Writing and Crit., Paris 2023

I have been going through feedback from years prior, it comes with the changing of the years, or the manifestations boards we pry from the backrooms of pinterest. Anyway, I stumbled upon an email from a previous professor on a final I wrote almost three years ago — a favourite of mine simply because I didn’t need to crawl into the recess of my brain for an argument. I could simply hold a conversation. The question went as such:

Write a dialogue between two characters chosen from different texts studied this term. How might the characters advise the other? Be inventive, but make sure the characters are addressing a theme common to both text.

Muddled in the haze of summer, I recieved an email from her a few weeks after landing in London. She wrote:

“I also wanted to shout out your diualogue: it’s moving, its funny, and you skillfully weave in the themes of both works without ever losing the rhythm of an actual conversation”

Here is my brazen attempt to publish this work once more…

[Setting: Both women have just entered the room at their therapist office. Medea’s appointment is to discuss the mistreatment of prescription pills prescribed from her bipolar disorder. Nyasha is undergoing treatment for anorexia. Both women take a seat on the opposing couch, (more pillows than actual couch). They happen to clash appointment times as Medea was running late due to fussy children and Nyasha appearing early from an overwhelming episode the night prior. This is their first and only meeting.]

Medea: I have a lint roller in my bag.

Nyasha [looks up] : Excuse me?

Medea: Your shirt is covered in lint. I can see it from here. Do you need the roller, yes or no?

Nyasha [unwillingly putting her hand out for the roller] : (muttering) Thanks.
[Both gaze around in the silence, elduing any type of eye contact. The The minute hand on the clock has passed two black bold lines and a recpetionist at has yet to call either of their names. Nyasha refrains from chucking the lint roller back at Medea, opting to roll it upon the carpet flooring to the older women across the room.]

Medea: What’s your name?

Nyasha: Nyasha. Do you want my social security next?

Medea: I could give you mine if that would appease you. [The clock must continue to tick]. What do they have you in for?

Nyasha: [Her gaze caught the brief display of Medea’s phone case littered in a grotesque animation of cats playing sports.] My diagnosable hatred for cats, its chronic, I’m afraid. [She offers up a cough as her eyes begin to close]

Medea: [Awfuly she wants to laugh, but resorts to this bigger person act and purposefully sets her phone on her legs with the case visible. She smiles at Nyasha’s eye roll] You on any prescription pills? Stay away from the Atavan alright, makes you question to much about life, about the woes of being a women, if you can even form a thought, that is.

[Nyasha exudes disinterest but is throughly entertained by the lack of etiqutte this woman seems to hold]: I was thinking more on the route of opioids, but I’ll get back to you on my successes. [Deciding to reach out in the conversation, Nyasha begins the questions] Do you have a tampon? Or even a pad? I don’t trust the ones in the bathroom, they are too colorful to open.

[Medea rummages through her bag forgetting her period stoped two years prior. She shakes her head slighlty, a hand still in the pocket of her purse, grasping onto the white lid of a pill bottle. Nyasha sighs once again as she begins to lean over. The lights were distracting and she could feel her heart beat smoothered as she laid on her side.].

Medea: Is your mother around?

Nyasha: Nope. [She pops her mouth at the end of the word] She has decided that she must tend to dinner, and breakfast, and lunch. Oh, don’t forget appeasing any man she encounters, or horrifyingly lowering herself down to knees for forgiveness, or maybe from muscle fatigue, because I refuse to believe there is a sort of pleasure she recieves as her skin becomes bruised. I find her submission tactics revolting. (Arms leave the space by her head to slowly rise in the air) I mean what is the point of submitting to a man who can’t even operate a laundry machine, or fails to understand the soap container in the dishwasher, and worst of all not knowing where his folded pants are in the morning. I get embarrassed simply seeing her subdued. Between you and me, I question if I am a woman sometimes because of this. Because of her.

Medea: [At the last sentence she frowns. Quite frankly, she doesn’t know the best way to approach this situation – her mother succumbed to cancer two years ago, a brother dead from a drug overdose, and a father still trying to climb that ladder of fame. That is to say, she didn’t think about herself that much, as a person capable of revulsion or identity. So, she was left to questions.] Does her submission scare you or anger you?

Nyasha: It mostly embarrasses me. I mean, she gave birth to three children who are able to breath and run around fast enough to eventually scrap their knees or hand their ridiculous pictures our parents will eventually hang on the fridge with the very damn hands that she grew! Does she not understand that we all suffer from the patriarchy already, from the day she gave me my name with the wierd little lifting syllable at the end, it would erase me. That sixteen years down the line, I would be percieved less than because they saw my tits? Jesus. (Nyasha doesn’t realize she is whispering now, not until Medea finds enough surface to talk) Sometimes, I want to cradle her against my chest and whisper, ‘why must we punish ourselves too’? I mean, she has to listen to submit, why can she not acknowledge the bruises on her knees in the process?

