The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism. But then, I’m the one who’ll grow up to wear

If we acknowledge only the happy things, maybe that’s all there will be.

The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be.

I was sixteen. I didn’t know I was too young for him. I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love, could be loved, and that I wasn’t broken.

When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on.

Living in the gray house makes me depressed, but when I’m depressed, to live there feels right, like the walls are confirmation of the memories.

The first time I slept with a woman, my chest opened up. I hadn’t known until that moment how closed it was. I’m gay because I love women, it’s as simple as that.

I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.

What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.

The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it.

What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.

I have never been very good at remaining silent to spare her feelings.

We carry what makes us.

The problem of this day, the problem of this meeting, the problem that starts this story inside me and the only way it can end it is this: The man who sits down across from me is a man. He’ll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person.