Atlas and Alice, Issue 16
Jessica Barksdale
This Decade I got married and stayed married. No small feat, trust me. The arc of second marriage, shorter, a meteor of desire and hope, and then, whoa! We are on that same damn spaceship we were on before, with different people. Hang on. If you dare. A flare of need, a flame of midlife crisis and panic, I enrolled in another graduate degree, graduated, and did pretty much what I was doing before but maybe with a bit more style. My children got older. Hurt more. Loved. Lost. Loved. Lost. Then they loved, and moved into the world without me, as they should. I tried not to hold on tight. I tried to remain calm, not react. “Not a bitch” my rule of thumb. My mother got older, and older, and her brain began to erase itself. Meanwhile, I continued to drag her around the world. Ireland, Canada, France three times, England twice, Sicily, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Denmark, Estonia, Botswana, South Africa, Zambia. What was I thinking? I taught over four thousand people something about writing. Or I think I did. I wrote a lot, published three novels, a poetry collection, many poems, many stories, many essays. I’m still not famous.
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