Memoir – Northwest Journals

Fluency

first let the nacre of that word coat in your throat your throat then throw the stone

lovely in its speckling up to the threshold of your mouth your mouth let it ping off your

uvula clatter the back of teeth an orb in the pinball machine of your body your body

enough with the swallowing the swallowing hook a smile reach this first need out like a

native speaker smooth the stone the stone with your sandpaper tongue remember how

consonants are broad and slender how the Irish skip skip skip the scarp of sentences

yes hope the cello-voiced Inishmaan waiter catches and keeps it in his pocket his pocket

Temporary (Permanent)

(photo credit to Robert Couse-Baker via flickr)

I’d just been down the street helping Justin. He was (shirtless) that kid in the neighborhood who was nice to everyone, so I offered to help him fix his bike.

He asked me to (stop staring at him) grab the little oil can from the garage. It was unusual to find him alone, so I asked him what he’d done with his fan club. He joked that they were all marooned on an island together—that’s why he needed to oil his bike chains: he was preparing to save them from doom.

As I pedaled the upside down Schwinn with my hands, Justin leaned over me clicking the bottom of the oil can. I felt his knee lightly on my back. His (armpit hair, bicep) proximity made me uncomfortable. Side-stepping, I made some excuse about getting home, to which he replied cluelessly “Snag you later then.” I walked up the incline of my driveway shivering, confused.

Inside the house, my brother was in our bedroom. Mom was working at the kitchen table and Dad was snoring on the couch. So my parents’ room was the only option for me to calm down and avoid having to tell someone (my secret) what was wrong. I wasn’t sure I could. I laid on my Dad’s side of the bed and closed my eyes. Whenever a breeze from the open window hit me, I took a deep breath until the shivering stopped.

A few weeks later, I was in our cramped garage watching my mom sand a dilapidated hoosier cupboard. Flecks of sawdust shone brightly in her dark curly hair. She stopped sanding for a moment to stand back and look at her work, so I took the opportunity to ask if she’d give me a perm. She questioned why and I said I wanted to (fix myself) try something different for my first year of junior high. She agreed to do it—more questions churning behind the words—and then looked back at the hoosier.

I watched her work a little longer, trying to figure out why she’d bought the old stained thing. I knew in a few months it would hold a prime location in her antique booth. Customers would comment on how stately and charming it was, but I just couldn’t see how.

My favorite tv show at the time was Head of the Class, about a bunch of high school misfits and their dedicated teacher. I had a crush on (Alan) Simone, the shy girl with the long red hair. Simone had a thing for the curly-headed and brainy kid Alan. Lying on my parents’ bed before, I had concocted a plan to look more like Alan and maybe find myself a Simone to take to the first dance of the school year. I saved money to buy a sweater with a dynamic pattern. I asked for wingtips and learned how to buff them. The perm was the last step.

On the Saturday before school started, I was sitting at the kitchen table with medium-sized pink curlers in my hair—Mom apologized for the color; they were her only set— when my brother walked in.

“What’s going on?”

“Nathan wanted something different this year.”

“A perm?” My brother sat down, a smirk spread across his face.

The chemical smell hit my nose before I felt the liquid dribble down my scalp. I started to panic. I asked my mom what would happen if I didn’t (change) like it.

“I never did understand why they called it a permanent,” she said, “when it’s only temporary.”

What Rob Lowe Taught Me About Fear

TW: pet death

I watched a show a few weeks ago called The Lowe Files in which the actor Rob Lowe and his sons visited an old “haunted” prison at midnight. There they met up with a scientist who studied the effects of fear in humans. Rob and his youngest son, John Owen, volunteered to wear heart monitors and other sensors and spend time in terrifying places. John Owen cowered at the bottom of the prison’s former gallows in the dark next to the hole in the ground that allowed the deads’ bodily fluids to drain. With the aid of night vision cameras, we could see every jump and twitch and facial expression he made. He remained terrified throughout the experiment because he was psyching himself out. His voice grew more shrill as he spiraled deeper into fear.

When John Owen’s experiment was over, the scientist sent Rob to the prison’s basement, the place that had been solitary confinement. Rob was also terrified…at first. But the longer he sat there the more comfortable he grew. His fear levels tapered off almost immediately, rising slightly when he heard a noise or when a draught blew over him. His reaction was the complete opposite of his son’s.

