No 1: ON HELL

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

I began my existence as a nameless burden, and these days I can feel myself reverting to that. I’m what a certain sort of person would call a Bastard–that same sort of person would also probably refer to me as a Jezebel now. Eighteen years ago, my mother, twelve years my father’s junior, had to tell her Catholic parents that she was pregnant with a married man’s child (he was technically separated, but still), and my father, being a Jewish stranger, had to work hard to earn their trust. When I was thirteen and looking to wound my mother, I asked her outright whether I was an accident. It was cruel of me to ask, since I already knew the answer.

I remember watching her struggle for a minute, feeling somehow vindicated. She looked so small and scared while she anxiously told me that I wasn’t quite an accident, that I would be qualified more as a surprise (and a good one at that). The guilt set in as she continued to speak, digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole. 

Despite her reassurances that I was wanted (needed, even), I struggled to scrub the image from my mind of my parents, scared: of my mother asking her girlfriends if she should get rid of it (because I was an it, at one point in time); of my father unable to concentrate at work, thinking about the thing (I was also a monstrous thing, at this point) growing inside of my mother. 

I feel that way now, evil and stupid, looking earnestly into A’s red-rimmed eyes. He’s resting a large hand on my knee, telling me in his shaky voice, so painfully sincere, that it’s not me, it’s him. That he loves me so much it’s turned into codependence. He doesn’t want to hurt me, he stresses, he just can’t handle a relationship right now, and he especially can’t handle shouldering someone else’s emotional baggage in addition to his own. 

I’m baggage, I think, walking home in the snow, snot mingling with hot tears. I’m an obstacle to him. In that instant, thinking of his warm body next to mine, of his tears when he told me about his dog that got put down, of him telling me that being together feels like a chore, I am once again a fetus, unknowingly destroying the people around me–the people I’m meant to love. I’ve caused pain I’ll never understand, and have since the very start of my being. 

I am Hell. The thought enters my mind unprompted as I wade through a puddle of slush. The more I think it, however, the more sense it seems to make. I feel like disgrace and beauty and evil all wrapped in one; like I create misery wherever I go; like I am stupid and ugly and wicked beyond my own comprehension. 

I am Hell. This becomes my mantra, and I feel it reverberating in my skull through each noiseless day: Iamhelliamhelliamhelliamhell.

My body feels like a loathsome weight to care for, and I find myself floating a few feet outside of it most of the time. Eating becomes an absurd function, much like sleeping, waking, and bathing. I allow myself to become vile and dirty, spend most of my time staring at the ceiling and thinking of hellfire. My mother strokes my hair, and I wince, because I could never tell her that she’s created something so clumsily cruel. 

Not that she doesn’t know, I just doubt she’d want to hear it.