I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.

1. The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

2. We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR

3. Mere Belief

Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words

In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS

4. Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words

Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW

5. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

We swing between the poles of persistence and transience, and we all suffer from what one scientist refers to as a “proneness of memory to error.” As soon as a memory is activated, it is suddenly fragile again, subject to interference. It must be reconsolidated every time. With each pass, tiny deformations appear. You can’t tell what has changed, because each time you recall a memory it feels correct.

This writer’s self can’t stop telling stories, but I may never write memoir again. At least, I won’t make the same promise. I can’t. This doesn’t feel like a loss or a change in the script; I am working on a book about the past right now. But the interrogation has changed. Lived life is past and present and future all receding at once. What we long to hold on to, we lose; what we remember is often what we would just as soon forget; the future is always bearing down, an endless distraction. I know myself as a glitter of synaptic activation, a flimsy thing easily swept aside. A ceaselessly increasing sum materializing out of nothingness, each integer instantly flung behind me. I am persistent. I am transient. Memory is not a fixed object, and neither am I.

 Twelve US presidents — Washington, Jefferson and Clinton among them — lost fathers early in life. From the start of the 19th century to the outbreak of the second world war, 67 per cent of British prime ministers lost a father before their 16th birthday. “That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class,” writes Gladwell.

Perhaps these public figures, behind whatever resilience was forged in their early misfortune, wrestled with the same paradox. Bereaved children carry with them a mark of exception. But to live in the shadow of a lost parent is to also live with a pervasive feeling of absence and abandonment. In the decades after my father died, I often sensed a thin line between purpose and futility. It would never be possible to emulate the taintless ghost I held in my mind, and so the line between self-belief and self-loathing often felt thinner still.

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.

The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.

The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”

UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.

But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.

I hope the healing is coming, too.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Maddy Frank | Longreads | June 27, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,981 words)

The caves of Missouri are bleeding. I had forgotten that—the way the rocks under the earth constantly drip, the water coming from places I cannot see. There is no singular source. It filters through the limestone like blood through lungs. 

I write it down in my notes app so I remember: the caves of Missouri are bleeding. I don’t usually like metaphors like that. They feel scientifically false, a romanticization of something that is already astounding and beautiful enough without poetry. But I can’t help it. I feel inside. 

I am inside—inside Meramec Caverns—a privately owned system of caves in the backwoods of Stanton, Missouri. It toes the line between natural wonder and tourist trap: At 400 million years old, this place has earned its awe, but there is also an extensive gift shop selling artificially dyed stones and nameplate necklaces. Lester Dill bought the cave in 1933 to turn it into a “show cave,” a place for tours and spectacles and entertainment. His picture is up on the Meramec Caverns website—he stands in a leopard print jacket, pointing up to something out of frame, smiling wide at the camera. A quintessentially American opportunist, he reportedly invented an early version of the bumper sticker to promote the caves, and this land has been in his descendants’ possession ever since.

Missouri, specifically the Ozark region spanning the southern half of the state, is prime real estate for caves. That’s why Missouri is called “The Cave State.” It has what is known as karst topography—soluble limestone and dolomite landscapes riddled with caverns and sinkholes. Swiss cheese, right under our feet. Acidic water moves through the ground, slowly dissolving the rocks, a process called dissolution. There was something, and then, unbearably slowly, there is nothing. A cave is an absence.  

There are only three of us on today’s tour of Meramec Caverns. That leads me to believe the extensive advertising isn’t working, bumper stickers or otherwise. I drove past dozens of billboards during my hour-long drive down Route 44 from St. Louis. Some of the billboards, posted between anti-abortion and adult video store signs, just read, Cave. Others say, Cave Ice Cream and Cave 60˚ All Year. One reads, Meramec Caverns Salutes Veterans. as if these rocks are a human entity. My favorite asserts, Kids Love It. At 26 years old, I am the youngest person in this hole in the ground by a few decades, though I don’t have much competition. The middle-aged couple from Oklahoma on the tour with me are the only non-employees I’ve seen since I arrived at the almost empty parking lot.   

Our guide is a man in his late seventies named Arthur. He’s dressed in a state park ranger sort of uniform. His hair is mostly gone, the perfect set-up for a joke: “Be careful, if the water from the cave drips on your head, it’ll burn your hair off.” He points to his own scalp. There’s even a fresh wound on his forehead, still red and the length of a thumb. The woman next to me looks concerned. He clarifies, “I’m just joking. It’s a very weak acid. It’s like, you guessed it, carbonated soda.” Despite telling us he’s from California, he talks in a thick Missouri accent, all the words running together uninhibited by consonants. 

I can’t hear him very well over the sound of the running water anyway. I’m relying on my own observations to take notes: cave pearls and yellow icicles and smells like ROCK. If I don’t write this stuff down, I don’t know how long it will last in my brain. I have a terrible memory. I have lost large swathes of time—family vacations and childhood birthdays, months in high school and college when my mental health was especially bad, classes I took and presents I received. Even the recent past eludes me. I can remember crying last week, for example, but not what the crying was about. I can remember around a memory, but rarely the memory itself. Nothing is medically wrong with me, at least not as far as I can tell. It has always been this way. My brain is constantly leaking acidic water, and these facts are just being dissolved away, leaving a karst life behind. It doesn’t matter if the thing was traumatic or not. It is simply gone. So, I’m trying to take note of everything.

