Narrative Theory

“A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.”—aristotle

When did the hole in you begin?

Let’s say you were fourteen in the small silver room of your boyfriend’s car, accelerating towards the crest of the hill, his hand riding the hem of your skirt.

Or years earlier, when your mom went to the hospital for a week and you ate a brick of cheese and watched your dad stumble drunkenly between flower beds that refused to flower. Kristie’s voice filtered in through your Minnie Mouse fake-rotary phone, telling you her sister started cutting again. The two of you—black eyeliner and vodka Gatorade, panty drawers stocked with Plan B and satanic CDS.

Your boyfriend sucking on your teeth in the Trigo parking lot was bored of you. Even you were bored of you. Blistered with rain, his windshield turned the streetlights into spider eyes.

At seventeen you fled with a suitcase, thinking, thank you, Aristotle, this is the end of the hole. Now, here’s where

I tell you, fuck Aristotle. The town still slouches into winter every September, re-emerging the following June. Your memory freezes and thaws again and again. You return every year on a twelve-passenger plane that descends by spiralling around an onion-shaped lake, the woods an Emily Carr retrospective, a walloping green nausea.

Your ex says, see you next Christmas!, and you slam his passenger door, plopping snow from his wheel well. You blow smoke behind the North Star

Bar, while inside your dad retells the same three stories—your life less of the arc he expected, more like a cedar growing rings, circling and circling.