A Memoir by Elizabeth Rose

My brain is like the egg they used to show on VHS in elementary school. Shell cracked against cast iron. The yolk splaying in the pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” the man says. It sizzles. This is supposed to be a bad thing, we can tell. From the tone of his voice. No room for doubt. 

I am sitting across from an officer who is speaking to me about important paperwork. He makes copies. I smile. He seems nice, and I want him to like me, to not realize I am fried egg in my mind. Not because of drugs. I am, unfortunately, definitely not high. Just exhausted and lost, a little confused about the finality of the decisions I’ve made. Is it too late to take them back? Is it too late for the plane to turn around, cross the ocean again? My brain is yellow, a single cell rolling around a rough pan while the whites start to burn and stick to the edges. Two days on planes and sleep not since Tuesday last that I can remember. There are much harder ways to do this, much more dangerous and courageous that require more faith and resilience but the truth is when tired I am terribly weak. I am soft insides of egg, my outside one collision from cracking. Life is pan, hot, scalding, unbuttered. I cook quickly. Beg to be scrambled or flipped, to reallocate the heat somehow.

I am going to see my boyfriend soon. I don’t tell the officer that because he is more likely to like me if I seem single-ish. I feel single-ish. Fried-egg brain doesn’t remember how my partner hugs me. It has been a very long time of time zones making our todays and tomorrows different. Will we kiss when we see each other again? I wince. Are we worse than strangers?

I think I miss him? What I really miss is what this officer is doing for me: being nice to me, helping me, not making me do something alone while my brain sizzles on the life-pan. Imagining me as someone I am not. Someone full of potential and enthusiasm. I was when I made the decision. But the me here, confused and tired, in desperate need of a change of clothes, she is signing paperwork agreeing to miss the birth of her niece, to miss PopPop, who said he’ll miss me, and I could tell he meant it, from the tone of his voice, his speckled hand on my wrist when we last spoke. This woman agrees to watch friendships unspool like snagged sweaters, crop tops by Christmas. She agrees to be out of sight and off their minds. She has emptied her bank account and left her lease and abandoned her job and shed most belongings and none of that matters except that there is no turning around now, is there? And forward is terrifying. Forward is crack-me-open. Forward, unknown, but please be better than his America, forward is what I just signed up for, under the influence of something more potent than jet lag or drugs. 

Intuition, the little nagging voice deep in my belly, whispering up the pipes into my throat until I speak it myself. It would be worse if I stayed, it says. It would be a bad thing, I can tell. From the tone in my voice. 

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Elizabeth Rose (she/her) is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her academic work has been published by Duke University, Georgetown University, and The Herald-Sun. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story competition while serving as a Lannan Fellow for creative writing at Georgetown. Her creative nonfiction appears in In Short. Find her on Instagram: @elizabethrosewrites.