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Inspiration: A relationship—everything but the drill.
I’d originally planned on writing a nightmarish short story, but it turned out better as a poem. It also became a way for me to explore grief and the loss of a loved one while attempting to deliver a more surreal and cinematic reading experience overall.
The idea for this story began in my final week at the Clarion Writers Workshop. I wanted to write a haunted house horror story using stripped language, but unsurprisingly, it became strange and detailed and maximalist. It’s the perfect piece to summarize my time at Clarion, as it was collectively inspired by all the great stories I read over the summer of 2023.
As someone who has had many family members lose their memory to disease, I wanted to write a poem where there isn’t exactly hope, but at least autonomy in memory loss—that instead of walking down a dimming path where you eventually lose your way home, it could be more like an act of burning your own memories to light the way to a different future.
Some days I felt close to that line where awareness ends. Beyond that border I would become someone else’s memory. I knew eventually even that erratic existence would fade. I knew you went through this, and I wondered what you saw and what you felt, lying there with your eyes closed.
This piece was one of my Clarion West Workshop stories, for one of the days we issued a challenge in the group to write something erotic for a particular week (shout out to Samit for being amazing during “Chaos week”) and this was the result of it.
Early Wednesday morning, after a long weekend devoted to the search for her, twelve-year-old Amelia is spotted wandering home on the main highway out of town. She has at that point been missing since the previous Friday.
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