Creative Nonfiction
Emily Pifer

Photo Credit: Fabian/Flickr (CC-by-nd)

First, you must leave or get left. The truth is: you have less control over the getting left, and more over the leaving. Not to mention, if you’re left, it doesn’t feel the same. It feels bad, yes, but it’s supposed to, so, it doesn’t feel as bad. You see, when it comes to missing, it’s best to do the leaving.

And it’s best, you may guess, to leave soon. Leave hard and fast and—listen—cold. Leave the ground wondering what it did wrong. Leave the walls whispering your name, unbelieving you’re gone. Leave the people, the people you know, the people who know you, grasping for remnants of your DNA.

It’s in your best interest to rush out, the wind at your back. If both the calendar tacked above your desk and the one hanging by a bright, plastic letter X on your refrigerator show you leaving Tuesday, leave before the end of the weekend. Go on Sunday afternoon when the town is taking a nap, or eating, unsuspecting. This, you’ll see, is like committing farewell robbery.

And if you really want to do this properly, rather than savoring the days before you go, the moments of sustenance, the fuel of journal writings, you should wish each painstaking moment away—far (far) away. Make a paper chain of what remains, tally the evenings standing before you and gone away, count down the sunrises left before escape.

Don’t engage in goodbyes like closure like peace of mind, careful hugs and kisses on the cheek at the last hour of so-long-bon-voyage parties. Tell guests there’s no need. If they say, “This is not goodbye, this is see you soon.” Say, “Well actually, I’m not sure when I’ll see you.” Don’t let their earth settle, your dust sink.

Pack timeworn memories, hard-fought heartaches, and small kitchen appliances in a hurried haste. Close your eyes as you fold and wrap, see yourself far away. Then it’s as simple as a crammed trunk slammed closed, keys in the ignition, eyes in the rearview mirror, but for a moment.

A note: It enhances your eventual missing if you are particular about what you leave behind. Particularly, try (try) to leave good and decent contingencies. If what you are leaving is, in general, shabby and shoddy, a deep and dark and noxious body of missing will be harder to come by—impossible, maybe. You must leave life behind. And not just any life, yours—the one you built from tears and nightmares. So, in general, as a rule of thumb, you must leave important things. Below, for your edification, are examples of such things.

An other who cares for you despite the doom threatening to boil your insides; a companion who sees through your neurosis as manageable and sometimes even charming; a friend who lets you eat their cereal; a group of souls who vibrate with your own, gentle and warm and tumbling—like they were custom-designed to help dry out the delicate fibers of your being; a comfortable chair; trees, dark corners, and cracks that have taught you; somewhere to be; books left open and unfinished, their pages flapping in the wind and soon moist in morning dew.

The second thing to do, after you’ve left only your ghost, is to point your bones toward a place as cold as you. This is the key. When you settle in this place, this new place, you should aim for a dull, but constant feeling of unsettling. Don’t harbor feelings of fitting. After all, belonging interrupts longing. Instead, cross your arms. Surround yourself with people who do not understand you and—listen—make sure you do not give them a chance to. Sequester. And do not plant seeds. And do not break ground—anywhere. Look in the mirror and yearn for what you were, before.

Begin adding all the things that were better, before. Scour your mind to remember the exact happenings in the very instant of your leaving. There was a flicker of something. Your days there came back to you in a series of unordered flashes. You felt different, suddenly, and thought maybe (maybe), but you looked down—your foot was on the gas. Knead that instant like dough. Consider pages left. Don’t just read the lines of that weathered paperback, feel it in your hands, notice how the ink blurs and evaporates right before the climax.

Fill in blanks.

Soon, if you’ve done it right, you’ll begin to notice the missing like a headache behind your eyes. Then, it aggravates into a subtle ache in your mind space. Before you know, it starts to quake. You’re rocked from somewhere off the spectrum everyday when you wake, and again at night. There is pain. It’s especially throbbing when a sliver of sunshine reaches across a precise strip of sidewalk in a certain way. In that small strip of shine, you’ll feel the vast pang of joy that can’t be shared, not because you can’t find the words, because there’s no one there.

You chose.

A third thing to do is to remind yourself of what is true: you are not permitted to miss that place you (you) left. You treated it as a marked gravel road to get somewhere else. You ignored the smoke-signal dust stirring up behind you. Despair. At this point, you’ll begin driving through a long, dark tunnel. There is an end, you suspect, but no light to guide you.

You’ll know you’ve done it—the missing—in a thorough sort of way when your tunnel becomes deeper, wider, black. Black. It turns into a well, wide enough that if you stand at the center with outstretched arms, you feel nothing but empty air. A damp breeze moves through the space between your fingers. It reminds you. All that, beyond your grasp.

*

In October of 1987, Jessica McClure Morales, then eighteen months old, fell into abandoned water well just outside the fence in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas. She was trapped deep down under the well’s shaft—and the whole country watched, held, prayed. Two-and-a-half days later, she was rescued, dirty and damaged and crying and okay. Now, she says, she doesn’t remember any of it happening.

Thick, dark bangs cover the scars on her forehead. Long dresses cover the ones on her thighs. I haven’t found anything to cover mine.

Emily Pifer is a candidate in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Wyoming. She comes from the hills and hollows of Appalachia, but spent much of her childhood in suburban Ohio. Emily studied journalism and creative writing at Ohio University before moving to New York City, where she worked at Esquire and Women’s Health. She’s currently working on a collection of essays that explore cultures, conditions, and definitions of self. Email: piferemily[at]gmail.com