EDGES
JAC JEMC
Saskia could remember a time when all she could feel was… herself.
Both ways she had of turning that phrase in her head were true: there was a time when she had felt sure of who she was, even if that self had been uncomplicated and untried. And it was also true that there was a time when she could remember registering what it felt like to be in her body, to experience only the sensations that her private nerves and hormones and brain synapses triggered.
None of this was the case any longer.
Saskia’s boundaries had been blurred. The change had crept in, impossible to pinpoint. It had started around the onset of puberty. Girls had begun to care less about the strange things that made them different and sought out ways they could identify themselves in one another: certain brands of clothing and hair styles and musical tastes and constantly evolving slang.
Saskia had watched, compelled by the way they all shifted at once, like those flocks of birds she saw wing through the sky, haphazard but united. There was always one bird who looked like it was failing to keep up. Saskia searched the internet high and low in the hopes of finding some proof that that odd bird was actually performing some incredibly helpful function for the flock, but either she didn’t have the right search terms or what she hoped was true was in fact not the case.
She wrote down these thoughts in her paper journal and then wrote, in lettering that took up three lines: I AM NOT THAT BIRD. She was so angry at the simplicity of the metaphor she’d drawn up. She knew she had better in her, but she also knew how boring it was to be fascinated by the way sweet girls turned into nasty versions of themselves seemingly overnight. She’d read about it so many times before it actually happened that there was nothing confusing about what she saw. It was just disgusting to her, the way their bodies had decided, all on their own, to transform.
Saskia was smart. She knew that even she was not exempt from these changes. Just because you knew they were happening didn’t mean the body didn’t have its way with you. She would google the lyrics she heard the girls singing in the locker room and listen to the songs and often she liked them, but she couldn’t tell if she would have liked them if she found them on her own, or if she liked them because now she “got” it—she understood the references the others were making, or because she had heard the songs sung in her classmates’ out-of-key belts enough times that any song would have that certain appeal that only familiarity could bring.
But here was the problem—not that she could no longer trace why it was she liked what she liked, or that it was a problem that she even thought about trying to trace it—no, the problem was that the way she blended with other people didn’t end there.
When someone in class was asked to read aloud and they mispronounced a word—something that seemed deceptively simple, like “compromise” as “promise” with a prefix or “indict” with a short “i” and a “k” sound before the “t”—and the class laughed at them, she felt the same burn light up in her stomach that she imagined the person reading also felt.
When she asked her mom about this, her mother had hugged her. “My empathetic girl. That happens to me, too. You understand what they’re going through and you identify with them and you imagine the same thing is happening to you. It’s a good thing. It will push you to treat others the same way you want them to treat you. I like to call it the old Golden Rule Syndrome.” Saskia had accepted this as good enough before retreating to her room.
She liked to question her parents and their answers and their motives, but she took her time. She knew if she resisted every answer they gave her she risked their not answering her at all, protecting themselves rather than taking her seriously. What her mom had said that afternoon seemed basically true. She wished extra kindness when she saw a lady passed out on the floor of the craft store bathroom, thin and dirty in a way that seemed to indicate life had not recently favored her. She felt that way when her grandmother got upset at the tablet they were trying to teach her to use and called it “dumb” rather than acknowledging that she was the one without the know-how to operate it properly. And when her little cousin had to accept that he wasn’t going to get the candy he asked for in the grocery store aisle.
But this was more purely physical.
Sometimes she worked with her biology partner and felt her groin grow hot, but she knew that it wasn’t about her feelings for him. It was about his feelings for someone else. She didn’t even know who. But she knew the feeling was his.
Or at recess, which she honestly resented that they were still forced to attend being that they were all nearly teenagers and had no desire to run around or play the simple physical games that had once occupied this time, she would stand in a circle with the handful of girls she felt closest to and talk, often about their crushes or sometimes about their families or sometimes about class projects or upcoming events they were looking forward to. She could feel the nerves bubbling up in her friend Bella, always so quiet in the group, but talkative once you cornered her one-on-one. Every time one person neared the end of their comment or if a topic was coming to a close, Saskia could feel Bella start to rumble inside. Say it, Saskia would will her, internally, but Bella always hung back. Saskia resolved to invite Bella to speak, but anytime she did, Bella looked at her, incredulous, and shook her head.
