Ellen Birkett Morris, I'm Trying to Remember the Last Time | L*STS

 

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I'm Trying to Remember the Last Time

Ellen Birkett Morris

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I’m trying to remember the last time:

I was not in pain

It didn’t feel like the weather was trying to kill someone

I went out of the house without a mask in my pocket

Watching other people’s pain on television was considered weird/unusual  

The mention of family did not summon the grief over losing my parents 

I could eat an unwashed piece of fruit without a thought 

Sat in an independent movie theater full of people

Rolled down a hill without worrying what I would do to myself

The last time my friends were made up solely of people I had met face to face

I was friendly with my neighbors whose Back the Blue window sticker contrasted with my Black Lives Matter yard sign 

I cried over a school shooting or war or the daily assaults from an administration off the rails 

Looked my neighbor with the Trump sign in her yard in the eyes 

I believed American Democracy would survive 

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My list of last times was prompted by the convergence of several events over the last six year. My managing an autoimmune condition in the middle of a global pandemic, realizing the changes wrought by aging, reflecting on changes in society brought on by technology, corrupt, cultish politicians, climate change, and what looks like some kind of mass surrender of what I believed were the values that brought us together as a nation. There is a sort of numb realization that I am not who I used to be, and our society no longer functions as it once did. Writing it was less cathartic than it was like waking up to a nightmare. I am not without hope, but I think our first step toward repair and reconciliation begins with a close examination of how things have changed. 

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Beware the Tall Grass: A Novel, selected by Lan Samantha Chang for the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. She is also the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award, and of Abide, and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her short story collection, Love Thy Neighbor, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Antioch Review, and South Carolina Review, among other publications. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Elizabeth George Foundation.