“Tabula Rasa” by Jean Banas 37″ x 46″, acrylic on canvas.

Every Wednesday at seven, I subjected myself to the week’s worst humiliations in the interest of narcissism disguised as good health. Each week, I jumped, bounced, and jiggled my way from fatness to slightly-less-fatness. I looked around the gymnasium, at the people at their various workout stations, comparing my body to her, and her, and him. I saw what I was. I saw what I was not.

I had signed up for a weight loss challenge at my gym, not unlike The Biggest Loser, and often, I felt the weight of the word “loser” hang on me like the extra fat I carried around my midsection. At the kickoff party, where over one hundred chairs were set up and filled between the two basketball hoops, I had said “sixteen pounds” into the microphone at the makeshift stage, dedicating myself to this number for the next sixty days. The program teamed me with a small group of other losers and a trainer, a handsome, young man my younger self would have loved to fawn over. I wanted him to be excited when I said I’d lost a pound or two. But he never was, and I suspected it was because I always knew, to the eighth of a pound, how much weight I’d lost and how much I had left to lose. I was, and continue to be, incredibly aware of my body.

When he said, “I want you to add oats for breakfast,” I grumbled and said, “I just eat eggs.” I adhered to a very strict paleo diet so I didn’t have excuses to eat food I shouldn’t. So, I routinely said no to most legumes, to quinoa, to dairy, to anything starchy other than yams. I saw him try to not roll his eyes or sigh dismissively. While I wanted to be a prized student, I simply couldn’t be. Even now, twenty years after high school, I find I am the same person I was back then. Then, as now, I occupied a space between excellent and average, the B+ zone, a place of invisibility. And when you’re invisible, no one expects a damn thing from you.

My life has been a series of phases where I’m either losing or gaining weight. When I run into people from my past, I think of what they must think of me. Did they meet me in 2006, when I was running and proud of how my body looked? Or maybe it was in 2011, when I hit the highest mark on the scale. What must zip through their minds? She looks great or what a mess or she used to look so much better.

I thought about this at the gym, as I snapped my minty gum and curled the ten-pound dumbbells for two minutes or lost track of the number of squats I could drive through my legs in the same interval. My new gym friends didn’t know that I’d lost twenty pounds on my own before the challenge began. It was hard to know when my victories would mean anything to them. When I lost five more pounds, it was just five pounds, not twenty-five pounds. It didn’t feel like enough.

Before each class, we texted each other to make sure none of us would skip. With my human buffers around me, eventually, I would forget a little of what I was doing and concentrate on form and technique instead. With each pound lost, I could be more of myself. But if I had to go through class by myself, I would spring back to silently hating myself the entire time, focused acutely on my body, my breathing, my sweat.

When I started the program, the sales pitch involved asking me why I was there. “Because this is what I do,” I’d said. When pushed, I just said, “I yo-yo,” and left it at that. No one there needed my history of gains and losses. The only thing that mattered now was my new goal.

What I couldn’t say was that I’d just moved back to my hometown after losing a teaching job I loved in a city that made me feel good about myself, despite being fat. I hadn’t expected to like Baltimore, and I hadn’t expected it to like me back. In my last year there, I had regained the weight I’d previously lost, but I didn’t hate myself for it. Yet in my hometown, I did. I was ready to yo-yo down again.

After I signed up, my best friend asked me what I wanted out of the experience. I simply said my scale number. Which was only partially true.

“It’s sad that one day you’re going to be sixty,” she said. Had she stopped there, I would have agreed. “And you’re going to look back and resent the fact that you spent so much time obsessing about your body. And your weight. And how pretty you think you aren’t.”

If only it were really that easy. Dear self: resist the temptation to judge and to compare yourself to her, and her, and her. To guilt yourself when you slip and eat something decadent and forbidden. To belabor your shortcomings and magnify them beyond hyperbole.

But, really, she got it right. When I sat and thought about it, in my most honest reflections, I thought, If I’m going to be fat, I want to be fat and fucking beautiful.

So, I kept going to the gym. I worked out five or six days a week on my own and met with my trainer on Thursdays. I only had one five- and one ten-pound kettlebell at home, so I bought more and heavier bells. I did planks and lunges and squats and swings at home before work. I counted my calories in an app on my phone. I kept my fatness close to me, never very far from a conversation about food or fatness or eating.

I’d visit my mother, and after the pleasantries, I’d show her the app and say, “I’ve lost more weight.” The chart would show my progress as a terraced slope.