Or there was even a time when Saskia had been thinking about a boy in class, Ben, randomly before she left for school, wondering why he never looked at the weather in the morning when he was picking his clothes. He was overdressed on the hot days and underdressed on the cold days. It didn’t make sense. She had been deep in her wondering about why this was when she felt a sharp pain in the palm of her hand—she couldn’t tell if it was from heat or cold, but within a moment, the pain changed to an aching itch, but she looked at her hand and saw nothing. She’d complained about it to her parents, but they’d waved it off—they said they got phantom pains, too. Sometimes your body was just fixing itself on its own, without explaining why. If it stuck around of course they’d check it out, but in the meantime, they told her to try not to worry about it.
Ben arrived late to school, a bandage around his hand. He’d grabbed a cast iron skillet on the stove. The burn wasn’t that bad, but best to keep it wrapped and clean until the skin had had time to heal. Saskia felt the lingering tenderness of her own pale palm and made a note in her assignment planner.
In gym the next day, Saskia felt an imaginary dodgeball sting her shin just as it hit another girl. The spot suggested tenderness all afternoon.
Saskia saw a third grader fall from a tree after school and felt the wind knocked out of her own lungs—that crushing startle like she’d never breathe again.
Saskia arrived home every day exhausted. It felt like she was living several lives at once. It went on like this for months. Saskia stopped talking to people. Then, she stopped looking at people, kept her eyes down. She tried to stop thinking of people. The pain was too much.
But still: the sensation of a purplish ear. An ethereal sewage slugging through her gut. The quality of refrigeration behind her eyes, a chilly hindsight, a frosted rearview. A curtain grabbed and thrust back in her hand. Her eyelids like eggshells. A palm wiped down her shirt. A fever throwing itself through her body. Her tailbone crumpled. A paralyzed drag on her right side. Ejaculation. A lack of appalling evidence. Torn flesh. A body cheated of food. A belly swollen with a swallowed vacuum of air. Her heel lifted tight and unextendible. A blanket of snow. Liquid spilled down her back. Her jaw a hinged latch unoiled. A moldy taste. Urine peppery. Sacked oblique. Undulation of light. Flush of pain. The chew of salt on her skin. Squidding loss of control of her limbs. Wire and wilt through her left hand. A cut. A drowning. A dizzying. The etch of a tattoo needle, calligraphy on thin skin. A contact lens put in. Domed smell of bread and burn. Walking drunk, jelly driving her thoughts. Backhand. Sweat. Risk and hopscotch landings and a throaty bark. Flare and full-tongued and mumbling drool and a stretched and strained muscle and falling and the seam of an old cut healing. Float and fog. Blood nozzle. Flutter and sleep and catch and press and break. A shoulder forced past angularity. Burn and bend and weft and crack. The feeling of being opened.
Her family watched her limping around, shut down. She stopped saying what she was feeling. Her mother asked what was wrong, but Saskia knew they couldn’t understand.
And then, one day, it stopped. Saskia woke up and the feelings were gone. It was like she’d been suspended in the air, held in place by electrical currents, and now gravity applied to her again. She felt frayed. Everything was sore like the day after a hard workout, but the feelings were her own.
She went back out into the world. She went to class. Girls taught themselves synchronized choreography. They pinched the little pockets of fat under each other’s arms. They held hands when they walked into class and looked around to see who noticed. Boys crossed their legs self-consciously and idly flexed their muscles during boring lessons. Students ate their bananas in deliberate ways and learned to lick their lips slowly and trained their eyes to linger past the point of discomfort.
Saskia felt no signals from any of their bodies. In the place of her former self, even, she felt a lack. She didn’t trust herself, knowing the way her body could recontextualize without her permission.
Now, it was like Saskia floated through the world inside a transparent shell that—every once in a while—she bumped up against, both rarely enough and regularly enough that it felt like nothing at all: the way we stop thinking about the ground beneath our feet. The way fish don’t know water until they leave it and birds know the air is a thing they can ride. The way we must forget to survive.
