the healing works better if i tell it in first person - Hannah Karim
sam and i started dating the summer before high school. sam read the new york times every morning and was the only person my age that i trusted to edit my essays. we first kissed wearing bedsheets as togas on halloween after taking his four year old sister trick or treating. i broke up with him as a result of trying to write out the story of our relationship as a valentine’s day gift two years later.
after sam and i stopped trying to stay friends, i befriended a girl named genevieve because her mother and his mother used the same laundry detergent and smelling it reminded me of a time when i thought people could really save one other.
dating ethan happened too soon after sam. ethan smoked weed every day, but restricted himself from doing so in front of me, which i internalized as an indirect form of affection. for eight months, we spent saturday afternoons watching netflix, while sunday mornings were spent walking to our town center, eating crepes in the cafe on the corner. ethan broke up with me in august after i told him that i like someone else.
in ap chemistry, michael and i were lab partners. ever so faintly, between titrations, michael’s finger tips would touch my ass. embarrassed, not wanting to make a scene, i said nothing, moving away from him only to feel his fingers against me again. it was always so subtle I questioned if it was happening at all. three years later, winter break of sophomore year, rumors in my hometown arose that he had been kicked out of his frat, having sexually assaulted a girl.
by senior year, i wanted to date thomas, but he wanted to date her and her had brown hair and hazel eyes, which was nice for her because then idiots on the internet didn’t blame her for the pandemic. she knew four languages and howto call amsterdam home, while i knew how to give a blowjob in the backseat of his mother’s minivan because i hadn’t yet learned that boys don’t like girls who don’t know how to say no.
summers were spent at my grandmother’s house. we sang billy joel in the kitchen while cleaning up dinner and spent hours by the lake, alternating between reading and swimming. we often took the hudson-line down to new york city. our train rides were dedicated towards stories. grandmother would give me a word like “serendipity” and i would challenge myself to write down all of the smaller words i can make out of the larger one. when time ran out, grandmother would check the notepad, letting me know which letter arrangements were products of my imagination, not to be found in the dictionary. when i got bored of the words, i asked her to tell me stories. she told me about growing up in manhattan, falling in love with my grandfather, and giving birth to my mother, but the time period she liked to talk about most was when she was younger, just out of college, navigating her first teaching job.
after grandmother died, i couldn’t masturbate for a month, scared she might glance down at the wrong moment and see me in the act. grandmother was a smoker, but never smoked in front of me. her house often smelled of febreeze failing to cover the scent of cigarettes. days before she died, grandmother took out a cigarette in front of me, asking me to light it. i did.