Every other Monday, we had to weigh in at 7:00pm. I resented the evening weigh-in, when I’d worked all day, eaten, drunk water, and added weight to my body. I resented going to the gym twice in a day since I always worked out in the afternoon, right after work. Mostly, I resented having to sit in the audience, arms folded across my chest, and be reminded of the body image support group I’d had to go to when I was twenty-one.

At the second weigh-in, I was four pounds down. At the third, an additional four. I was halfway to my goal. I was so concerned with my own progress that I hadn’t seen any of the paper signs posted around the gym, showing the Top 25 Losers. But at Day 45, I finally noticed. I was number 24. When I took my best friend to boot camp that week, I pointed at my name on the paper.

On Thanksgiving, I paced myself, making sure I clocked each morsel, each crumb, into my app. I could not let myself go. The challenge was still at the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t that I wanted to win; I simply wanted to stay on the list.

At the gym the following week, I ran into a teammate who had given himself over to the holiday weekend. Before this, he had been doing so well, and I had meant to tell him that he was looking good. Another teammate had bailed for the previous three weeks, and for the remainder of the challenge, we officially lost her. But one girl, Kaytlin, gave me something to aim toward. Years before, when I had trained for the Seattle half-marathon, I had always chosen someone far ahead, someone I could challenge myself to catch up to. Someone I would eventually pass.

I started spinning again. It was an activity I had loved when I was twenty and had worked front desk at a gym. I found power and strength and forgiveness on the bike. I could get lost in the music as the flywheel carried me forward, through the speed work, intervals, and heavy mountain climbs. I’d end class with a pool of sweat under me and laugh it off with friends I’d made. Soon after, I added a lifting class to my schedule, where I stayed near the back of the room, and worked on my lunge technique and began to add more weight to my chest presses and bicep curls.

I never caught up to Kaytlin. She ended the challenge as number four, a stunning prize of loss. At the finale, she participated in a Before and After photo contest, a cruelty where we applauded the best Loser’s photos. I valued her ability to stand in front of everyone and reveal an old, fat photo next to her current self. She deserved our applause, but some other woman who had lost nearly a hundred pounds over several challenges won instead. Kaytlin simply hadn’t lost enough yet.

In the final weigh-in, as the announcer held the mic up for each participant, I chomped hard, like an anxious cow, on a fresh stick of Mint Bliss and removed every article of clothing I could, plus earrings, rings, and my fitness tracker. In the background I heard, “her goal was seven pounds! How much did you lose?” “Nine pounds,” a woman’s voice said just before I saw her disappear in a tunnel of seated Losers offering high fives.

“Sixteen point eight,” the trainer said to me, writing my number on the sheet with my name on it. I struggled to put my clothes back on, the earrings, the rings, the tracker. I had to ask him again before I walked up to the mic. Was it really true? Did he have me right? He leafed through the pages and found my name. “Sixteen point eight,” he said again, as he weighed the next woman in line. I had passed my goal by .8 of a pound.

As I walked to the mic, in front of a sea of fellow Losers, I caught the eye of my trainer. He looked as if he knew the number already—five or maybe ten pounds, tops. He would eventually tell me that he knew I could meet my goal all along, that I needed tough love. I knew to not believe him.

The truth is that I had been invisible, even to him, hiding myself in plain sight while trying to erase the parts of me I didn’t like. It was that same tactic I had begun in high school, something that kept me safe. But I didn’t want to be invisible anymore.

I smiled as I leaned toward the mic and the too-cheery announcer. She said my name and my goal as my trainer whispered the information in her ear.

“Sixteen point eight,” I said. I walked through the tunnel of high fives and sat with my team, and Kaytlin and I exchanged phone numbers, texting each other for the remainder of the weigh-in, which made our new friendship official.

Later that week, the Top 25 list was posted around the gym. I looked at the bottom of the sheet and scrolled up, expecting to see myself near twenty-four again, but my name was at lucky number eleven. I took a picture of the sheet and texted it to my best friend.

“💪” she texted back.

On my way out, I stopped by the front desk to sign up for the next spinning class and saw that a spinning friend had already signed me up. I tucked a wayward strand of sweaty hair behind an ear and walked to my car, feeling more conspicuous than I had in ages.

Jenne Knight writes poetry and essays, and her work appears in Bodega, The Rumpus, and The Common, among others, and new work is forthcoming from wildness. Her poem, “Elegy for my Father” was nominated for Best of the Net 2016. Please visit www.jenneknight.com for more information.

“Road of No Return” by Jean Banas.