After the experiments, when both men were safe again in the room with the scientific equipment, the scientist told the pair that they demonstrated the two main reactions to fear. I don’t remember her exact words, but I have been thinking about it as “the churner” and “the taperer.” John Owen’s fear levels remained high throughout the experiment. He is a churner. Rob’s fear levels spiked at the beginning of the experiment and then tapered off to almost the same level as before he walked into the basement. Rob is the taperer.

I learned from that episode that, when it comes to fear, I am a John-Owen churner.

My orange tabby cat Dobyns was devoted to me. He had been my first pet after moving out of my parents’ house. He followed me around and insisted on being on my lap whenever I sat down. He demanded food all the time and would freak out if he could see a centimeter of the bottom of his food dish. I didn’t have the patience to fight with him, so I kept filling his bowl. At his largest, he was 23 lbs. That isn’t a typo. He was humungous.

In the fall of 2010, he dropped a significant amount of weight over about 2 months. I took him to the vet, who said there was a lump in Dobyns’s abdomen. From that moment on, I had little rest. I couldn’t sleep; I’d wake up to any small noise in the apartment. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t done enough to help him, my Dobbs. I had overfed him. I hadn’t played with him enough. I had gotten mad when he demanded too much of my attention. I tried to make it up to him. I started brushing his teeth and giving him catnip-infused toys. I cleaned his litter box twice a day and bought him the most expensive food. I carried him to the vet’s office every other week for chemo.

I don’t know why I was surprised when he continued to lose weight, when he’d mewl after using the litter box because of the pain, when he stopped eating altogether. I guess I thought I could cure him with responsibility. His rehabilitation consumed me. I also lost weight. I’d get up in the middle of the night and sit next to his cat bed. I’d sniff the top of his head and whisper to him. “I wish you’d tell me what you need,” I’d say. “I can try to make it better.”

Dobyns died in February 2011. In his last minutes, at the vet, I reassured him that he wouldn’t be in pain any longer. Then the vet injected the drug into his arm. And the next morning, I woke up feeling so guilty that it had been the best night’s sleep I’d gotten in five months.

It’s happening again. My gray tabby Daphne dropped half of her weight over the summer. She is 19 years old, and her illness is coupled with arthritis and a bad thyroid, but she has more good days than bad.

Last night after dinner, she joined me on the couch like she used to. She lay down on the blanket and stretched her paws to touch my leg. She wheezed, which rattled her purr, but she was genuinely happy. I bent over her and sniffed the top of her head. I whispered, “You are my sweet girl. You always have been my sweet girl.”

Our serenity in that moment reminded me of the differences between that time with Dobyns and now. I had been so terrified with Dobyns, not knowing what was going to happen or what was expected of me. I was John Owen in the gallows. And now, six years later, I am Rob Lowe in solitary confinement. In a good way. I am not worried that I’m not doing enough for her. She has had a long life, and I am secure in the fact that I have cared for her well. I do feel guilty about the should-haves and the could-haves of our relationship over the years, but I can remind myself that if, at the very end of her life, she is both horribly ill and purring ferociously from my gentle cooing, then I am exactly what she needs.

Walls

It started with the jar of loose change, the way the coins glittered in the sun. No matter where I stood in my bedroom, silver and bronze flashes swarmed around me like gnats or doubt. Without thinking, I pushed the jar off my dresser and watched as coins pummeled the floor and the jar shattered. The sound punched a hole into the silence of my childhood home.

I froze, waiting for the bellow of my name through the wall or my father’s heavy steps in the hallway. But my thin house remained still.

Growing up, my parents hoarded quiet like other parents hoarded plastic butter tubs. Mom was an insomniac and Dad worked third-shift, so at least one of them was napping at any point during the day. I wasn’t sure if their lack of reaction meant I was in much worse trouble or if I got away with it. I started thinking up excuses—practicing my innocent face and whispering “I don’t know what happened, honest.” The wind carried the sound of a distant dog bark through the window and a feeling bubbled up in my gut, an overwhelming sense to defy my parents’ rule.

I shoved piles of papers, books, and pencils off my desk. I upturned dresser drawers full of clothes, cassette tapes, stuffed animals, Hotwheels track, and He-Men toys. As I self-plundered, my defiance turned to anger. I was so tired of this stuff, so sick of the kiddie toys and the sweater vests and the thick glasses. I wanted to be completely new, completely opposite.

