Re: The Agony of Wishing Someone Would Disappear

Abstract

Re: The Agony of Wishing Someone Would Disappear Emily Van Duyne (bio) January 21, 2017: The Women's March My son's father once threatened me with a flaming iron skillet I had used to cook a gorgeous puttanesca all that long, hot day—it simmered in the pan even as he lifted it from the flames. It wobbled, tipped, the olives and the onions dipped and swirled, the colors were a riot of forms, coming at me, as he was coming at me, shaking its volcanic contents as I hovered in the corner of that tiny Texas kitchen, barefoot, so that even if I could have run, I couldn't have gone far. I could regale you with a million tales like this one, but the point is this—that day, like many other days, he wanted to kill me. He said as much. Which is a strange thing to hear, so strange, in fact, that more than once I pretended I didn't hear it, I pretended he couldn't have said it, I pretended it couldn't be true. Imagine the power—I couldn't imagine. The power to want someone off of the earth—imagine the earth as that skillet, and I am a tiny joke of a woman, an olive slipping toward the edge, and tumbling onto the floor, off of the earth, into the earth from whence I came. Sometimes, after I left, I tried to wish death for him—but I couldn't get the words out. I couldn't even get them to play in my head: I wish he was—so I changed it up—"I wish he would fall off the face of the earth." Which is a curious game, since as I said, we don't fall off, but crawl back in, and I wondered, then, if I was wishing we had never met, never spent those days and nights falling into what I thought was love, but was, for him, its own dark game, devoid of love, devoid of meaning, was I desiring my life erased of his presence: the dark-lashed green eyes, the smart mouth, the body against mine, the body which helped create my son? At which point I realized—no one gets out alive. No one falls off for free. [End Page 295] Some of us can make others appear to disappear, but if I wished my life absent of him, I got a two for one special, since that meant Hank went with him, too, and so, there I was, am: trapped. Trapped on an earth with the man who wanted me dead. Who I couldn't want dead. Who I couldn't even theoretically wipe from the world's face. Not my power. Not my place. I am barefoot in the kitchen, folks, staring into a steaming iron skillet I brought forth like the little god I am, wondering what my own burned face will look like, reminding myself how much my son looks like me. [End Page 296] Emily Van Duyne Emily Van Duyne teaches writing and women and gender studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. She can be reached at emily.vanduyne@stockton.edu. Copyright © 2018 Emily Van Duyne