and they would say things they each regretted later. That gash on her forehead—she didn’t think he knew, but he did. He was not unsympathetic to the others, but in Stefan’s reality, there was only one person whose well-being stood at stake: his wife. Miranda, who was good. Miranda, who tried so hard to do what was right. And if this put her in opposition to him, he hated it. Yes, he was selfish, too. Her turmoil was his. Her unhappiness, his anguish. No, he could not tell her to go to Ecuador now. But he also could not demand that she stay. It tore him up, that he loved her—he tried so hard to love her—yet how best to love her still eluded him. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” he said.

A vague longing for something that cannot exist again, or perhaps never existed.

Next day she comes she is wearing same tent, you believe it? I am a dying man here, she can respect my wish.

Ha lol

but who is to say what is right way to die?

I hear Lucia and Jie laughing together, and this makes me happy, but I am also a little bit sad I am not laughing with them.

She gives me kiss on my forehead. I say, no crying. She nods. I love you, she says. She can’t look at me. I don’t look at her either. Both of us pretending like we’re not gonna crack. But for first time, I feel how real it is.

I say. When I meet Lucy she is twenty-eight years old, but when I remember her she is without age.

Someday I will tell her about you, she says. What will you say? I will tell her love is everything. She looks at me, then down at her hands. But now, like this, I think love is just romantic way of explaining selflessness.

This is life.

Grief drives people to recklessness, despair.

Careless. People are careless. People are careless and they die. But it was impossible to know the truth of another’s interior life. Wasn’t it?

These thoughts would bob to the surface for years to come, the what-ifs, the whys, fueling her bleakest nightmares, unleashing the guilt and anger for all she had done or not done or tried or not tried or plain never understood—it would take its toll, test their marriage, the inexplicable eruptions, retreats, assignations of blame, minings of pasts and souls in one relentless search for meaning. Forgiveness. That would come much later.

There should be no blame, yet each would remain tortured in the years to come, unable to fend off their guilt.

And this was enough, for now, neither was ready for more. In grief, the future seems impossible.

he would emit a long, bestial howl, shudder and sob and gasp unabashedly for air. Raw pain squeezed into fat, dripping tears.

I knew no clear answer to this question. She felt isolated, maybe. Constricted, misunderstood. Lucia, always chasing some happily-ever-after; she needed to be free. Or was she simply childish, self-centered, irresponsible? For a long time I saw her as the latter, I admit.