I noticed the posters hanging on my wall; the liner notes of my favorite album, a framed Bible quote, and a map of Saskatchewan hung over me. Richard Marx glowered from under his silken Eighties mullet. His leather jacket, tight jeans, and vanilla sexuality said: “I dare you.” The Bible verse said, “This is not like you at all.” The map said, “This wasn’t planned. You’ve veered off course.” So I ripped paper and broke frames, toppled bookcases, flipped footlockers; nothing was safe from my rage. I was panting and sweaty. My room reminded me of Jekyll and Hyde. My brother’s desk, his nightstand remained untouched on one side and barren walls stared back at me on the other. The pile of my things reminded me of the bonfire at camp, before a grown-up lit a match. My imagination found one, struck it, and ignited loose paper. I felt the heat on my face. It reminded me of opening the oven door. Dinnertime was soon and there were still no steps in the hallway, no shriek through the wall. Was I alone in the house?

My feet took me to the living room where I found my parents watching TV together. It was so odd. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them in the same place, not because they didn’t love each other, but because Mom couldn’t keep still and Dad couldn’t get moving.

After Radar from M*A*S*H delivered a few lines, my father spoke. “What in the Sam Hell is going on in there, son?” His voice was gravelly but clear, no sleep in its corners. My mother kept her hands in her lap.

“I was rearranging my room and I accidentally tipped my dresser over,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve and trying to convince myself it was the truth. “Could one of you help me, please?”

My father looked at my mother, nodded, and said, “It seems to me that if you get yourself into some trouble, then you should be the one to get yourself out.”

He sent me back down the hallway with instructions to have my room picked up before my brother got home at 8 pm. I returned to the mess I’d created even more frustrated. Nothing had changed. I was still the same person with the same stupid clothes and the same baby toys. The house was still library quiet and Richard Marx was still my favorite singer. I tilted my desk upright and returned it to its spot under the window. I refilled my bookcase except for one shelf because it had broken.

As I worked, I decided I couldn’t let the bookcase be the only evidence of the change that happened inside me. Vacuum still running, I marched through the house to the garage where I knew my mom was working on one of her old pieces of furniture, a tall cupboard with attached cabinets.

“Mom, will you perm my hair?” My mom had been a hair stylist before she married.

“Is your room clean?” she asked, her cigarette fumed between two fingers. I nodded.

“Knock it off with this Tasmanian Devil business, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Shoes, or What Not To Do When People Call You Names

As the bus doors opened, a tall man planted his feet wide in the threshold and stretched his long arms to the top corners of the jamb. He wore jean shorts and an old concert tee, and he had what looked like a cold sore on his lower lip. Our eyes locked as he leaned out toward me and my partner standing at the bus stop. A smirk pulled at his mouth, and he mumbled as he stepped onto the sidewalk and elbowed past me.

A minute later my partner asked if I’d heard what the guy said. I had. Despite the racket of the idling bus I’d heard him clearly. He said, in an almost genial tone, “How’s it going, faggot?”

The first time I remember hearing that word I was in church. Some dude wearing a cardigan was pulling felt characters of Jesus and sheep and wise men out of a Ziploc baggie, preparing for class. I remember street lights were on in the parking lot outside, which means I wasn’t in Sunday school but at Awana, what the Baptists called a youth group but was really just Sunday school on Wednesday nights with a game of dodgeball and a juice box thrown in.

I was sitting in a half-circle of school desks with the other young Christian boys aged 9 to 11. The classrooms in our church basement smelled musty year-round, but especially so in the humidity of that early September night in Michigan. To this day, a dank room reminds me of rubbery pancakes and eternal salvation.

The kid next to me told everyone to look at how I was sitting. Hands on desk, left ankle on right knee. He said, “Why are you sitting like a girl, faggot?”

The Cardigan stopped unpacking.

“I’m not,” I said. “My dad sits like this all the time.”

“Haha! Nathan’s daddy’s a queer!”

“That’s enough. Let’s get started. Nathan, both feet on the floor, please,” the Cardigan said, and then he launched into his lesson, probably the one about turning the other cheek. I spent the rest of that class studying my teacher and classmates, watching how they sat, staring at the floor because, for some reason, I thought their shoes would show me what unified them and set me apart.

Just like in the church basement, the moment with the tall man on the bus happened in a flash. He was smirking and then he was gone and then I was sitting in the back of the bus kicking myself for not confronting him.

I could have adopted my most winsome Southern drawl, slid an index finger down his sternum and said Why, honey, you interested? Or I could have unleashed a wild grin—each tooth a separate act of defiance—and quipped I’m great, asshole, how ’bout you? I could have called him the epithet that popped into my head when I saw the scab on his lip. I could have punched him in his willfully-exposed torso or tripped him as he stepped past me or I could have simply said “Fuck off.”