Dear Baby Witch,

We, the women in our family, have a problem with love, little girl. Love inside of us is a hard black hole, baseless, bottomless, always threatening to suck the rest of our bodies through its borders and to consume us until we no longer exist. Love is something too heavy to hold. Love isn’t something we think we deserve. We have been taught love means to clutch, to drag down into the dirt. Love is something to bear. But that is not what love is.

You will be born into a long line of witches, of complicated women capable of great anger and great joy. There are demons and curses in your story, little girl, but our family’s story, like all immigrant stories, is a fairy tale wrapped in war.

My grandmother says when she was a child, “Someone put a curse on us, a witch, or they paid a witch, or it was a demon.” Why, I ask, would anyone want to do that do your family? “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe they were jealous of us. Curses bring trouble to a family. Curses will make people drink, beat, steal, cheat, lie, rape, get pregnant, die. This was a big curse, a bad curse, what they call an Original Curse. The worst kind. Hard, very hard, almost impossible to lift.”

I always loved listening to my grandmother’s stories of Italy and the war. Others groaned at the beginning of a war story, but I leaned in. Stories of the past are in our blood, little girl, in our genes. Even if we never hear the words, they are unspoken in our bodies and they are our framework, our blueprint, whether we know it or not. I want to tell you, always listen to your family stories. They are the story of who you are.

Our people are from a farming village on the Adriatic Coast. My mother was born there and her mother, in a tiny concrete hut, and these two women raised me far away from the farm, as far away as they could get, across an ocean and in what they imagined to be the most magical city in the world, New York, where people come from all over the world to live, where the languages and smells of every country are in every particle of the air, a city of islands on the sea, a city without bombs, a city where the unimaginable was possible.

My grandmother Elena, your great-grandma, will sometimes tell a story of her childhood on an idyllic farm. She will smile and her eyes will go soft. They were five sisters, little girl, and they were bound tight, tight against the outside, tight against their brothers. They gathered eggs from the chickens, they buried meat in the ground, and they washed each other’s hair with vinegar. She will tell us of her sweet father, Rocco, and how he loved her so. When he died, the ghost of her father searched the earth for her and found his daughter in a Queens apartment. He sat on her bed across the sea and placed his hand on her chest. “He was a saint,” she will tell me, but I will not yet know that this is only true because once a person dies, all their sins are forgiven.

The men drank, little girl. They drank and fought and waged little wars. In America today, there would be labels like addiction or abuse, but in Italy then, they were only men. My grandmother will laugh and say, my father liked to drink. He rode Nina, the horse, into town and got so drunk that the men in the tavern had to carry him out and drape him over Nina, and Nina was such a good horse, she knew the way home. When we heard Nina coming, we got out of bed, carried our father inside, we took off his shoes, we washed his feet, we did this with love.

Years later, when I am a grown woman in my thirties, my grandmother’s younger sister will tell me another truth. That Rocco came home drunk and beat their mother. That the brothers didn’t want to see. The sisters were too small or too scared to intervene, but my grandmother was the only one who wasn’t afraid of him. She would stand between her mother and father, fists clenched, body strong and scream for him to stop. This is not your right, she screamed, leave mother alone. Sometimes he shoved her aside and continued to beat her mother, but sometimes Elena got him stop. Sometimes it worked.

In our family, before your father, the men were loose cannons and helpless babies and the women had to learn to be witches. Women learn to orchestrate the family and the town and the universe with their wands. A woman must learn to freeze time, must learn to hold one million things together, hovered in the air, with only her will. Her ability to keep a family and a farm together, in sync with the weather and seasons, in sync with the neighbors, her ability to bend and morph herself in order to keep a marriage together is her magic, and her magic is her love.

I want you to know, little girl, that love was different then, all kinds—romantic and familial. The definition of love is not something constant or permanent. My grandparents’ marriage was arranged. Love changes with the air. Love changes based on space, on time, on geography, on what you think you can handle, or more exactly, on what is put in front of you.

My grandmother grew up on the front line of a world war, little girl. Italy was divided into a north and south, two sides of the same country fighting each other. The farm was on that line, the line that divided the country, that divided loyalties, the line on which every soldier was the enemy, my grandmother said, as nearly every soldier was a bad man.

Germans, Americans, Brits, and Canadians raped farm girls and made their fathers watch then drank all the wine. My grandmother and her sisters learned to scatter into the fields and hide when soldiers came so their father could say, “There are no girls here.” Sometimes this line worked and sometimes it didn’t.

I ask her, how could you move to a country that has men like that?

