Elsewhere

by Alexis Schaitkin

She never knew the truth of herself, not really, because she had never offered herself to our affliction, never had a child to teach her who she was.

They felt it, too, could hardly summon any interest in those things that used to give them the most pleasure, whether gardening or singing or foraging in the forest. They couldn’t even really remember how it had felt to be the women who cared about these things. Was this how it started? With these small, ordinary seeds of diminishment, which might grow until there was nothing left of you? Tess said she had instituted a system for herself. During the baby’s afternoon nap, she set an egg timer for an hour and went to her easel to paint. She forced herself to do it even if she didn’t feel like it that day, which most days she didn’t. Sometimes the whole hour was a chore, but occasionally the old rhythms returned to her, the sweep of the wet brush over the creamy paper, the bloom of color in water when she washed the brush. Minutes would pass during which she thought of her child not at all; she forgot she was a mother and remembered what it felt like to just be Tess, painting.

wondering whether I had saved myself or thrown away my child.

You do not get to keep what is sweetest to you; you only get to remember it from the vantage point of having lost it.