Everything is wet. The limestone looks rounded and glossy. The rock formations are drips and dollops, pillars of melted cream-colored candle wax and inorganic limbs. We weave and duck between these rooms of calcium carbonate and even with the path, I am aware of how one could get lost in here. Arthur keeps turning out the lights behind us so we exist only in the current space. It makes it hard to have any situational awareness. I can’t figure out which point of darkness we walked out of or which one we’re walking into next. He shines the flashlight on the floor where he wants us to go and the three of us follow it like moths.

Part of my disorientation is due to lack of information. I tried to research Meramec Caverns before I came here today, but because this place has been privately owned for so long, the largest source on these caverns is the cave’s own website. Buried among pages about panning for fake gold and purchasing tour tickets is a simplistic history page, nary a citation in sight. Fifty percent of the timeline is dedicated to Lester Dill’s feats of promotion.

Meramec Caverns seems to be operating almost entirely on lore. There’s science too, but they sell this experience through tales. The infamous outlaw Jesse James is plastered all over this place—his name, his likeness—but there is little evidence to confirm that he ever used this cave as a hideout like they claim. They call it a local legend, but it feels more like a rumor, a guess, a padding of the timeline. 

There wasn’t much left behind here by Jesse James or the people who came before him, though it’s said that the Osage people did sometimes use these caverns, and others like it, for protection during bad weather. That name, “Osage,” is French, an example of the way certain stories in America are purposefully forgotten and rewritten. The Osage call themselves 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 (Ni-U-Ko¢n-Ska, “Children of the Middle Waters”). Frenchman Philippe François Renault is credited with the discovery of Meramec Caverns in 1720, but the Osage natives are the ones who showed it to him. From Osage stories, Renault thought there might be gold in the cave, but instead he found saltpeter (potassium nitrate), a valuable oxidizing agent used in gunpowder. Over 300 years later, in 2021, the Osage Nation sought to purchase a different Missouri cavern, Picture Cave, but it was sold to the highest private bidder. That $2 million transaction took place despite the cave being a sacred indigenous site, one covered in prehistoric glyphs. We don’t just want to hear stories, we want to own them, profit from them, even if they’re not ours to begin with. Lester Dill was one of many. 

Meramec Caverns contains no such drawings, though there is an unsettling statue of Jesse James and his brother crouching over their loot in one of the limestone rooms. They look surprised to see us. Jesse has his hand on his gun.

Someone once told me that geology is like storytelling: piecing together rocks of eras past to create a narrative, the earth’s narrative, our narrative. But that makes the missing facts, the missing chapters, even more noticeable. Geologists call these missing bits of time “unconformities”—layers of rock from vastly different time periods butting up against each other, the years connecting the two completely gone. In parts of the Great Unconformity (which is clearly visible in the Grand Canyon), for example, there are over a billion years missing. We don’t know where they went, at least not for sure.  Our best guess is a large-scale deglaciation event. Receding ice, miles thick, can eat just about everything, it seems. Water has a knack for stealing time. The dissolution that created these caves is evidence of that. 

My undergraduate degree is in geology. As time goes on, and as I’ve completed my master’s in creative writing, this science degree has become less an aspect of myself and more of a fun fact. It’s a way to say, hey, I wasn’t always a struggling creative. But I can no longer remember how to read a phase diagram, nor can I recall the optical properties of different minerals, and this hurts me. The me who knew those things seems like a different person. I can’t even place the absence of my geology knowledge in my brain. Most of the time, it’s like it was never there. 

The things I do remember feel random. I remember that Herkimer diamonds are double terminated quartz (that means pointy at both ends). I remember that a species of eurypterid are the state fossil of New York. I remember that the mineral kyanite glows rainbow under cross-polarized light. I’m not sure what to do with this information besides hold it, wedge it between the two hemispheres of my brain in hopes it won’t slip out. It’s not useful to me anymore, maybe, but it must’ve been useful to me once. I am worried about losing these facts because I’m worried about losing the person I was when I needed them. She was smart. She knew how to read a rock’s deformational history. 

I can’t even read my own. 

Forgetting is a part of living. This issue of mine is more of an inconvenience and less of a cause for alarm. But an inconvenience it is, and I worry about the future, when my mom is gone, maybe my dad too, and there’s no one to fill in the blanks for me, no more geologists trying to complete the story. I won’t remember how many times I went to summer camp or when I started horseback riding or how to catch fireflies in mason jars in the hot Alabama evenings.  

As we walk down a narrow hallway, Arthur talks about the formation of stalagmites and stalactites. The water seeps through the limestone, and over thousands of years, millions of years, the calcium carbonate precipitates out, forming the rocks—stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor. That’s another fact I’ve always remembered. They reach toward each other like The Creation of Adam until they create a column. The rock is dissolved away and then spat back out. It’s the same composition, but it doesn’t fill up the space like before. It’s a retelling of an old story, a dissolution of the original. 