She shrugs, our men were no better. Men are the same everywhere.

It is important you know this, little girl. In our history, women were for raping, for shaming, for childbearing, for cooking, for beating, and keeping a house together. Often women turned on each other to save themselves.

Mothers and daughters warred while the men stayed out of it, quiet, off to the side, with a drink. The sons were coddled and the daughters were made to be strong, taught to cook and clean and care for the men, there was a different love for sons than for daughters. The magic of mothers clashes with those of her daughters. I will not do this to you, little girl. Nothing will ever be as important to me as valuing you for who you are, loving you in a way that is new to our family.

Love was standing by your husband’s side no matter what he did. There was no limit to what he could do, little girl. He could do anything. The worst things you could imagine. He could rape your daughter. He could rape your best friend. He could beat you almost to death. But you must stand by him and I can’t pretend to know why, little girl. I can only guess.

Because there was no other way to survive? Because there was a war? Because there was God? Because there were neighbors watching? Because if you didn’t have a husband, you had nothing? No rights to your land or your children? Because there was nothing else? Nowhere else to go? No one else to be?

Women used their magic to weave invisible veils, cloaks over their eyes that stuck to their skin and perhaps they were so good at their magic that they forgot the veils were ever there to begin with.

When my grandmother was young she often slept in Nina-the-horse’s stall. In the morning, Nina’s hair was braided into thousands of tiny braids. The next morning, the braids undone.

It was the fairies, my grandmother will explain eighty years later to her adult granddaughter and she will still believe in the fairies, and you will believe in them too.

She kicked me, my grandmother said, when I was young. I almost died. She was sorry. For years. Really, for the rest of her life she was sorry. She loved me, and I loved her.

When the bombs came, my grandmother couldn’t leave Nina behind. She took Nina across the fields, to each point of escape, across hills and valleys, to the homes of family and friends, she took her horse with her as they ran from the bombs that ripped the land apart, shredded houses, destroyed the vineyards and olive groves, killed the animals, scattered the people.

Many ran to the mountains, to La Maiella, where there were caves. People lived for years in the caves, they made chimneys and stoves and rugs and beds. The mountains were safe and strong. We could go to La Maiella, my grandmother pleaded with her mother. We could bring Nina. We could be safe inside the mountain.

My grandmother will stop her story here. She will make me think that it worked, that they lived in the mountains.

“What happened?” I ask. “What happened to Nina?”

“We could not bring her to where we were going,” my grandmother will say. She will not answer my question. Her face, which had been enchanted, animated, returns to its regular state, the resigned face I am used to, ready for whatever is next.

In Italy, and in America, we are taught if a woman has sex and is not married, she is a whore, she is a demon, she is a witch. We can say it is no longer this way but it is. Women are witches and demons and are only allowed sex from husbands to have babies but men can do what they want. A woman’s job is to stay. A whore casts a spell on a man to make him wander.

I will do all I can to make sure these lessons don’t sink into your core, little girl. But sometimes the air around us is so thick with these curses that we can’t help but breathe them in.

When explaining the Original Curse on our family, Grandma Elena says that everyone knows an original curse lasts for three generations: my grandmother’s, my mother’s and mine. You will not have the original curse in you, little girl. But there have been other curses, curses that have landed on me. I haven’t outrun my demons and curses, and I am afraid you will get some of them too. But they are diluted. I diluted them. I tried to get rid of the demons and curses before you came to be but I couldn’t. I can only let time pass and not let the curses take hold of me. I can fight them. I can teach you to fight them.

There’s a new branch of science these days called epigenetics. It is basically the law of the Original Curse. If your grandparents were cursed, it will get passed down to you. The Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Genocide, Rape, War, Drug abuse, these things are manifested as methyl tags on our DNA and we pass the trauma to our children and our grandchildren, so you will get my traumas and my mother’s but you will also inherit all of my fight, all of my searching for a peaceful love.

When my grandmother left for America with her children, her father got on his hands and knees and beat the ground with his fists and cursed America for taking his daughter and grandchildren. He wailed and beat the ground bloody. For my grandmother, there is no greater love than this.

I was born into my grandmother’s house, among labyrinths of gardens, vegetables vining up the fences and fruit trees blooming through concrete. In late summer we made and jarred tomato sauce for the year, in fall, salad dressing and wine. On Sunday mornings we pressed fresh pasta in the basement. I pushed my finger into tiny balls of dough to make gnocchi. We made each piece of pasta, one by one.

