Not all stories need to be told. I held on to one closely since 2018 and then, last year, something shifted. Maybe it was hitting a five-year mark. Maybe it was being immersed in the writerly world of Sewanee School of Letters, where most summers I teach creative nonfiction atop the verdant Southern Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, drowned in cicada song. In the classroom, I was asking my students to take risks, to be brave, to put blood on the page. Could I?
And so I began to pull from journals and letters, audio recordings and pictures. All to track the arc of a friendship that began, well, here’s how the piece that emerged begins:
We were two women on either side of thirty throwing punches at one another’s faces in a concrete stairwell abuzz with florescent light. Our instructor showed us how to make a fist (thumbs on the outside), take aim, and put our weight into the shot. I threw punches at her first. She was younger than I was by a handful of years and just as racially ambiguous. Then it was her turn, and I jerked my head to the side to dodge impact, heard the whoosh of fist through air. Fight Club for girls. New York University. Coles Rec Center, 2004. Fourteen years before the surgery.
“A Measure of Gratitude,” just published in the fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, is about the power of female friendships and the burden of gratitude. It’s about sickness and health. The prospect of dying and the act of living. It’s about seeking and hoping and letting go and finding. There is cancer, the swapping of body parts, Peter Singer, the Bhagavad Gita, and bluefish, cooked up with cracker crumbs as new love blooms.
And in some strange way, it’s about how to respond to events like what happened last week at the American ballot box and what will happen in the years to come. How unraveling on the outside can sometimes lead to clarity within. Another snippet from the piece:
Michael waited for my answer. I considered my deepening cynicism, my daily grief. We had a madman scheming in the White House. People were scaling up their assaults—on fellow humans, other species, entire ecosystems, the planet. The world I loved was aflame and the fire spreading. I looked at Michael. “I want to see more good in the world,” I heard myself telling him, “so why not do something…good?” It suddenly seemed achingly simple.
I hope you’ll make a nice cup of tea or pour a glass of wine, put your phone into silent mode, and take the time to read “A Measure of Gratitude.” Maybe afterwards, you’ll decide to dance, or kiss someone, or call up an old friend.
It was a pleasure and honor to once again work with the brilliant editor Paul Reyes at VQR, an ad-free, just-shy-of-a-century-old, award-winning literary magazine that I hope you’ll consider subscribing to so it may exist for another ninety-nine years. And the commissioned illustration by artist Hanna Barczyk is just perfect.
Not all stories need to be told. But, taking a deep breath, I’m glad this one is finally out there.
thanks for reading,
~meera
34 writers. One planet in flux. How are we processing the changes underfoot and overhead? Join me and other educators, journalists, poets, and scientists as we try to put words to the experience of what Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined “solastalgia”… “the homesickness we feel while still at home.” Edited by Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night and many other books.