Meramec Caverns is filled with little spotlights. They point at everything in all directions, and yet this place still feels dark. Every time I think my eyes have reached the back of the cave, they fall on a hold of pitch black, and I know there must be something else back there, more rooms and stories and geological hideouts, but I can’t seem to picture the ambiguous darkness. It’s a cave, but I can’t conjure up an image, despite having multiple references for what it might look like. There are too many unknown factors.

I’ve toured caves two other times in my life: once on a field trip to Howe Caverns in New York in college, and once when I was young, on a family excursion to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. On the way to Meramec this morning, I called my mom and asked about the latter. I told her I couldn’t picture much from the trip except for the gift shop. My mom said I was 8 years old. She said I was slightly timid, and then she said, “My recollection is that you found it fascinating…but there is something scary about going below the Earth.” Yes, I can still conjure up the feeling of descending the metal stairs into Mammoth, watching my feet the whole way down so I don’t slip. I know I was a careful child because I am a careful adult. Even now, I’m ducking when Arthur tells me to duck, holding the railings and staying away from the edges, watching my feet so I don’t slip into the depths. 

We enter a room called Mirror Lake. Arthur tells us this area is sometimes called the karaoke room. He launches into “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White to demonstrate the lovely acoustics and the notes bounce off the rock columns that stand in the middle of the lake. It sounds beautiful in a way that makes me wonder about his past. He hasn’t turned the lights all the way on yet, and there’s no way to tell how far back the sound is going. The pool of water just beyond the guardrail looks dark, impossibly deep. When he finally flips the main switch, the couple and I say, “Oh, wow” in unison. The water is, in fact, not deep at all. The stillness of the surface just reflects everything—images of the limestone columns are doubled—six feet of stone reflected in 18 inches of water. 

In a moment between looking up from the water to the stalactites, the lights go out and it’s as if the world has been deleted. There is no perception of any kind. There is only cave, only absence. It makes me want to hold my breath. My body tells me that even the air is gone. By the time we’ve all figured out what’s happening, the spotlights are shining again. “The power must’ve switched from the generator back to main,” Arthur says. That explains the noise I heard above ground. I had thought it was an excavator. There’s a terrible storm making its way across the entire region today. Arthur says the power has gone off a few times. Flooding prevents us from seeing the lower levels of the cave (we were refunded seven dollars of the tour price because of it). “I’m glad you got to experience absolute darkness,” he says. That’s the one part of a cave tour that I have always remembered. Absolute darkness is difficult to recreate in any other circumstance. 

I don’t like picturing the flooding down below—guardrails and stairs drowned in water. Maybe there’s still a spotlight on down there, but probably not. I bet it’s like the deep ocean, past the twilight zone, the kind of place humans aren’t meant to go.  

Despite this knowledge of danger, and my resistance to the image, I still want to see those places, look at what’s inside. Like cliff edges, I’m drawn there, as if whatever is visible beyond my current field of view will tell me something I need to know.  

Over the last 200 or 2,000 or 200 million years, large earthquakes have opened new drainage pathways in the rocks at Meramec Caverns, emptying the water and revealing new rooms and entrances. In some places, like “The Wine Room,” you can see a dark line on the wall of the cave, a mark of where the water level used to be. Arthur is telling us about a formation that looks like a three-headed camel, a six-foot-tall structure named “The Wine Table” composed of grape-shaped aragonite clusters, but I’m busy looking up at that line. I am underwater.

I am reminded of grounding, a technique in which a person walks barefoot on the Earth’s surface  to realign their natural energy. People claim it can help with all kinds of physical and mental ailments, but I don’t buy it. The Earth may have energy, but it uses that energy to destroy itself: tectonic plates slipping under and above one another, mountains breaking open, rocks dissolving and washing away. Even if that energy could be transferred, I’m not sure that I would want it. I am already missing enough of myself. The Earth creates too, of course, but it’s at the cost of itself. 

My missing bits, my faulty memory, have become a more noticeable problem in recent years because I’ve been writing more. Memoirists are supposed to remember the things that happen to them; that’s kind of the whole point. My mom often jokes that I write fiction, not nonfiction, because my reconstruction of events is so unrecognizable to her. I have always been an unreliable narrator of my own story. 

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around creative writing workshops: “present absence.” It refers to something that a reader can feel in an essay, but is not actually there—that is, written down. What is left is the shape of that thing. It might be the narrator’s motivations, or something more specific, like the narrator’s relationship with her family. The consensus is almost always that this present absence should not be absent. I received this comment several times in response to my vague references to my mental health and my sexuality and my thoughts on my older brother, among other things. I was told that all the substance was in the ether of my essays, floating around in the empty space between lines of dialogue and paragraph breaks. 

I worry sometimes that my brain only functions in this ether. I worry that I am mostly ether, in fact. That so much is missing that my only hope is to write it down and trust that the reader can fill in the unconformities for me. 