But I didn’t.

Thirty-some years after I put my feet on the floor, after the tribulations of reconciling my sexuality with my religious upbringing, after the lonely years post-college believing the ridiculous notion that all gay men ended up sad and alone, after the exhilaration of meeting my partner, after almost 15 years of enjoying a happy loving relationship, a stranger called me a faggot and I looked down at his shoes.

The Songs We Sing

Sometime in the middle of May, in the blinking daylight hours between rolling fog and thunderstorms, the buildings along Lincoln Avenue inhale. The restaurant workers in their white aprons have thrown open the large, floor-to-ceiling windows that line the fronts of their buildings. You have to fight against the draw of their breath as you walk by them, and the gift shop, and that store on the corner that sells running shoes, because the sidewalk could pull you inside to a waiting wood-trimmed bar or cash register. But it doesn’t. Instead it pushes you farther up the street past a Bierstube (once upon a time your neighborhood was German Town) where a young man stops talking to his date long enough to appreciate a tendril of her hair blowing onto his wrist.

And you feel an unfolding inside you.

The doors of the gift shop are propped open with heavy chairs. The greeting cards in the spinning racks at the front of the store whistle as the wind vibrates between them. They are reed instruments accompanying the bass of traffic noise rising from the busy street. They play a tune you find yourself wanting to sing.

A gaggle—or is it called a Fitbit?—of joggers stand outside the shoe store. They stretch, popping one foot up on the free-newspaper racks and light posts. Or they lunge, the hems of their matching yellow shorts almost make contact with the pockmarked sidewalk. The runners silently form a rank and piston their way down the avenue. Your shoulders square as you watch them. Your spine straightens. Intersection after intersection, they stop traffic with their presence until they turn left and vanish.

You walk the four blocks to Lincoln Square. Las Lagunitas, a new cantina, is raucous with 20-somethings. Its patrons spill neatly out onto the grid of tables formed on the patio. Chartreuse margaritas beckon from every table. On the other side of the patio gate, couples sit on benches gripping the handle of a baby stroller the size of a Humvee in one hand and a paper cup the size of a golf ball in the other. Inside the cups, mini-glaciers of coconut, chocolate mousse, and roasted-banana gelato peek at you over the rim. The parents chastise their sons and daughters to sit still, then they dip the tiniest shovels you’ve ever seen into their cups. You smile as they take their first bite.

The Fitbit of joggers thunder past you. You join their most informal of parades. They breathe loudly and rhythmically, and you match them. It is not a surprise that they take you back to the shoe store and assume their scissor and jackknife positions up and down the sidewalk. It is not a surprise to you because this ritual takes place every year: the birdsong, the echoes of laughter coming from inside the pub, the guitar riffs only audible when the School of Folk Music door swings open. None of it is a surprise. You breathe, you swing your arms, you glide up the back steps of your apartment ready to begin again.

What Matters

Lisa Burkhardt’s anger surfaced on her skin just like her freckles—slapdash and intense. She bragged she inherited her Irish temper from her mother and I believed it. When Mrs. Burkhardt took walks around the neighborhood without her usual thick ’80s makeup, I couldn’t tell mother and daughter apart. And Lisa could rant for hours using only swear words and the occasional “off” or “balls.” A neighborhood boy once teased me in front of her about being her boyfriend. She leveraged her lanky 14-year-old body to pin him against a tree and asked “Why? You jealous, little boy? Do you want me to give you a smooch?”

I worshipped her.

It helped that her green and black tri-level house peeked into our living room whenever my mom opened the drapes. But I didn’t need a reminder to visit her because I helped her with chores after school every day. I never knocked; Lisa said anyone willing to help clean her house was welcome. Together she and I scrubbed their already-spotless kitchen and bathrooms while blaring MTV.

Lisa wasn’t always angry and swearing, though. She liked to call the mop Boy George, as in “Grab Boy George out of the closet, will ya?” One time when I asked her why Boy George, she jabbed a finger at its shaggy locks and its mascara-thin black seam and said “Are you kidding? It looks just like him!” Then she dipped him in a bucket and sang over the sound of dripping water: Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? On Monday afternoons when her mom worked late at the cable company, Lisa liked to take shots of Southern Comfort. She always offered me some and I always politely abstained, then lectured her on the perils of teen drinking. My words never stopped her, though. That’s pretty much how our friendship worked.