Both ways she had of turning that phrase in her head were true: there was a time when she had felt sure of who she was, even if that self had been uncomplicated and untried. And it was also true that there was a time when she could remember registering what it felt like to be in her body, to experience only the sensations that her private nerves and hormones and brain synapses triggered.
None of this was the case any longer.
Saskia’s boundaries had been blurred. The change had crept in, impossible to pinpoint. It had started around the onset of puberty. Girls had begun to care less about the strange things that made them different and sought out ways they could identify themselves in one another: certain brands of clothing and hair styles and musical tastes and constantly evolving slang.
Saskia had watched, compelled by the way they all shifted at once, like those flocks of birds she saw wing through the sky, haphazard but united. There was always one bird who looked like it was failing to keep up. Saskia searched the internet high and low in the hopes of finding some proof that that odd bird was actually performing some incredibly helpful function for the flock, but either she didn’t have the right search terms or what she hoped was true was in fact not the case.
She wrote down these thoughts in her paper journal and then wrote, in lettering that took up three lines: I AM NOT THAT BIRD. She was so angry at the simplicity of the metaphor she’d drawn up. She knew she had better in her, but she also knew how boring it was to be fascinated by the way sweet girls turned into nasty versions of themselves seemingly overnight. She’d read about it so many times before it actually happened that there was nothing confusing about what she saw. It was just disgusting to her, the way their bodies had decided, all on their own, to transform.
Saskia was smart. She knew that even she was not exempt from these changes. Just because you knew they were happening didn’t mean the body didn’t have its way with you. She would google the lyrics she heard the girls singing in the locker room and listen to the songs and often she liked them, but she couldn’t tell if she would have liked them if she found them on her own, or if she liked them because now she “got” it—she understood the references the others were making, or because she had heard the songs sung in her classmates’ out-of-key belts enough times that any song would have that certain appeal that only familiarity could bring.
But here was the problem—not that she could no longer trace why it was she liked what she liked, or that it was a problem that she even thought about trying to trace it—no, the problem was that the way she blended with other people didn’t end there.
When someone in class was asked to read aloud and they mispronounced a word—something that seemed deceptively simple, like “compromise” as “promise” with a prefix or “indict” with a short “i” and a “k” sound before the “t”—and the class laughed at them, she felt the same burn light up in her stomach that she imagined the person reading also felt.
When she asked her mom about this, her mother had hugged her. “My empathetic girl. That happens to me, too. You understand what they’re going through and you identify with them and you imagine the same thing is happening to you. It’s a good thing. It will push you to treat others the same way you want them to treat you. I like to call it the old Golden Rule Syndrome.” Saskia had accepted this as good enough before retreating to her room.
She liked to question her parents and their answers and their motives, but she took her time. She knew if she resisted every answer they gave her she risked their not answering her at all, protecting themselves rather than taking her seriously. What her mom had said that afternoon seemed basically true. She wished extra kindness when she saw a lady passed out on the floor of the craft store bathroom, thin and dirty in a way that seemed to indicate life had not recently favored her. She felt that way when her grandmother got upset at the tablet they were trying to teach her to use and called it “dumb” rather than acknowledging that she was the one without the know-how to operate it properly. And when her little cousin had to accept that he wasn’t going to get the candy he asked for in the grocery store aisle.
But this was more purely physical.
Sometimes she worked with her biology partner and felt her groin grow hot, but she knew that it wasn’t about her feelings for him. It was about his feelings for someone else. She didn’t even know who. But she knew the feeling was his.
Or at recess, which she honestly resented that they were still forced to attend being that they were all nearly teenagers and had no desire to run around or play the simple physical games that had once occupied this time, she would stand in a circle with the handful of girls she felt closest to and talk, often about their crushes or sometimes about their families or sometimes about class projects or upcoming events they were looking forward to. She could feel the nerves bubbling up in her friend Bella, always so quiet in the group, but talkative once you cornered her one-on-one. Every time one person neared the end of their comment or if a topic was coming to a close, Saskia could feel Bella start to rumble inside. Say it, Saskia would will her, internally, but Bella always hung back. Saskia resolved to invite Bella to speak, but anytime she did, Bella looked at her, incredulous, and shook her head.