I’ve heard people describe limestone caves as “cathedrals” because the stalactites and stalagmites look like a massive organ or carved arches. I can almost picture the altar in Howe Caverns, an artificial glowing heart placed into the limestone floor. There’s something about caves that feel intimate to the point of being holy. Arthur points out a human-shaped stalagmite tucked away in a corner. “That’s the Virgin Mary,” he says. She’s lit up with a spotlight, turned away from us, head hanging low. Humans love to create meaning like that, place it somewhere quiet and damp and safe. We see the perfect version of us in a lump of stone. We trace our hands on cave walls. We want to remember what it felt like to be here. 

I try to take a picture of her, but my phone just captures the rock. That’s nice too; it’s the truth of the thing.

I’d like to think that the truth exists outside of our memories and narratives, beyond photographic evidence, as if it’s written into the fabric of the fourth dimension, but sometimes that’s hard to believe. Memory is inherently fallible and endlessly moldable. We influence the witnesses. We are the witnesses. It’s a messy and unfair system controlled by those in power, the ones who write the stories. Consequently, peoples and landscapes and histories are crossed out and rewritten and retold, separate from the truth, especially in the depths of America, even down here in the belly of Missouri. 

But sometimes the person writing is you, and the story is yours. 

So what do we lose when we lose our own memories? Do we lose the story? The real one? Am I no longer the person who measured glacial striations in a geology lab in northern New York because I can’t remember what it felt like to trace the grooves with my index finger? Those lost days must still influence us; the shape of them must be present. A cave is an absence, yes, but you can still occupy it, wander around, see where the stalactites and stalagmites are almost touching. What I’m trying to say is, I am still the person who went to camp in the Adirondack Mountains three summers in a row; it’s in what the water spat back out, my tendency for homesickness and my dislike of cold morning swims. I am, in part, my karst topography. 

I do not know what I will retain of this trip. It will still be with me tomorrow, I’m sure, but I cannot predict the days after that. I do not know where the water will seep. 

The tour ends with a light show, which is less of a show and more of a slide presentation, with stock photos of soldiers and happy couples walking on the beach and bald eagles projected on a curtain of limestone 70 feet high. The three of us sit in the first row of some metal bleachers. If nothing else, this place does feel like a theater. “God Bless America” plays in the background over surround sound speakers. When Mount Rushmore appears, the faces of those long dead men distorted from the uneven surface of the cave wall, it takes everything in my power not to laugh. I think I am supposed to be feeling patriotic, as if these rocks, which have existed here for millions of years, hold that history in their forms. It takes 100 years to precipitate one cubic inch of limestone. We are nothing but inches here.  

At the beginning of the tour, Arthur told us not to touch the rocks. “If it’s a rock, don’t touch it,” he said. “The oils from hands can be damaging.” I’m all for the preservation of natural landscapes, but what is the owner of Meramec Caverns doing if not leaving his mark? This place is not being refilled with precipitated limestone, but with polished, artificial narratives. Plastic stones.   

After the music fades, we are asked to clap for the people who have fought for our freedom, particularly the ones who lost their lives. There is no mention of the stories of Pre-Columbian Native Americans who used these caves as shelter, or the enslaved peoples who used it as a stop on the Underground Railroad. We don’t talk about how Philippe François Renault, the man falsely credited with the discovery of these caves, was also the man who first brought enslaved Africans to this part of the continent. This American story is full of holes. Our reluctant claps hit the contours of the cave and then disappear. 

We exit the caverns the same way we came in, though a large open space they call “The Ballroom.” Groups of people used to drive their cars in here for parties before they realized that the trapped fumes were dangerous. There’s a disco ball hanging from the bumpy dolomite ceiling. Arthur shines his flashlight on it and the light starts to bounce but with just the four of us standing here, it doesn’t feel much like a party. People gathered here because it stays a consistent 60 degrees, the perfect dancing temperature. I think the billboard should’ve specified that. 

I move at a glacial pace toward the exit. I like feeling blanketed by these rocks, removed from my own head, occupying some other gaps instead. I finally make it to the gift shop. I browse through the T-shirts and baseball hats. I stop at the nameplate necklaces and look for my own name etched in imitation gold. I can’t find it and I take that as a sign to leave.

Arthur holds the door for me as I walk back outside. It’s still pouring rain. The water is spilling over the gutterless roof. 

“I was hoping it would’ve stopped by now,” I say. I squint at the Meramec River raging in the background. I’m stalling. I don’t want to get wet. 

“Not until 2 p.m.,” he responds, filling in the unconformity for me. That’s still an hour and a half off. I can’t wait it out. The water will continue to fall. 

I thank him for the tour and make a run for it. By the time I reach my car, I’m soaked.

Maddy Frank is a memoir and science writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis’ MFA program. Her work has appeared in Brevity and Driftwood Press. 

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Peter Rubin

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Anne Lagamayo | Longreads | May 11, 2023 | 4,252 words (15 minutes)

Don’t drive when it snows.

Okay, that’s not realistic, so it’s really more like: Always check the weather before you go on a four-hour road trip in the dead of winter to see your friend Jen in Bend, Oregon, during the height of the pandemic.