One morning before school around Halloween 1985, I watched an ambulance back into the Burkhardt’s driveway. Blue and red lights flashed but no siren blared. EMTs opened the van’s back door. I couldn’t see who they carried out on the stretcher, but after the ambulance pulled out of the driveway I watched as the orange leaves settled back down on my quiet street. I didn’t see Lisa that day or the next. The rumor around school was that her mom had died of a brain aneurism in the shower.

I waited exactly a week to climb the steps to Lisa’s front porch. The open-door policy felt revoked somehow, so I knocked until Lisa yelled for me to come in. As I passed the bathroom I noticed perfume misters and several cans of Aqua Net hair spray and the telltale pink of hair curlers jumbled on the counter. Lisa was sprawled on the floor of her room, dirty dishes fanning around her head like pets waiting for attention. Her eyes stayed closed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Why? You didn’t do anything.”

“Do you want help with the bathroom?”

“No,” she huffed. The red in her eyes matched the red in her hair, and I found myself in a stare-down that didn’t break until she looked up at the ceiling. “Don’t you know that doesn’t matter anymore?”

I slouched back across the street soon after, feeling like I’d failed a test. Our street widened after that. Lisa found girlfriends in her grade and spent less time at home. Despite the constant gaze of her tri-level, I never visited her again. She entered high school; I followed quietly two years later. She said Hi to me in the hallways sometimes and drove me home once with a cigarette jammed in her mouth blasting Guns-N-Roses the whole way.

Twenty years later, she friend-requested me on Facebook. A private message popped up. Lisa asked how I was. I told her about my life in Chicago, about my partner.

—Does he treat you well? she typed.

—He does. He takes care of me when I’m sick. He sings to me when I’m sad.

—Good. That’s all that matters.

The flashing green light in the IM window went solid gray and she unfriended me the next day.

The Woman Who Died More Than Once

If my father heard me tell you that his mother died twice, he’d rock back on his heels, dip his chin so the tip of his cotton swab beard glanced off his sternum, and declare that she died all of three times. He would not elaborate. As you can imagine, these stories are not pleasant to recall; he rarely brings his mother up in conversation. Growing up, I don’t remember ever hearing her name.

Our differing sums can be attributed to absence. I forget about the first time my grandmother died because it happened before I was born. Unfortunately, all of this means you must rely on me to tell you stories of which I only hold shards. I will do my best.

In 1951 my father was 7 years old and his brother and sister, the twins, were 6. They were sitting or playing or napping in a house across town from the courtroom in which my grandparents slouched. A stoic judge restated the charges of The State of Michigan v. James and Romine, which I imagine includes public nuisance and several counts of child neglect. The case ended with the word guilty and three swift knocks of a gavel. Later in the week, a social worker came to the house, gathered the three children’s belongings, and drove them to three different houses full of strangers: foster families. And on his third or fourth night in the new house when my dad was lonely and confused and crying, his foster mother peeked into the room and told him that she was all he had, his mother would not be back. That was her first death.

The other deaths begin with phone calls placed to my father from strangers claiming to be relatives. The first one happened in 1983 and went something like this:

“This is your niece. My name is Karen*.”

“What can I do for you, Karen?”

“I thought you should know your mother has cancer. They caught it late. Things aren’t looking too good.”

“Thanks for telling me. I’m sorry for the people who care for her, but I do not count myself among them. Goodbye.” Dad hung up believing that was that.

The second phone call was less abrupt. It happened in the summer of 1989.

“This is your Aunt Loretta,” a woman said by way of a greeting.

“I didn’t know I had an Aunt Loretta.”

“Yes, well, this is her. Your mother is sick and she’s asking for you. She doesn’t have much time left.”

“You must be mistaken. My mother died years ago.”

“No. She’s had cancer before, a couple of times in fact. But she never let it kill her until now. Will you come?”

“I’m sorry, but there has been a mistake because my mother has never once wanted to see me.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do to change that, but I’m telling you now that your mother is dying and she wants to see you.”

Dad didn’t go.

Two years ago, I connected with Karen’s daughter on Facebook. We got together for dinner one night. I was nervous; she was the first relative on that side of my family I had ever met. I wanted it to go well. I wanted her to answer questions I’ve had simply with her presence. At some point, I started describing my dad, her grand-uncle, but she stopped me mid-sentence. She told me she’d met my dad at a wake, Dad’s mother’s, in 1989. He never told us he’d gone.

