Before/After

A different kind of new year's post

Photo by Photo by cottonbro studio:

You cannot get out of this life without experiencing an event that bifurcates it into a Before and an After.

Some events are global or national (an assassination, an election, a pandemic, a disaster) and some are personal (a diagnosis, a move, an accident, a betrayal).

Sometimes, the moment of transition from Before to After is clear-cut and knife-sharp; there is no confusion and no denial: The foundation of life has changed, forever transformed in fundamental ways. Other times, we cross a line incrementally, one small step at a time, until finally some small happening makes us aware that we’ve gone someplace from which there will be no return. Either way, the work before us is the same: We have to absorb a loss, grieve, and build our way to a new normal.

In the last week of 2024 I found myself grappling with Before/After. In the same week, the latest exercise in my writing class/group/experience dropped. It required writing a brief letter to someone focused on a particular memory, using the opening of Ocean Vuoung’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a model. Because I’ve decided to focus my work there on writing about my experiences with my brother, I chose a childhood memory for the exercise. I didn’t set out to write about Before/After, but—of course—it was probably impossible not to.

After

Dear Rita,

I am writing to return you to the girl you once were—even though each moment it takes you to read this will carry her further away. I am writing to go back to the time you played alone in the front yard of your house with your collection of small ceramic dogs under the three firs who stood sentinel in the corner of the property. Remember how the trees’ ridged roots rose, mountainous, above valleys of hard-packed dirt, marking territories for the little poodles and retrievers and terriers who ran and loved and warred completely under your dominion?

I think now of your play’s proximity to an intersection with no marked stops, and of the night a man crashed into one of your trees, his car’s grille gashing its trunk and permanently scarring the bark. Of how you continued to play there afterward, an intrepid little god making a world beneath weeping sap, and how it was not until the day a carful of boys catcalled you that shame, not fear or communion or care, finally brought your kingdom to an end.

I am writing because they never taught me how to hold that girl holy. But I am not trying to worship her—I am trying to resurrect her. Because salvation, I am told, is the reward of a life lived in truth.

As we have all crossed the rather arbitrary line that divides one year from the next, and as many of us are bracing ourselves for the regime change taking place in the US, and as losses so often haunt what is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, I’m guessing that Befores and Afters might be on many of our minds. So I thought I’d share this writing and invite you to share whatever you’d like in response to it.

I look forward to hearing from you, truly.

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