But let’s rewind a bit, since there were other ways to die on this long journey to reach Jen. You first flew across the country from New York to Oregon. You could have died then, too, gambling with your life with that five-hour flight, breathing the same stuffy plane air as everyone else.

Remember when you were advised to stay at least six feet away from people, or else risk getting COVID? Then possibly dying? That four-hour car ride on the final leg of your trip, then, was both a foolish and fitting thing to do.

Because it’s on this drive from the coast of Oregon to Bend that your car slips on the snow and crashes into the highway barrier. You find out later — see, this is why you should always check the weather before you drive — that that day was the first heavy snowfall of the season, and you’re in one of many car accidents around town, just half an hour away from Jen and her husband, who put all their belongings in storage and decided to rent an Airbnb in town indefinitely. (People did that during the pandemic, in that uncertain time between the fear of succumbing to the disease and the boredom of staying at home.) 

You have photos of this carnage and general mayhem and, much later — after all this is more or less over — gleefully show them to people who ask, while watching kind of sadistically as they squirm and wince and gravely tell you they’re glad you’re alive.

Designate someone you trust as an emergency contact. 

Especially if your family is in the Philippines, a few thousand miles away. In this case, your emergency contact is your roommate Miya, who’s back in New York. You’ve never thought about how the police identify people in a car accident, especially if the victim is from out of town, and you’re impressed by the lengths everyone goes through just to call Jen, who’s the only person you know in Bend. 

Here’s how they identify you:

1. Your driver’s license shows that you live in New York City, which is all the way on the opposite side of the country. Other options? Your work ID, which you were luckily too lazy to stuff back into your backpack after it rolled out onto the floor of the car, shows that you work for an international news media company. 
2. They call the Hong Kong bureau of said company. By God, you have no idea why. Is it because you’re Asian?
3. The Hong Kong bureau connects them to HR, who connects them to your boss. Your boss finds your emergency contact. She calls Miya.
4. Miya calls your mom on Facebook. Your mom added her a few years ago, most likely to spy on your life.
5. Your mom, who never puts her phone on silent mode — which usually drives you insane — answers the call at 2 a.m. in Manila.
6. By late morning, your parents tearfully tell both your brothers that you’re in a coma after the accident and might die some thousand miles away from home.
7. Your brother searches for Jen on Facebook and calls her there. 
8. When Jen gets the call, she is a few miles away from you, on top of a black diamond ski slope. Before this, she was confused and a little anxious about why you hadn’t called to say you got into town when you were supposed to arrive last night. Her last message to you reads, ARE YOU ALIVE??? She and her husband talk about waiting a few hours before calling the police. Maybe her phone battery is just dead. Maybe she’s just conked out asleep and forgot to text. Bzzzt, wrong! The quickest way down the mountain, to reach the hospital, is to ski. I’d never seen her ski better, her husband observed.

Remember you’re 32 years old. 

It’s usually hard to forget how many years you’ve been in this world, but after you wake up in the hospital a good week after the accident, you turn to Jen and ask for confirmation. I’m 32, right? 

By this time, your doctor has told you about your traumatic brain injury. Just to be sure you get it, your nurses and all six of your speech, occupational, and physical therapists repeat that you have diffuse axonal injury, or your brain was jiggled so hard inside your head during the crash that a lot of  connecting nerve tissues were torn. You always get stuck on the medical term “jiggle.” 

Some symptoms include: completely forgetting how to upload a video on Instagram. You know how to record one — you’ve filmed yourself six different ways lying in your hospital bed, the TV on but muted in the background, colors reflecting on the planes of your face, while saying in a death-warmed-over voice, Hi everyone, I’m alive but I have a trau-ma-tic brain injury. 

You forget how long you shift from the camera to your photo library to — what’s the app that puts things up on the internet again? — but eventually your brain hurts from the effort (and judging from your energy level in those first few months, you can gamely say it was a solid five minutes), and you give up.

A nurse comes in and asks, Hon, are you okay? after seeing your dejected face, because you’re frustrated and annoyed that uploading a video on the internet is. So. Hard. 

Your parents fly in from Manila, and you remember seeing them walk into the room as you sit in your wheelchair and smile like they just stopped by for brunch. It’s impossible to faze you at this stage, maybe because you are in a state of shock, and, well, you’re a few marbles short of a full set.

Another early symptom: the inability to tell dreams from reality. You dream once that you’re horseback riding on the beach with one of the leggy real estate agents from Selling Sunset, and she invites you to her wedding. You blink, sure that just two minutes ago your horse was waiting for you to mount. You ask a nurse who walks into your room to take your blood pressure: Are we by the beach? No? You sure? Okay.

Listen to your speech therapist. Especially when she says things like: You’ll never go back to work again.

You highly doubt she sounds like a Disney villain — if Disney ever makes a movie about corporate America — but you’re living in your sort of beat-up head at the moment.  Since you told her you produce a science podcast for a living, she makes you read elementary school-level science articles out loud, which goes like this:

You: A normal resting heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute.

Your therapist: How many beats is a normal resting heart rate?

You: Um. 

