I Used to Give Men Mercy

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

I believe in Oprah. I see pictures of her every day. I pay attention to the way she smokes a turkey on Thanksgiving, and to the fact that she still loves bread. Because of Oprah, I tell myself, “The world is right there: take it.”

In the hospital, after my second or third breakdown, I watched OWN as often as I could. There was an evening of programming dedicated to Maya Angelou. I took a risk watching TV, because the nurses considered it a symptom of depression. But I needed to hear Maya speak. She said, “Let me tell so much truth—not facts. Because facts can obscure the truth.”

And I tell the truth as an expedient thing, for the reader and myself. I don’t obscure the truth with the mundane. I don’t build my work on the aesthetic I learned in the MFA classes at school, on suggestions that I slow down, that I remove the poetry and ambiguity from my prose, that I produce competent writing. Long before I graduated with my first degree, I was tired of competent writing. Competent books, with protagonists with names like Siobhán, who live in brownstone apartments and are never gratuitous or explicit or poor. I can’t afford to let white academia drag me into mediocrity.

But it’s hard to articulate how one goes from a server to a camgirl to a master’s student to someone holding a degree in her hands so tightly the paper became wet and she had to throw it away. Because I’ve existed in extremes for much of my life, I’m reticent to write from a middle place, where there is no urgency. I can hear my graduate program’s workshop facilitator, a white man, saying, “Terese, slow down.” He wants the tourist experience. He wants me to curate pain and titillation, and tell what each room looks like, because, without that, my work is not enough. He doesn’t believe that these experiences felt