[Medea looks past Nyasha’s head, a brief tilt to acknowledge the youngers gaze that has not left in the five minutes]

Medea: I suppose that is how she is to fight. If we are being honest here, I have sacrificed my hands and my clothes and that ridiculous amount of time one losses sitting in the car park waiting for their child, just to save a bit of my energy. Maybe, I am wrong in sacrificing moments of my identity. It was painful, it always is. Not like childbirth, this pain is not a by-product but it is internal enough to envoke endurance in some and submission in others. (A long pause is held for the passing sirens) Either way, the embarrasment does not leave you. You will see it resemble your skin in the shower, or the way your hands grip a steering wheel, or more predictably when you are in the same room with your father.

[Nyasha tilts her head down, seeimgly focused on the broken hem in her shirt, resisting the urge to keep pulling] How do you take control? [Medea’s confusion is clear] I mean, how do you, I don’t know… become you again? I know there is the embarrassment, but there has to be a way to work around this, I mean, (Nyasha exasperation is evident) we have the pain, the dread we carry in our purses and the bedroom, but, come on, there has to be a way I can become a different person who doesn’t need to come to an office like this, weekly?

Medea: You know, I used to try these therapy sessions because I thought I would be easier to love if I didn’t have any pain, but as my lovely therapist informed me, I would be rid of my memories. I don’t think we as humans are pure enough to not know the fear and forgetfullness, or the subsequent regret. Truthfully, between you and me, I think the whole idea of becoming pure is a man’s doing, where we need to constantly be changing to fit some holy or divine ideal. Hell, they were the ones who created religion just to know what it felt like to be a God. So, if you want to hold your mom close, in that wierd hug that you mentioned earlier, then maybe you should both be happy you are a little messed up. Fuck that pure shit and trust me on this sweetheart, the moment you feel the lick of freedom upon your skin you will be so happy to have never prayed to a man to get there.

[Nyasha watches as Medea leans backward, a subtle wink thrown her way as the older women comes to a stop; Nyasha can’t simmer in the self-assurance just yet] Have you ever thrown up before? [Medea nodes slightly] You know that anxiety you get right before you are about to bend over and you have to accept that this uncomfortable act you is natural, so you must continue to breath even through the panic? How do you kill the part of yourself that loves it? That instead of fear they sometimes feel relief?

Medea: [She pauses for a moment, enough to make Nyasha back off once more, arms gripping one another to turn the knuckles white.]

Nyasha: Never mind, forget I said anything.

Medea: It is okay to want control in your life Nyasha so long as you know what it is you must control. Now I am not going to go on that bullshit tangent where I claim to be wise because I am going through menopause, or whatever they say, but I don’t think it is necessarily a situation where ‘if you know, you know’. As we are being honest here, I didn’t know I was being abused until seven years into my marriage, carrying a child on my hip and a dead phone in my hand. It was only until a late friend of mine called me up to discuss her weekend that I burst out into tears looking at frozen pizza’s at my grocery store, wondering what the hell happened. I mean, I used to do ballet, and rather than my pelvic floor crumbling each time I need a wee, I only had to deal with the blood that barely came out of those damn shoes. [There is a long pause as Medea catches her breath, seemingly relieved to tell someone this part of her] I am jealous of you. You have thought about killing the control, I have only force-fed it. Maybe that is what having kids does to you — you want to assume that death is to far away, light years away in fact, but they encounter it everyday. So, my motherly advice to you is to feel that “relief” more than you want to get rid of it. Either way, one is bound to work for you anyway, eh?

Nyasha: [A timer goes off on her phone, a daily reminder to take her birth control. Medea looks wistful and courageous and in pain. They both want to laugh at this ridculous situation]

Medea: You know, when I was younger I dreamed of being that relief for people. That little saviour that would sit on their shoulder, without actually having to save then, but instead I would just listen. It was a small act, but I was a dreamer so it was became extradionary to me. But, Nyasha I think you wear that dream beautifully.

[Nyasha opens her mouth once more, wanting to know what to do next, but Medea has just been called by their therapist and so she lost focus on the woman once in front of her. She places the packet of pills back into her pocket, not caring to adjust the fallen sleeve on her shoulder or follow the ticking of the clock behind her. Rather, she wonders what she is going to have for dinner tonight.]