Your therapist (kindly): That’s okay, read it out loud again.

You: A normal resting heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute.

Your therapist: Now cover that sentence with your hand. What is the normal resting heart rate?

Silence.

With a TBI, you have a hard time retaining facts. Your therapist asks: What is it that you do? You’re a journalist? You may not be able to go back to work again.

It’s possible that your speech therapist says this in a gentle way: There is a small chance, if you don’t fully recover, that you can’t perform the same way you did before. Memory is tricky. And you need that for your work, don’t you?

Maybe it’s like that after all. You’re not entirely sure — you can’t even remember what the normal resting heart rate is. But the takeaway is the same: You’ll never be able to work again. You’re doomed forever to live in your parents’ home, sucking their money and time like a parasite when they’re this close to retirement, all of you sitting in your wheelchairs together in front of the TV in the evenings. 

But it’s not about work at all. You’ve lost something vital. You’re changed forever. The world will never be the same to you again, and you will never be the same to the world. You remember a nurse coming into your room, sitting on your bed and saying, You know what, what even is normal? Who the hell determines what that means? You’re you, and you’re very lucky to be alive.

That day in the hospital is fuzzy. But it remains the only time you’ve wanted to kill yourself. Not actively. Maybe if you just expired like a package of forgotten salmon filets, and someone threw you in the trash. You imagine life seeping out of you, like helium escaping a balloon. The ending of life a non-event as the beginning was pain and drama and blood. 

But that’s the only time. 

Don’t listen to your speech therapist.

You’re deep into mental images of expired salmon when you call your friend Stephanie, a neurosurgeon, on the phone. 

Some TBI patients don’t have the capacity to map out the future or plan in advance, both of which require the part of your brain in charge of executive function. And that is precisely the part of your brain that’s MIA at the moment. In your speech therapy activities, you’re deciding which clothes go on a hanger and which ones you have to fold in the drawers. Future work prospects are part of a college-level course, and your brain is stuck repeating the second grade. Will you go back to the Philippines? Will you give up everything you’ve built in the U.S.? Will you stay home with your parents? These are questions you can’t think about at the moment. But you know enough to be mopey and think of expired salmon. 

Stephanie calls bullshit on speech therapists. They’re looking out for their bottom line. They’re overly cautious, so they will give you the worst-case scenario. They also don’t want to be sued, so their predictions are always conservative. But I’ve seen way worse in my line of work. And I’ve seen people recover. Just read a lot! Practice reading. Read everything. Do all the exercises your speech therapists tell you to do. Work hard. If you want to improve your memory, work on memory exercises. Your brain is always changing — it’ll adapt based on repetition. What you put in is what you get out. Okay? I gotta go. 

Always be exercising.

Your doctors tell you that you have your whole life to recover, but also that you have a window of just six months when your brain is most primed to relearn everything you’ve forgotten. So, no pressure. Your brain can’t regenerate the neurons it’s lost. Use ’em or lose ’em. You had no idea your brain operated like annual dental benefits. 

But the brain is always growing and changing and reorganizing neural pathways, so while you can’t ever get the neurons back, it can make new ones. As long as you keep doing something over and over, like practicing scales on the piano or reciting the multiplication table 10 times over until it becomes as easy as breathing, you too can eventually learn to retain facts and remember what the normal resting heart rate is.

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The six-month period after a TBI is when your brain is at a heightened state of healing, like Superman being blasted with solar power. You throw yourself into your therapy sessions, read all of the magazines in your Airbnb in Bend, borrow books at the local library, hit a 60-day streak in Duolingo, and download an app with different brain exercises to improve your memory, attention, and problem solving. Your speech therapist makes you read an article in The New Yorker while listening to music, to practice dividing your focus and attention between two different things. Your physical therapist helps prepare you for the streets of New York City by designing an obstacle course in the gym with chairs and yoga blocks scattered across the floor, meant to simulate rats on the sidewalk and tourists blocking the road while gawking at the Empire State Building.

Eventually, you make it to the graduate lesson of walking up stairs. Your occupational therapist role-plays how to make small talk with a hair stylist, because your brain isn’t quick enough to respond to normal conversation. (And then when she asks you why you have a walker, what do you say?) 

You once thought all these things were so easy — reading, walking, talking. (You’re a journalist, you talk for a living!) But it turns out that three decades of living is hard to condense into a few months, and you have to start somewhere. 

When it all gets to be too much, close your eyes, transport yourself away from whatever godforsaken place you’re in at the moment, and visualize the beach. Or someplace nice and similarly clichéd. 

Your speech therapist — you’re making it seem like your speech therapist has 10 different personalities but really, you’ve had five of them so for the sake of not introducing a new character every few sentences, you’re just going to call all of them “your speech therapist” in the form of a benevolent amalgamated clay monster — anyway, your speech therapist, whose iteration this time is a hokey, crystal ball-gazing, maple-granola-from-scratch-making hippie (you’re in the Pacific Northwest after all), tells you that your brain is powerful. If you tell it that you’re in a peaceful place, it will tell the rest of your body that you’re okay. Even if you’re really not. 

