Conjuring a Life
Maybe when kids like Jessie and John grew up they wanted to be firefighters or teachers or someone that excavates dinosaurs, but you never really knew what you wanted to be because you always had this inexplicable notion you’d be dead.
You never wanted to be dead. And you weren’t sick, not like those kids in the sad St. Jude’s commercials you’d see on TV or anything. You also weren’t a weird kid that spent too much time scribbling with black crayon, either. It was just this peculiar notion of being an aberration in your own life, of always expecting the universe to correct the mistake, like oops sorry kid! Gotta erase you now! Poof, gone, probably before the age of 18, you guessed. You concluded there was no way you belonged: not to your family, not to your school, not to the wobbly blue planet.
(In fact, you felt like such an alien that when you decided to write about all of this, you opted for second person narration. How very detached of you.)
If asked to pinpoint a reason why, an inciting incident, you struggle. But you do have visceral memories of your kindergarten classroom: a bunch of five year olds throwing naked Barbies like ninja stars, Faygo Red Pop staining the corners of their mouths like demented clowns. Memories of them digging their dirty thumbs into cupcakes and crying about empty glue sticks while you retreated into a corner with your doll, Mandy.
Trusty Mandy. You were convinced you had more in common with the non-sentient entities in your life. Sitting in a corner and brushing Mandy’s stiff, synthetic hair became your go-to escape hatch. It’s a wonder she had any remaining, considering you easily averaged 100 strokes per session, probably more.
The imaginary spaces you escaped to were wild. There was always music—Paul Simon, The Moody Blues, Bob Dylan—whatever album your dad last listened to. Colors, too, typically psychedelic hues of melting Superman ice cream. You told yourself you weren’t like the other kids, even though you were in ways you didn’t yet know, all of you coming from homes where your parents sometimes served breakfast for dinner because it was all they could afford. You viewed pancakes as fun. Your parents viewed them as budget-friendly.
*
High school graduation hits you hard, a smart slap across your cheek, the universe basically hissing at you to get with the program. Arriving to an event you never thought you’d see feels like waking up in a drunk stranger’s life. At first you wonder if you’re really still living, or if maybe your anorexia finally collapsed your hollow bird bones into a heap somewhere. Maybe you popped out of them, pantomimed your way through washing your ghost hair and getting dressed and pumping gas completely unaware that you should be floating toward an ethereal white light instead.
But no.
Your stomach still churns in on itself and your eyes still leak fluids, liquid reminders of solid existence. Of course your stomach churns; it’s fucking empty. Your eyes leak because you’re 18 and everything makes you emotional: songs, Humane Society commercials, the wind.
You clutch a rickety lectern propped up by a composition book and give an unoriginal graduation speech about reaching for the stars while convinced you’re partly stardust. Melt under the sheen of your synthetic gown into the heat and foot-stink of the gymnasium. Clutch your diploma in a vice grip while your biology teacher turns your silky tassel, acknowledging both your presence and achievement. Your skin stings and your mouth turns dry as reality erupts around you. You try to think about what you should be when you grow up, which is suddenly NOW. ‘Teacher’ seems like an option, but maybe that’s just because you’re currently staring out at so many of them. You clomp your chunky Mary Janes off the stage, each step a purposeful reverberation, trying to get better connected with your body, the way it should move and which earth bound orientation you should pilot it in.
There are two pregnant girls in your graduating class of 60, their expanding bellies hidden under flowing robes, tucked away from the future like gumballs in a pillowy cheek. You sit in your folding chair and pull your knees to your chest, feet planted on the aluminum seat. The idea of pregnancy scares the shit out of you, always will. Maybe you’ve been trying to scrabble back into the womb and incubate a little longer ever since your premature birth. Maybe you’re unfinished business, maybe you’re raw, maybe you’re pink and wildly underdone.
In retrospect, it would seem your birth is the only event you’ve been early to—every other milestone you’ve arrived late, always confused as to how you got there and fairly sure you didn’t belong. You started your period behind everyone else and were convinced you’d suffered an internal injury. Were you really a fully formed adult woman? Really supposed to be part of this bizarre spectacle where your ovaries shot out eggs that could get fertilized and carried around in the rented space of your uterus? Yeah, no.
Take me to the doctor! You’d told your mom. She’d given you a hug and handed you a box of knock-off Always pads instead. You always hated those knock-off Always. Or maybe it was just the irony of wearing something that felt like a diaper when you were officially no longer considered a child.
You think about these things and imagine your period starting again mid-graduation ceremony, a blood bath to interrupt the valedictorian’s dry, halting address—something like the elevator scene in The Shining. You can see it now, a river of red, collapsing the folding chairs, carrying away mortarboards and diplomas. The speech is long and boring and painful, but also one of the few things that night that feels like anything real, simply because of how bad it is.
Other things that feel real: the drone of insects and rush of hot air circulating through the open gymnasium doors, the occasional squawk of exhausted woodwinds during Pomp and Circumstance, your intensely Catholic gym teacher slipping thoughts on marriage and family planning into his speech. A baby refusing to let the ceremony interrupt his riotous cries toward a distracted and indifferent world.
Things that feel like a sculptor’s unrealized daydream: you. Everyone here has finished trying to mold you. They’re ready to stick you in the kiln and you want to scream, because you are not a vase or a jar or even a sloppy looking coffee mug. You’re still just a lump of soppy clay, maybe an amorphous soap dish on your best days. You spot your guidance counselor in the audience. Last year he told you that kids from your school don’t get accepted to Northwestern, had laughed when you randomly picked it as a place to send your ACT scores. You think he has to be the least helpful person ever to carry the title ‘counselor.’