My grandmother says there was no greater love in her life than her love for her children and grandchildren. All her demons and the curse upon her family followed her across the ocean. There was no love between her and my grandfather, or between my mother and father. Our house erupted in violence nearly every day, the roar of their screaming and the neglect of our parents brought police and child services to our house.

Magical Realism represents a leap over a chasm, a reality impossible to bear. This leap coveys more truth than reality ever could.

When I was young, I thought I could overthrow my past, I could leave, I could move, I could change, I could be my greatest self. But now that you are deep within me, and now that you have slowed every part of me down, I can see that all I can hope for myself and for you are subtle shifts, glacial growth, and bursts of energy and light in unexpected places because we cannot escape our past; there is no way to cleave us of our ancestors, and anyway, even if we could, I wouldn’t want to. I’d want all of it, all the curses, all the demons, all the love, however fraught, however damaged.

The demons and the fairies and the witches and the dead followed my mother across an ocean and fifty years later they followed me across a country, from New York to California. You can live on a different planet, little girl but you will still be cursed. Sometimes we are under water. Sometimes we breathe the water in and we drown. We carry the geography of where we are from inside our bodies.

Immigration stories are about land, little girl, about geography. Not just time. A person is the land on which they were born and raised. My grandmother is long lines of perfectly parallel vineyards that stretch to infinity. She is gnarled olive groves, bombed farmhouses, chickens and dirt; she is a valley, a mountain, the Adriatic Sea. My mother is these things too but she is also concrete sidewalks, she is the bridges and skyscrapers her father helped to build. She is a cacophony of cars, languages and smells. She is the East River. She is a city of islands. And so am I.

You will be these things too, little girl, you will be Italy and New York City but you will be born in Los Angeles, another city on the sea, and like Italy, another city of horses, cypress trees, oleander, long warm days and long cool nights. You will be windstorms and palm fronds scattered in the streets. You will be a glittering and infinite city encased in mountains, you will be the dark silhouettes of owls in the wilderness above the city, you will be wild fires, ashes falling thick and flames curling into the sky. You will be hot pink bougainvillea vines and raining purple jacarandas. You will be packs of coyotes low to the ground, quiet and running in the night.

These places are in your blood. Someday, you might find yourself standing at a counter in Italy, drinking an espresso in the brisk morning air, biting into a sweet cream-filled pastry. A motorino will pass and its exhaust will curl through the cool air, through the dusty and ancient orange trees that line the street, and you will smell the bitter coffee, the pastry, the exhaust, the oranges, and you will feel like you are home again.

I crossed this country for myself, to save myself, and I stayed for you, and for other generations. I wanted to change our fate. I wanted us to breathe easier, have more access to peace.

My grandfather used to dance with me when I was a little girl; he used to twirl me around the dance floor at the Italian social club until I was exhausted. He died just a few months ago. He knew you existed but he didn’t know you were a girl. He didn’t know your name. He will never see your face. It seems impossible that you weren’t with me my whole life, right next to me, knowing everything I’ve known. I don’t know how to let time come and go like that. Let realities exist in different space times concurrently. Except I don’t have a choice. They must. My grandparents are still in Italy. They are in New York. They are being captured and held as prisoners of war. They are being hunted by soldiers through the fields that are, that are supposed to be, their homes. They are working all day and all night inside the factories of New York City or outside making the buildings, highways and bridges that will become a city. They are fighting to break free, to change, and they are failing.

Maybe when we move from one place to another, we become whatever wide-open space we crossed to get here: we are the oceans we have sailed across, the highways that traverse a country, the desert between cities. If we go back, we will not be the same. We will be half-here and half-there, half-nowhere and half empty air, bigger than we were before, so big we may float away.

When I was a little girl, I stood between my grandparents the way my grandmother stood between her parents, so they wouldn’t kill each other. You will never have to do this little girl. I have something no other woman in my family has ever had. I fell in love. I am, so far, the luckiest woman in this long line of women.

I have chosen a father for you that isn’t like the men I’ve known. Your father is gentle and kind. He believes in fairies and guardian angels and your father would do anything for me, anything for you. Your father went hunting with men, little girl, and he couldn’t shoot the birds.

The hardest thing I have ever done, so far, is learn to love him, your father, and to learn to accept his love for me. But I did it, and now I am ready for what I am told will be harder than anything yet: raising you, loving you, and letting you go.

