The anorexia memoirs have been out for a year and a half now–a year and a half of busy todays that have helped me forget the painful yesterdays. Most of the time, those two memoirs seem as if they’re still just thoughts in my head: unseen battle scars that any busy mother might carry.
But sometimes, something happens to remind me that the memoirs are out in the real world and that they have an existence of their own. I might glance at my bookshelf and spot this beautiful origami unicorn with his flowing mane and tail, sent to me as a present by a gifted and sensitive reader. Or Elena might send me some of the poetry readers have written for her, or tell me about an Elena Vanishing tattoo. A tattoo! Someone’s body is wearing my words! Strange and wonderful evidence that the memoirs have developed their own life independent of ours.
A couple of weeks ago, Elena called me. “You’re never going to believe this,” she said.
Elena had just received a private tweet from a reader. The reader asked if Elena had ever been in Clove House–the real name of Clove House. Elena wrote back that she couldn’t recommend a place of treatment. It’s the most common question she receives.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” the girl wrote back. “I’m at Clove House now, and yours is one of the ED books we’re allowed to read. I just read the part where you’re describing lying in a Foof and looking around the main room… and then I looked up and realized that I’m in that room right now!”
My brain has been trying to take this all in. I myself have been in that room, of course; it’s how I could describe the scene. But the scene hurt to write, so when I wrote about Elena’s first days at Clove House, I pressed that scene between the pages of a book so that I wouldn’t have to keep it in my mind anymore. I could forget all about it. That whole scene stayed folded up in the memoir, out of sight and out of mind. I could let myself move on.
But then, along comes another girl, new to Clove House, walking her own path of recovery. She’s living through that same experience Elena lived through of getting to know the place and its routines. She curls up in a Foof, opens up Elena Vanishing, and that scene of Elena reading poetry at Clove House springs out of the pages and comes to life… and overlays and overlaps the life that girl is living now. Only now, instead of reading a book of Rupert Brooke’s poetry, this girl is reading my words. She’s holding the very pages into which I pressed that scene. Elena Vanishing has come back full-circle into its own story, like cunning origami folding in upon itself, like mirrors reflecting mirrors, revealing themselves to each other and scattering their own brilliant rainbows of broken light.
Strange and wonderful. Wonderful and strange.
Text and photos copyright 2016 by Clare B. Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.