Looking back while marching on through constant change.
Millie Beatch (she/her) // Contributor
Jordan Richert (he/him) // Crew Illustrator
- Two days before I turned 16, my dad’s cousin’s husband died. He was very loved, a kind and easy talker who had many friends. His funeral was in my high school’s gym, and we were all instructed to wear Jimmy Buffet-style Hawaiian getups. A huge projection screen hung just in front of the bleachers. It cycled through the blown-up faces of cousins, aunts, family friends, me and my sister. Her eyes were so wide when she was a baby, her huge little face shining above the clusters of hibiscus leis. She was watching us all.
- I flew on Air Canada in the summer. It was a long flight, the kind where they give out useless little pillows and thin blankets and feed you fake breakfast. Behind me, the loudest and most restless children I have ever heard cried to their mother. Everyone was glaring in her direction. She responded with pleading, ‘You know, maybe even remember, how it is, right? what can you do, right?’ looks. But we all wanted to watch movies with the shitty Air Canada-branded non-noise canceling earbuds and forgot.
- “Yes, sorry, I can’t work that day,” I overheard my coworker say to a client. “My wife’s due that day.” I thought about having babies, and the fact that you might have to work the day before and the day after you had one, but it was okay to get the middle day off. I texted my boss to ask for my birthday off, and she said ‘yes. No one should work on their birthday’.
- If I had a child right now, I’d go to some tiny, disgusting, apartment somewhere, and raise her on my own. She would like what I like, and I would be the one getting on the crowded bus with a stroller hoping that the teenagers sitting in the priority seating would move to the back without having to be told. It would be very hard, and I would probably regret it in the end because there are a lot of things I want to do in my life that a child would destroy. On the other hand, she’d be my baby.
- My friend is in Strasbourg for a couple months. She texts me:
very fun activity is going to a French bar and just. Chatting with whoever’s sitting next to us for three hiura
*hours
What if you walked into a bar and there was someone there who wanted to get to know you for three hours?
The body remembers: a feeling, a birth, a funeral, sickness. For the first two years of her life, my little sister was very sick. I was a toddler and I recall only a moment from when she’d recovered. I don’t remember what her sickness was like, or how we later played when we were nine, ten, twelve. I don’t remember the blizzard that night. I remember that, for the first time in forever, on that day, we played in the snow. Narrowly, a joyous feeling. The taste of ice.
Category: Letters