I dreamed your father a few days before I met him on a warm summer night at the beer garden in Queens. It was after two in the morning, our feet were dusted in dirt. He had braces and a baseball cap and a face from my dreams. I’d had plenty of dreams that had come true, but magic had been a letdown, a disappointment. Dreams came true but amounted to nothing. There were many times I thought we couldn’t last. But we fought for each other, we fought for our marriage, and for a long time now, it has been easy. I battled to discard the memories of what men will do, how they will ruin your body and spirit. My war was learning to trust. My dropped bombs were ones of betrayal. I didn’t think I could love, or trust, but I do. There is magic. It exists.

We were all pregnant, little girl, my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, and on and on. We all felt our daughters move inside us. We felt her heels move across our stomachs and we felt her hiccups and we felt infinity inside us. The sense of possibility that maybe this time, things can be different.

We can choose the way we look at our lives, at our pasts, we can look both ways. We can say—fairies braided the horses’ hair while bombs dropped from the sky.

Sara Finnerty has essays and stories in Lithub, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Longreads, Joyland, The Nervous Breakdown, Fanzine, The Weeklings, Dame, and others. She is the Nonfiction Editor at Entropy magazine, co-curator of The Griffith Park Storytelling Series and The Women’s Center for Creative Work Reading Series. Sara is originally from Queens, NY and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Find her at www.sarafinnerty.com.

“Moving Through Space” by Jean Banas, acrylic on canvas, 46″ x 47″.

We had gone running early that morning but cut it short, stopping after three and half miles.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Cortney said, and started to walk.

“Big potty?” I asked, trying to be delicate, speaking her third-grade-teacher lingo.

“Yes.” Her cheeks reddened under the lamps that lit the trail.

“You can poop in my hat,” I said.

“No. I wish I had brought some toilet paper. I’d go in the bushes.” We were on the Virginia Corridor Trailway, a two-lane paved path that replaced a dormant set of train tracks and bisected neighborhoods to the west and east. I pictured the doggie pick-up bags in dispensers and shuddered at the thought of cleaning up after her. Thankfully, I kept my mouth shut. Thankfully, she didn’t want to crap in my favorite fitted running beanie.

I had to go, too, but I was more used to running through the urge.

Ten minutes later, back at her apartment, Cortney rushed to the bathroom. I started making a smoothie and heard the shower. Since there is only one bathroom in her apartment, I held it and got her lunch ready. The relationship was pretty new in those ways.

~

Cortney was running late for work. She had already left the apartment and walked down the stairs to her car but rushed back in. “Have you seen my cell phone?” The force of her words pushed the door open as much as her hands.

I popped my head out from the kitchen at a 45-degree angle, shaking my hands toward the sink. “No, I don’t think so. Is it by the b—”

She reached between the cushion and the arm of her reading chair. “Oh, here it is. Okay, gotta go. Quick kiss.” She walked and puckered as I met her in the living room.

In unison, we exaggerated, “Muah!”

“I’ll walk you out to your car,” I said.

She sped through the door and hurtled down the stairs. “Don’t lock yourself out.”

“I won’t,” I said, closing the door behind me and rushing to catch up. Suddenly it felt like we were working out again, running down bleachers at the track, head and eyes down, intent on each step, a mixture of concentration, caution, and exertion. At the bottom and on flat ground, we jogged the twenty yards to her car.

“Okayhaveagreatday,” she said.

“You, too. See you this afternoon.”

I stood in the mini parking lot like I was waiting for her plane to take off, not wanting to turn around until her car had disappeared from my sight. I watched her pull out in reverse. The gravel in the alley crunched under her tires. She drove away after we gave our final waves, metronomes from elbows to fingertips, and blew our final kisses.

Floating back upstairs, belly full of butterflies, I glowed with the thought that I was an attentive, exciting boyfriend.

The front door was locked. I gripped the cold, gold handle and shook it like I was trying to tear it off, as if I would somehow overpower the locking mechanism with brute force. The windows rattled.

“What the fuck?” I said out loud, knowing Cortney was already down the street, out of sight, zooming to work fourteen miles away and two towns over. Knowing I didn’t have my own cell phone on me. Knowing I didn’t know her phone number anyway.

I walked around the wrap-around balcony to each hand-crank window, hoping that one had been left cracked open, digging my fingers into the gaps on the sides to pry loose the old, rusted frames.

What the hell am I going to do? I had rented out my house when I went on sabbatical and was crashing at Cortney’s before I went traveling again. Everything I needed was locked inside of her place.

I started to get cold in my running tights, running shoes, and form-fitting, long-sleeved running shirt.

~

Now I was stuck outside without a key to my car, a phone, money, anything. The morning air added an extra chill to my smoothied bones. And, still having to go big potty, it felt like I was going to mess myself.