Your peaceful place is on the Oregon coast a week before the accident, before the drive to Bend. You were in Lincoln City, which was cold and rugged and devoid of people, with the predictability of the crashing waves. When you’re there it’s just you at the end of the world, and life — with all of its everyday concerns — fades away with the tide.

You think about this place a lot because you’re in pretty beat-up shape for a human being. Like, you’d avert your eyes and dole out platitudes if you see you in the hospital, while slowly backing away in search of the nearest fire exit. You’re not bleeding from any orifices, and you didn’t break any bones or tear skin, but you have a granny walker to help you get around because you’re a walking hazard to society and yourself. Your brain controls balance and coordination, and your TBI makes you teeter whenever you stand (you have a hospital bracelet that labels you a fall risk, and humiliatingly, nurses have to watch you shower and go to the bathroom). 

Your muscles are weak, and you have to relearn how to walk — your physical therapist (also an amalgamated clay monster because you have seven of them) has a metronome to remind you that this is when you put one foot out in front of the other, this is how fast you should be going. You live in New York City, you remind him, so this is the pace that grandmothers or tourists walk, and you’ve wanted to push both in front of oncoming traffic a few times.

Hopefully other New Yorkers will be understanding, he says cluelessly.

You also have really bad double vision. Your neuro-optometrist says, This will all go away in two months. Or you’ll be like this forever. Honestly either option is possible.

A nurse tells you to get an eyepatch to make it easier to focus on one image. On paper, this sounds insanely cool because you have visions of yourself as a badass war reporter like Marie Colvin or a drunk pirate like Jack Sparrow. But you also have glasses, so the nurse just tapes the right side of your frames with medical tape and you look so much like a bullied fifth grader that you feel the urge to stuff yourself in a locker.

You can’t cut your nails yourself because you might have survived a car accident only to succumb to death by accidental nail cutter stabbing, seeing two toenails and misjudging which is the real one, so you ask your mom to cut your nails for you like a sad little toddler. She does such a poor job because she’s afraid of hurting you (you want your nails very short — if you’re not this close to bleeding then why even bother).

Sure, it’s humiliating, infantilizing, and pretty bleak, but all that doesn’t matter right now — you’re on the Oregon coast at sunset, bundled up in a warm sweater as you huddle along a sand dune with a Thermos of coffee, the icy waves crashing in, then going back out to sea. 

It’s perfectly normal to see death everywhere, so no, you don’t need to get your eyes checked.

A few months after the accident, you and your parents fly to Ohio, where you can continue your therapy at your uncle’s place. The Airbnb in Bend was getting expensive, and you don’t really have the cash to live there indefinitely. You’ve been on countless plane rides before, but the one from Oregon to Ohio is unique in that it almost kills you. 

Okay, you’re being overdramatic. After the accident, you think there must have been a mistake when you survived, that you cheated death and sooner or later God or Allah or Buddha or the grim reaper would come waving a pink slip saying, Whoops, my bad, there was an error in accounting and we should’ve taken you ages ago!

Death is a hovering specter you can’t shake. It’s in the promise of ominous things, like your Airbnb’s too-quiet location, beside a hill with no street lamps, that feels like the perfect backdrop for a serial killer’s next crime. But also in seemingly harmless ones, like crossing the street or your dad hitting the car brakes too abruptly or banging your arm in the shower, which has become a deadly place to you ever since your occupational therapists warned you that your balance issues could make you slip and crack your head open like an egg. 

During the turbulent plane ride to Ohio, you’re sure that the plane will crash. You used to love turbulence like a weirdo, delighting in its stomach-churning ebbs and flows. Now every sudden jolt, every bump and violent shift is a sign that the plane is plunging into the water, and you’re sure that it’ll happen in the next moment. No, the next one. But it’s okay, it’s just the universe balancing its assets and liabilities.

You read later that this is all a normal PTSD response, your body still on guard and constantly bracing itself to protect you. Over time, you develop a zen attitude toward death, ready to look it right in the face the next time you see it out of the corner of your eye.

It’s a rule of life and storytelling that once you hit rock bottom, things can only go up, so be sure not to miss the signs.

The first sign that you’re getting better is when you finish Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Do you remember it? Not entirely. The novel took you two months to read, and the protagonist is a robot so it reads like a sixth grader wrote it, but goddammit it’s the first book you finish.

Your vision gets better. You’ve exercised your eyes for months, following the movements of a ball on a string like an eager cat. (This sounds simple, but try doing it when you see two balls on two strings.) 

In Ohio, you start to walk a little bit faster. Maybe not New York City fast yet, but you outpace a 10-year-old and take it as a victory. 

But the real sign that you’re getting better is when the small town in Ohio starts to suffocate you. You’ve always joked that you have agoraphobia — the fear of wide, open spaces — but really, whenever you find yourself in a suburb with houses that have washers and dryers or yards or acres and acres of corn fields or a gigantic Walmart, you start to feel a gnawing helplessness in your chest, like an alien is about to rip itself out of you. 

