Hadas Lea Goshen

After letting the pond thicken and brown for many years, it’s an eerie feeling to delve back into the depths of my hard drive. To sift through forgotten files. I am wading through folders entitled “Undergrad Essays” and “Poems about J” and trying to surface something that makes sense. Something clean.

But clarity is hard when your memory has hardened. I find myself reading my words and doubting they are mine. Do they even belong to me, when I am no longer the “her” that wrote them? The 20-year-old, even the 25-year-old, had a higher pitch. But her voice was thinner too, I think.

I am reading a doc called “Mary,” apparently created by me, on August 5, 2012, that states, “A book about a woman’s sense of self distorted by her own self loathing as perceived through fragments of a broken mirror.”

Whose book? My unborn book? The trials of being a former English major is worrying that your notes about your proposed creative projects are actually lecture notes from someone else’s book, that you may or may not have read in your Gothic Lit class circa 2007.

The doc reads:

When I woke up he was facing the wall. His back to me, curved so that the nearest part of him was the bone of his spine. It was always angles with this one. The jutting of his spine or a few hours before, the jutting hips. The flip of front to back, always meeting at a point, a thrust, perpendicular in our passion.

6:27 am. In three minutes his phone would begin its gentle crescendo, stirring him into consciousness and back out of my apartment onto the New York street.

It scares me to admit, I don’t hate it. Then, of course, I think, “So it obviously isn’t mine. This is a passage I copied out of someone else’s book.”

On the other hand, it has my telltale style of alliteration (with which I liberally overseason sentences) and a dark obsession with the body–also typical Hadas. It uses the word “jutting,” which I remember coupling with words like “hips” on more than one occasion–but who hasn’t?

Oh, and the last piece of evidence that points to my authorship: it sounds a whole lot like my morning routine with J when we lived together on the Upper East Side. Then again, it sounds like every New York couples’ morning routine. It is me, and him, and everyone else.

So I am left here, casting my net. Letting it drop. Wondering. Who did these words belong to? Clearly, not the woman who found them today.