I thought, Maybe Paul is awake and I can borrow one of his cars. I walked the five blocks to my friend’s house, reliving the scene in Up in Smoke when Cheech coaches himself: “Cheeks stay together.”

Paul was already gone, so I returned to Cortney’s porch, shaking the same door handle, pulling at the same windows. I looked across the street to my college. It was still before 7 a.m. on a Friday, a non-teaching day. I could wait until the secretaries arrived and call my mom’s house. But what I wore left very little to the imagination. One glance at my crotch gave a clear outline of everything.

Plus, having just spent too many weeks on the road eating crappy food, I looked like I was pregnant and just starting to show. My pecs, too, seemed more like points since I hadn’t done a push-up in weeks. I felt like Mr. Fatness more than Mr. Fitness. This was fine for running in the dark before most of the world awoke but not walking around in broad daylight at my place of employment. Still, the specter of squatting outside to relieve myself overtook all ego.

Where do the homeless go to the bathroom? I wondered.

The science building, otherwise foreign to me, sat close to the road. I slipped into a bathroom with an outside entrance. Warmth, gratitude, and relief consumed me so much that I considered staying until Cortney got home at 4 p.m. But picturing myself pacing back and forth in a bathroom or sitting all day in a stall, hiding and hoping no one would walk in, motivated me to think of other options, like running to my mom’s house three and a half miles away.

The run would keep me warm, allow time for my mom and stepdad to wake up, give me access to a car, and provide the option of putting on some less–revealing clothes. An added bonus, which I didn’t anticipate, was that the run would give me time and insight to work through my tendency to blame others for anything bad that happens to me.

I knew that Cortney locked the door as she walked out, an unconscious movement from the two years she had spent living alone in that apartment. I noticed her doing it a week before when she almost locked me out, and I had thought several times that I should get an extra key made to stash outside. But I didn’t. And now I wanted it to be her fault that I was stuck outside, stranded, resourceless, and practically naked.

Deep down, I knew better. But it took this extra run through Modesto to figure it out.

~

My mom opened the front door, her face pixilated through the security screen. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“I’m locked out. I need your car.”

“What? Where’s Cortney? Is she already at work?”

“Yeah, I walked her out to her car and didn’t realize that she locked the door out of habit.”

“Do you have your license with you? You can’t drive my car without your license.”

“Mom, are you serious? Look at me. I don’t have anything. All I have is what I wore to go running. I’m not going to get pulled over.”

She chuckled in that nervous way that conveyed she meant what she said but wasn’t comfortable being challenged about it. “Yeah, I’m serious.”

Dan, my stepdad, still facing the too-loud TV, said, “I’ll take him.”

“Okay, thanks, Dan. But Mom, do you have some sweats I could wear over my running gear? I can’t walk into Cortney’s school looking like this.” I would have asked Dan, but he outweighs me by at least 100 pounds.

She soon displayed a series of matching sweatsuits in pastels and kitten-soft material not meant to go past the front door.

“No, Mom, what about that matching blue Adidas track suit you wear all the time? Can I wear that?”

“Oh, yeah. Let me see.”

Meanwhile, I said to Dan, “If I’m not being too needy, can I borrow one of your baseball caps? My hair is a mess.”

“You bet.” He followed my mom down the hall but turned left to the spare room cum storage closet.

My mom returned with another wrong set of sweats. “This?” she asked. I began to get flashbacks of being in the third grade, shopping for school clothes at Mervyn’s with my mom. She had seemed intent on ensuring that everybody I ever encountered would not only dislike me but also openly ridicule me.

“No, you know, the track suit with that material that makes that swishy sound when you walk and it rubs together? Swish, swish, swish,” I said, embarrassed that I tried to mimic the sound certain clothes make.

“Oh, okay. I think I know what you’re talking about.”

“See if this fits,” Dan said, walking past my mom. “If it does, you can have it. I didn’t realize it didn’t adjust when I bought it, and my head is so big you could put a wine barrel on it and it’d still be tight. That thing’s not even close.”

I squeezed it on, getting an instant headache, but I just wanted this kitchen fashion show to be over. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Thanks.” Meanwhile, I wondered who I could give it to after it served its purpose.

My mom walked into the room holding another set of warm-ups like she was carrying a baby at a distance, one hand on the hanger-hook, and one hand under the legs of the pants. “This one?”

“Yep, those are the ones.”

