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.