Or there was even a time when Saskia had been thinking about a boy in class, Ben, randomly before she left for school, wondering why he never looked at the weather in the morning when he was picking his clothes. He was overdressed on the hot days and underdressed on the cold days. It didn’t make sense. She had been deep in her wondering about why this was when she felt a sharp pain in the palm of her hand—she couldn’t tell if it was from heat or cold, but within a moment, the pain changed to an aching itch, but she looked at her hand and saw nothing. She’d complained about it to her parents, but they’d waved it off—they said they got phantom pains, too. Sometimes your body was just fixing itself on its own, without explaining why. If it stuck around of course they’d check it out, but in the meantime, they told her to try not to worry about it.
Ben arrived late to school, a bandage around his hand. He’d grabbed a cast iron skillet on the stove. The burn wasn’t that bad, but best to keep it wrapped and clean until the skin had had time to heal. Saskia felt the lingering tenderness of her own pale palm and made a note in her assignment planner.
In gym the next day, Saskia felt an imaginary dodgeball sting her shin just as it hit another girl. The spot suggested tenderness all afternoon.
Saskia saw a third grader fall from a tree after school and felt the wind knocked out of her own lungs—that crushing startle like she’d never breathe again.
Saskia arrived home every day exhausted. It felt like she was living several lives at once. It went on like this for months. Saskia stopped talking to people. Then, she stopped looking at people, kept her eyes down. She tried to stop thinking of people. The pain was too much.
But still: the sensation of a purplish ear. An ethereal sewage slugging through her gut. The quality of refrigeration behind her eyes, a chilly hindsight, a frosted rearview. A curtain grabbed and thrust back in her hand. Her eyelids like eggshells. A palm wiped down her shirt. A fever throwing itself through her body. Her tailbone crumpled. A paralyzed drag on her right side. Ejaculation. A lack of appalling evidence. Torn flesh. A body cheated of food. A belly swollen with a swallowed vacuum of air. Her heel lifted tight and unextendible. A blanket of snow. Liquid spilled down her back. Her jaw a hinged latch unoiled. A moldy taste. Urine peppery. Sacked oblique. Undulation of light. Flush of pain. The chew of salt on her skin. Squidding loss of control of her limbs. Wire and wilt through her left hand. A cut. A drowning. A dizzying. The etch of a tattoo needle, calligraphy on thin skin. A contact lens put in. Domed smell of bread and burn. Walking drunk, jelly driving her thoughts. Backhand. Sweat. Risk and hopscotch landings and a throaty bark. Flare and full-tongued and mumbling drool and a stretched and strained muscle and falling and the seam of an old cut healing. Float and fog. Blood nozzle. Flutter and sleep and catch and press and break. A shoulder forced past angularity. Burn and bend and weft and crack. The feeling of being opened.
Her family watched her limping around, shut down. She stopped saying what she was feeling. Her mother asked what was wrong, but Saskia knew they couldn’t understand.
And then, one day, it stopped. Saskia woke up and the feelings were gone. It was like she’d been suspended in the air, held in place by electrical currents, and now gravity applied to her again. She felt frayed. Everything was sore like the day after a hard workout, but the feelings were her own.
She went back out into the world. She went to class. Girls taught themselves synchronized choreography. They pinched the little pockets of fat under each other’s arms. They held hands when they walked into class and looked around to see who noticed. Boys crossed their legs self-consciously and idly flexed their muscles during boring lessons. Students ate their bananas in deliberate ways and learned to lick their lips slowly and trained their eyes to linger past the point of discomfort.
Saskia felt no signals from any of their bodies. In the place of her former self, even, she felt a lack. She didn’t trust herself, knowing the way her body could recontextualize without her permission.
Now, it was like Saskia floated through the world inside a transparent shell that—every once in a while—she bumped up against, both rarely enough and regularly enough that it felt like nothing at all: the way we stop thinking about the ground beneath our feet. The way fish don’t know water until they leave it and birds know the air is a thing they can ride. The way we must forget to survive.