Lauren Schlesinger
Evelyn
When I was nine, I put my life inside
the bug, which was stuck up to my ceiling.
It was my fault that she became plastered
against a plane of whiteness. If my mind
had not been mapping graphs and asymptotes
on that ceiling, then her speck of a body
would have been unseen and possibly she
would have gone free. But she was a clear point.
She had entered the quantitative game
I played in all quadrants of my domain.
And even if she was too small to be
harmful, she might fall down and crawl on me.
I figured I was infinitely better
without her, since small things expand to big
distractions. From one lousy point, she sucked
mathematics and the whole evening away.
Every second squared my pointed desire
to erase her existence. She mocked me
for as long as she lived because there were
too many inches between us for me.
To reach her, I leapt from a chair atop
the bed. It took coordination to kill her.
And since I had jumped, she died stuck up too
terribly high for me to remove her.
My action only ensured that she would stay
a permanent resident of my room.
Too soon, she became a full-time roommate
who managed, like a black hole, to make more room
for herself. She was not unlike the cyst
that thrived on silence in the flesh of my back;
she was quick to make herself amount to more.
I could feel her—only—as a part of me.
And we were so indistinguishable
that we could ruminate graphs together.
I was the mind. She was the mind's cursor.
We put the parallel plane in perspective
and over me, she even grew protective.
While I grew up, she was up there like a god.
Together we supplied both sides of a proof
that proved: ∴Q.E.D. Attachment is strongest
within the bonds between the smallest things.
And with the distance, we appeared smaller;
therefore, the depth that was between us was
not a dimension we could quantify.
I named her Evelyn—not thinking of Eve
or its meanings: light and life and hazelnut
even if all those things were accurate—
it just sounded old and appropriate.
Evelyn and I knew that creating
a theory for the assignment of her
meaning would generate an excessive
axis for her existence. We did not.
For years, we lived our synonymous lives
and thrived within the gridlines made by light
shot between the pink blinds to the ceiling.
But after we stretched out the number lines
and grew out of a girl's pink life, we knew
it was the right time to repaint the room.
I still could not comfortably reach her.
I had to stack every dictionary
on my bed to be at her level.
Once again, I was unsure about her
whole body's removal. This time, I managed
to move all of her to an unlined notecard.
And she became more than a portable pet.
She took tests with me as my amulet.
And always, she guides me out of the room
charted inside myself and back inside
the wild mind of the girl who once made us.
Lauren Schlesinger is a poet and educator. She earned a BA with Honors in poetry and MSED from Northwestern University—plus, an MFA from the University of Washington. In the past, Lauren was a recipient of the Northwestern University Alumnae Graduate Fellowship, was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She teaches creative writing and serves as an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University.