My mind reeled to think what I was doing that day. I would have been 15, preoccupied by marching band practices and pool parties at friends’ houses. But even if I hadn’t been a self-absorbed teenager I still would not have known of his loss. He kept his family secrets. I resented his attitude then; I always felt like he was withholding himself. Now I understand that it was protection. It was my father’s determination to leave his past behind, to give his sons a less complicated family life.

I know facts about my grandmother now. I know her name was Mary Louise Romine. She was born in Parma, Missouri, in 1918. She was the oldest daughter of Clayton Romine and Elizabeth Lewis. She moved to Flint, Michigan, sometime around 1940 and eventually became the head cook of Higgins Restaurant on Corunna Road. She died on November 18, 1989, near Otisville, Michigan. I’ve been given pictures of her. She is the woman on the far left of the picture in the polka dot dress.

She is the woman who died not twice, but three times. She is the woman who profoundly hurt my father, but she is also the woman who directly shaped my father’s attitude toward his own family, made him want the opposite of what he had. She is a key reason I had a stable and loving childhood, and for that I begrudgingly thank her.

*names of living people are changed

String Bean

“Thin people shouldn’t talk about their weight. It always sounds like bragging.”*

A few years ago, at a party I hosted, an acquaintance— all six-foot three, 235 pounds of him— leaned down to me and said, “Look at you! You’re just a wisp of a thing.” He meant it as a compliment, but I couldn’t stop old insecurities from flushing my face. I felt like every jock I went to high school with somehow crawled through 20 years of space/time continuum to slam me up against my own refrigerator.

I am a thin man. That’s not bragging. I have always been self-conscious about being “too skinny.” It sounds weird now in these times of skinny jeans and moob jobs and size-zero male models, but I grew up when “skinny” was a put-down. It meant frail and nerdy. Thin guys were called weakling or twig or string bean. And everywhere we looked in the media of the 1990s we saw powerful bodies like Mark Wahlberg’s and Tyson Beckford’s with arms the same size as their thighs and shoulders that angled out from their waists at impossibly wide vees.

“Everyone likes to hear how thin they look.”

Not long after that party, I went to the doctor for weird feelings in my extremities. Tests were done and a specialist informed me that I was pre-diabetic. She gave me no prescriptions; she wanted to see how I fared without them. Instead, she handed me a tri-fold pamphlet with an illustration of what good eating habits look like: half a plate of vegetables, a slice of meat that could fit in your palm, and either an apple or a dollop of mashed potatoes. It looked meager. She told me to cut out carbs and sweets, to eat more greens and less starch. No sugar or white rice and exercise more. In other words, the string bean was on a diet.

“Man, when you turn sideways, you disappear.”

Of course, I followed her orders: I started ordering Amstel Lights (the beer with the fewest carbs) at bars. I ignored the looks on waitresses’ faces when I quizzed them about low-carb fare. I secretly put back the cake and donuts that well-meaning co-workers brought to my desk. When friends offered to “fatten me up,” I laughed politely. I became known as a health nut, and swallowed the anger I felt due to my prescribed eating habits. They couldn’t know I’d kill for a heaping bowl of pasta, or a sandwich with regular fucking slices of bread. I kept my mouth shut about why I ate the way I did because I knew they would say exactly what I hated to hear: “But you’re so thin.” As if being thin made me invincible.

Around Easter this year, I started feeling thirsty all the time. Like an unrelenting fill-a-swimming pool-with-unsweetened-iced-tea-and-I-will-either-drink-my-way-out-or-drown kind of thirst. I waited for the thirst to pass, finally seeing a doctor when it was either that or clawing my throat out. As the doctor handed over a prescription to manage the diabetes symptoms, she nonchalantly added, “One of the side effects is weight loss.” I’m not sure what sound I let out, but her subsequent concern demanded an explanation.

“Look at me,” I huffed, motioning with my open hands from my chest to my waist. “People tease me about being blown out to sea by a strong wind. I just started gaining back the weight I lost after quitting carbs on your orders, and now you’re telling me I have to start all over again?”

“Oh, poor skinny dude. Can’t gain weight. Boo-hoo.”

I know. There are so many worse diagnoses to hear. I’m lucky to live in a time and place where I can manage my symptoms with a pill. But this just happened. The ink has barely dried on the prescription bottle. I need a day (or six) to wallow in my frustration. I need to tell people that “thin” is not a synonym for “healthy.”

*The italic sentences in this essay are direct quotes from various people at various times in my life.