It’s the height of summer now, the point in the pandemic when there’s finally a vaccine, and most people decide to move on and restart their lives. You start picking fights with your parents, and you’re deliriously happy the first time you’re able to think on your feet to defend yourself and volley some arguments back. (For months, you only sat there dumbly, your brain not coherent enough to form a counterargument.) 

New York, they say, is not the best place for a brain-damaged person; you still walk with a cane, and your parents have all these paranoid fantasies that someone will push you in front of a subway train because you’re so slow. Maybe, a friend suggests, we can get you, like, a cane sword? 

But there are other things too. Things you never expected, good things, like the brunch scene in Columbus, Ohio, which you claim is much better than New York’s. (You have a brain injury, so a second opinion is required.) You celebrate Mother’s Day with your mom in person for the first time in nearly a decade, and when your dad turns 60 you throw him a small party. You hadn’t been home for any of your family’s birthday dinners in years. 

These are signs that you don’t want to miss. So you hold them close to you and feel hopeful you might be okay after all, hoarding them the way your mom hoards old makeup bottles and used shopping bags. I never know when I might need all of this, okay? 

You don’t actually get a free pass for almost dying, so don’t think that life gets easier from now on.

It kind of sucks because you think life is a meritocracy or something. Not that almost dying has actual merit — it’s the “almost” part that kind of makes you seem like a failure. You almost made it to Hollywood. You almost finished your novel. You almost died.

When you finally return to New York, the air is chilly again and the wind has a menacing bite. But you feel invincible. You were turned inside out and unplugged without being properly shut down, but you lived, and there is nothing in this city that can possibly do any worse to you, not even its giant rats or ridiculous apartment rentals. 

But less than a year of transitioning back to work after disability leave, you get laid off. You never fully recover from the nerve pain and your lower back is constantly aggravated. You’re always in pain. You can’t run, not even after a 7 train that’s about to leave the platform. Your right hand also never completely recovers, so your handwriting looks like a very gifted six-year-old’s at best. Your balance is forever shot, so after one glass of wine, it takes you 50 times the effort to walk straight. And even your hormonal acne has come back in full force, for fuck’s sake. Your dermatologist warned you to cut back on dairy and sugar, and honestly, why did you survive in the first place if not for chocolate and cheesecake, or even better, a chocolate cheesecake? 

You can’t believe you still have to deal with this shit. Haven’t you paid your debt to society 10 times over? Doesn’t the world owe you some peace, to live out the rest of your life with cute puppies that never grow up and only shit rainbows? You had been prepared for an ending and had so accepted death that life itself was the surprise. 

Your friends all get married in the same year — some have babies, some lose them, others buy a house. They get new hair, new jobs. And you? You move into your first solo apartment. You travel across Europe on your own, and then later go home to Asia and travel more with friends and family. Your physical therapist is both supportive and horrified at the mangling of your body with all that intense walking and, at one point, an eight-hour motorbike ride that causes you so much pain that you feel you may be back at the scene of the accident. But hey, you rode a motorbike across the Vietnamese countryside.

You are so incandescently happy to be alive one moment, and miserable and alone and aimless the next. You no longer coast along the outskirts of life but deep within it, plunged headfirst without a life jacket. To be completely honest, sometimes you miss being excused from the business of living. Other times, you can’t imagine life any other way.

You’re trying not to compare everything to the one year you were barely alive, but you suspect it’ll be a long time before that happens. Until then, you’re cutting your own nails. Keeping up your streak in Duolingo. And not driving in the snow.

Anne Lagamayo is a documentary and podcast producer by day. By night, she is something else entirely. You can find her work at annelagamayo.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

But in 2020, Choi received a phone call that challenged everything he remembered from that day. The girl, he learns, is alive. Or is she? As the truth unravels, Kim weaves a moving story of regret, the unreliability of memory, and the freedom from closure.

On a frigid day in December 2020, Huh and his team met with Choi at a chicken restaurant in Incheon, a port city west of Seoul. Over shots of soju, Choi began to tell them, at first a little cautiously, what he’d seen in Gwangju, eventually turning the topic to an incident that sounded familiar to Huh. “He told us that he’d saved a young girl and handed her off, but that she had probably been taken to a military camp and executed,” recalled Huh. “He had believed this version of events his entire life.”

An astronomer indicating different constellations with a laser pointer, explaining to a group of tourists and me that all those distant lights we see shining above our heads come from the past.

Depending how far away they are, we might be talking about billions of years. The glow from stars that may be dead or gone. Reports of their death have yet to reach us and what we see is the glimmer of a life possibly extinguished without our knowing it. Shafts of light freezing the past in our gaze, like family snapshots in a photograph album or the kaleidoscopic patterns of our own memory.

We exit the neurologist’s office and I look at my mother with new eyes. Now I know that she’s carrying the whole cosmos on her shoulders. I tell her what I saw on the doctor’s screen. I tell her how much her brain looks like the night sky. I tell her about the electrical patterns of her neurons, the glow of her memory, the constellation that lit up the moment she summoned it, the luminescent reflection of her own past. I ask which happy scene it was that I saw twinkling on the monitor in the doctor’s office and she smiles and says she was remembering the moment I was born.