Allissandra Bequette
Allissandra Bequette is a writer and educator from Omaha, Nebraska. She received her MFA at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her work has appeared in Fine Lines and 13th Floor Magazine. Her interests include asking questions, sympathizing with strange creatures, and imagining a better world. She is currently working on her first horror manuscript about the toll of patriarchal violence.
Entries from a Dollar Store Diary
I’ve been told not to publish pure catharsis, but the thing is, every breath is catharsis when you’re fighting your own system. I had a sickness from the beginning, a service in my veins at which the eulogy wound on and on, tendrils around my shoulders cataloguing my collected tragedies. They fell around my shoulders much like hair, tossed with my every step. I started out sick and carried on over rural highways. I was sick in the brain, sick in the body, sick in the voice box. I was sick of being sick instead of being the right girl. I was sick in the toilet of Penn Station after love carried me over state lines. I was sick in the street while a passerby waved the cardboard head of a fascist, and I refused to look him in the eye.
I was sick on the way to my homeland, praying that my body would not reject the distance my ancestors already crossed, that they were not looking back at me in judgment, in retroactive irritation. I was sick every day at my high school desk, pulling out my hair to avoid pulling out of the public eye. I was sick because I was me, because my skin was too thick and it enabled my body to misfire and strangle me. I was sick eating red strawberries by the river while blood gushed out of its destined place. I was sick when the woman at the corner store hurriedly wrapped my pads in newspaper, tucking them away like a spy on her way to a dead drop.
I’ve been told to use my writing to toe the edge of the pit within me—but I’m never supposed to step in. I live inside words this way, feeling true and yet not. You should know that all I ever wanted was to fit the definition, to be neatly tucked in beside the word. I wanted to follow naturally after daughter, stepdaughter, gifted child, student, wife. Instead, I clawed my way out of each label, discovering once again that I cannot simply be; I am ill, and the words others call me are ill-fitting too, and the sickness never leaves.
The words pile up inside that pit: She’s sick, she’s sick, she’s sad, she’s sick, she’s not a good girl and that’s why she’s sick, she’s sick and I can prove it. I was never the one to prove it. It was doctors in tacky button-up shirts and a judgmental pinch between their brows that said, “You don’t want babies?”
I’ve been told not to fill pages with pure grief, but if recreating the worst days of my life in a placid voice is not grief, what is? How can I tell the difference between censorship and efficiency? How can I tell when I ought to rest and when I’m hitting a wall of someone else’s making? How can I choose where to spend the sparse currency this body has given me? They say you can vote with your wallet, but how can you vote with your soul? How can I choose, knowing the choices get smaller with each hour of sleep lost? When does it cease to be a choice and become an emergency protocol? If I’m not meant to be sick with words, then where can I turn? How can I tell my story when sick words are forbidden? How can I be sick at all when silence is preferred?
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