The graduation gown hides your body and for this you are grateful. Every photo threatens to capture the angles and hollows of your cheeks, but at least you can hide the golden marks of your anorexia behind this gauzy silver robe. You aren’t thrilled with your gaunt looks, just semi-hostage to the few ‘safe’ foods keeping you chronically underfed: loads of under-ripe cantaloupe and carefully portioned graham crackers. Roughly one year ago, you’d stared at the cellulite blooming across the back of your mother’s pale thighs as reflected in the misted mirror of the produce section, right next to rows of cucumbers and leaf lettuce. Somehow you’d convinced yourself you were gazing into a crystal ball at your own future legs, or possibly just your own future. Blame Kate Moss or maybe TEEN magazine for your warped perceptions. Blame the patriarchy or biology or a still-developing frontal lobe. Your damage was a dose of these things, but it was probably more about your desire for continued disconnection. From the world at large, but also from your small town—the only world you really knew.
Kid you. She’d been so small and lean and light, a form easily aligned with your feeling of never being fully tethered to the physical world. Your adolescent shape filled in slow and soft, a mutiny of tissue you feared would anchor you into an existence you didn’t want or weren’t ready for. You saw them everywhere, tired women with dead eyes dragging screeching toddlers with sticky hands. (Years later, you will pass a ramshackle resale shop in the corner of your rural county. There will be a row of simple wedding dresses in the window, sad silk and shimmering plastic beads. What you will feel in that moment, staring at those dresses and imagining the young women who wore them and the young men that pawed at them with their sweaty hands, is thankful. That you never said ‘yes’ and got pregnant and divorced and stuck in a place you couldn’t escape.) You ran from these women like they were zombies, exercising and starving your way into Death’s territory. Come February, you were so unwell that you passed out in your bedroom. Death had peered curiously at your dessicated body then, noted the thrum of your heart knocking fast against your jutting ribs. Fuck you, you’d told Death. I don’t belong in your world, either.
You never told anyone about that episode: your heart racing, fainting, telling Death to GTFO as you came-to on a pile of dirty thermal shirts. You’d pulled yourself together and hightailed it to the dinner table after that, filled your empty belly with noodles and meatballs and runny Prego sauce. In the following months you ate just enough to keep yourself alive yet safely unmoored, buoyant in the dangerously thin limbo you felt deliciously accustomed to.
Toward the close of the graduation ceremony you become conscious of your stomach growling so loudly the people now crowding around you, offering congratulations, can surely hear it. Your mom had insisted you eat before climbing into your cap and gown. You’d placated her with a cup of light yogurt and two rice cakes, chalky and stale.
Most of the kids in your class are bound for the trades or farming or propping up the nearby tourist economy. A few are set for the armed services, a few more to college. One girl clutches a newly hatched infant and stands next to the pregnant girls as you pose for photos. Say cheese! Say a million parents with a million cameras wanting to capture a million moments in time. You pose. A melting statue, an apparition, a freakish doll. You flash peace signs next to friends who are mostly friends in name, because you’ve been so busy half-existing that you failed to form any real relationships. A vapor afraid to step into her own life.
You watch a mylar balloon get popped by a ginger kid with a mullet, feel yourself pffffting away on its spiral current, the empty foil form sucked against an air grate, stuck, flapping. In the bleachers, your third grade teacher chats up your uncle. She once expressed concern to your parents about your overactive imagination. Her head is always in the clouds, but she’s performing well so at least we know she’s learning? she’d reported/guessed. Of course it was old news to your family, long accustomed to your intense, irrational fear of the Unsolved Mysteries intro music and obsessive need to wash your feet every night before crawling into bed. You’re not sure what they thought of the spiral notebook full of descriptions of imaginary planets you thought you might belong to. Your favorite was the one where all the houses were glass orbs and the people floated instead of walking and could make themselves invisible on a whim.
More things that feel real: the ridges of the stamp embossed into your diploma, sequined confetti clinging to your hair and shoulders, hugs. So many hugs—an endless parade of fleshy, disjointed arms. You feel strangely anchored in the crooks of their elbows, propped up by the backs of their calloused palms, a little more whole in the curve of their embrace. You occasionally like to touch down like this, to ground yourself in the press of hot skin or the crashing waves of Lake Michigan or your battered skis slicing through snow before launching yourself, weightless, back into the stratosphere.
After the graduation ceremony, you attend a supervised all night party to prevent you from doing other things, like drugs or getting knocked-up. One of the features is a caricature artist. You avoid him most of the night, afraid you’ll be handed a blank sheet of paper after he completes his quick and violent strokes. What you actually receive is a sketch of a girl with dye-blond hair and a flannel shirt, raisin colored lips and a Colgate smile. A healthier, tarted up version of yourself that could be anyone or you or no one at all. You furtively roll the paper into a slim tube, wait until after you lock yourself in a bathroom stall and analyze graffiti memorializing Tracy’s love for Brad before daring a closer examination. The dust from the pastels leaves a trace of colors on your fingertips. The longer you stare at the caricature, the more you come to conclude that it’s perfect. A version of a girl that doesn’t even know what the real version of her looks like. She could be an astrophysicist or a mixed media artist or a mime in Times Square. Most importantly, on that paper is some kind of proof, for some reason more real than any photo, that she fucking exists.
You give the toilet a courtesy flush, pausing to wonder if Tracy and Brad are still together, and then wonder why you hope they’re not. The truth is you imagine that Brad was a dick and a deadweight, holding Tracy down. You hope she lives 1000 miles away. You rejoin the graduation party from the periphery, blanketed under the scattershot light of a disco ball. Dancing haphazardly to the Jamiroquai song Virtual Insanity, a song you really don’t even like, you clutch the portrait of that girl in your sweaty hand. You slide into the music, bobbing, twirling, swaying, suddenly hellbent on shaking her off the page and conjuring her into life.
- Conjuring a Life - September 18, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
