I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.

The bystander, the voyeur, even the perpetrator—they’re all off the hook when the girl was born dead.

Diving down online rabbit holes was not great for my mental health.

The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia.

I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to. I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off.

It was the kind of joke that left no room for response. I could never figure out if he thought he was flirting, or if I was so far below him on the social scale that this was pure mockery.

I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head. Irrationally, viscerally, in a way tied more to memory than possibility.

She was walking her bulldog, a delicious beast she introduced as Brigitte, and whom I squatted to scratch.

The dog licked my face, and I marveled at the little pocket her wrinkles made between her eyes. You could stash a spare piece of kibble in there.

Alder struck me as a hugely creative kid who’d gotten the unfortunate message early on that there was always a right answer.

Fran said, “He was a Pisces. You can never read them.”

It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered.

It struck me that while I might have been happier going to school with this sweet band of Gen Zers, I’d likely have failed out, the only kid showing up fifteen minutes late with wet hair, mouthful of bagel, term paper lost in her computer. Even today, after my bad night’s sleep, I felt two steps behind them all.

I sidestepped him, hurried down the sidewalk hating the rush to my limbs, my stomach. He called, “Run, little bunny rabbit! Hoppity-hop!” I felt I’d done something wrong and embarrassing, hadn’t been tough enough.

said, kindly and with interest,

She seemed to have sprung from the earth that way, rather than crafting herself from the pages of a magazine.

I’d love to be one of those people who complain when things change. But no one around me was changing; here was my entire high school, preserved in amber. The only thing changing was my vision—like the first time I put on glasses and looked in wonder at the trees, and felt inexplicably betrayed. Those clearly delineated leaves had been there all along, and no one ever told me.

One of Fran’s best traits is that she genuinely wants to hear the whole mess of things. Her eyes light up like she’s rewatching her favorite movie.

I wanted to shout that she was wrong, and I also wanted to melt to a puddle and tell her she was right.

How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.

What if my memories were as false as dreams? What if my dreams were really memories?

I loved that Fran’s advice always started with the word “just.”

It wasn’t that a boob grab was the worst that could happen to me. I had survived far worse. It was just one thing too much.

We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

I said, “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” Alder stood, brushed off his jeans. He said, “I’m a Black man in America. My hopes aren’t up.”

She was speaking, I realized, with the practiced self-awareness and the monologuing capacity of someone who’d gone through a lot of therapy.

And I—for years, I told myself I must have just wanted the attention all to myself. But sometimes when we’re young, we’re smarter than we think. Maybe it didn’t bother me because I was jealous. Maybe it bothered me because it bothered me.”

But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own.

Britt had sauntered into the business center like she lived there and headphoned up to work on edits. Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.

I had to accept that people fundamentally slide past each other in this world.

But I can still love the place itself, as a place, as smells and echoes and angles of light, as surfaces etched deep with their own history.

Lacy Crawford’s brilliant memoir Notes on a Silencing (please read it!)