I heel-pushed out of my running shoes and pulled the pants on over my running tights, then the jacket over my running shirt. My mom’s waist and torso are bigger than mine, so I looked like a kid who wore his big brother’s sweats and his little brother’s hat. To top it all off, the legs came up a little short to show my bare ankles, what kids called “high waters” back in the day.

~

Walking onto the playground in elementary school was always terrifying. Actually, junior high and high school were no different. It was like playing “Marco Polo” but on dry ground. I just knew someone was going to yell “fish outta water!” and identify me as an outcast, an oddball, the one who wore his big brothers’ hand-me-downs, the one who still wore Toughskins while everyone else had graduated to Levi’s, the one who wore Kinney shoes while K-Swiss ruled. It didn’t even matter that I was generally pretty popular. I didn’t feel like I fit in.

Thirty-five years later, I thought I had grown out of that, but the perfect confluence of mishaps brought it all back.

~

I swished into the elementary school office wishing that I had shaved in the last three days, that I wasn’t sporting my stepdad’s too-tight baseball cap, and that I wasn’t wearing my mother’s clothes. But I was desperate.

“Oh, you’re Op,” the secretary said. “Nice to finally meet you. Just sign in right there and you can walk to Cortney’s classroom. Do you know where it is?”

“I think so. That way, right?” I pointed in a direction I hoped was south.

“You got it.”

Exiting the back door of the office, I saw miniature people, maybe kindergartners, lining up outside. One of them appeared to ask his friend, “Who is that strange, scary man walking with his head down?”

I sped up my pace, which only made me look more creepy and suspicious, I’m sure.

When I approached Cortney’s third-grade classroom, I heard her voice and suddenly realized I hadn’t considered what I would say. I just stood in the doorway, watching her read to her students in “Library Corner.” The light from behind me made me a silhouette.

She looked up, and her brow tightened over her eyes, defensive and alarmed. “Can I help you?” Twenty-seven tiny faces turned my way.

“I’m locked out.”

She registered my voice and unclenched her jaw. “Oh, no. Come in, come in.” Then her teacher voice returned, a few decibels higher than normal conversation. “We-were-just-read-ing-a-stor-y. Let-me-in-tro-duce-you-to-ev-er-y-bod-y. Class, this-is-my-boy-friend, Op. Op, this-is-Kay-la, Lu-is, A-lex-is, O-mar–”

“Baby, I’m sorry, but Dan is waiting outside. Can I meet everybody at a better time, when I’m not wearing my mom’s clothes?” The kids all giggled, either titillated that I had called their teacher “baby” or looking closer at my get-up.

While Cortney retrieved her keys, the kids still stared at me, so I addressed them like a robot speaking to a group of semi-deaf, developmentally-delayed children. “I-look-for-ward-to-meet-ing-ev-er-y-one-of-you-real-ly-soon. Good-bye-now,” and waved like Ronald McDonald.

As I did this, I kept thinking, Is this how I’m supposed to communicate with third graders? This can’t be right. I was used to teaching adults at the local junior college.

In a chorus, Cortney’s students said, “Goodbye,” unaffected by my self-consciousness, my attire, my mannerisms, or my syncopated speech.

~

Now, with the key to Cortney’s apartment securely zipped in my pocket, I strode back over hopscotch outlines and basketball courts while two bottles of post-run water pushed for release. I wondered if it’d be okay to slip into the little kiddos’ john to pee. But just then, a waist-high poster boy for cuteness stepped out of the bathroom entrance while still buttoning his pants, and I got a clue. No way was I going in there, especially looking like a forty-something stalker-predator who still lived with his mom.

I didn’t want to add another challenge to my morning of playing Survivor: Central Valley, so I held it again, trying to find the lesson in all this. Like before, what I desired remained just out of reach — a bathroom, my living space, a vehicle, an inconspicuous set of clothes. But really, these were all temporary, and it wasn’t like I was actually homeless. My so-called problems were small in comparison.

I also had to look at my fault-finding. Since I was no longer a kid, I couldn’t just blame others for whatever predicaments I got myself into. Still, I didn’t shit or piss my pants or die from colon blockage, kidney failure, hypothermia, running too many miles, or embarrassment from wearing goofy clothes. Yes, I did have to relive all the anxiety I felt as a kid about what I wore and how others perceived me. But just like when I was in the third grade, I didn’t get laughed off the playground. I lived to learn another day.

Optimism One‘s essays have been published by In Fact Books and The Normal School, among others. He earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College and teaches writing full-time at Modesto Junior College in California. He’s currently working on a memoir called Goodbye, Suicide. His blood type is B+ (be positive).