Previously by Jacqueline Steiger: 16 Gemstones Renamed Correctly

I have always considered myself a reader: always stuck in a book, always escaping into another world. As a child, I would read during dinner, at night under the covers, in the car. We had a rule that if I picked out a book at the bookstore, I could not start reading it until we exited, because my mother said she was tired of me “finishing the goddamn book ten minutes after we leave.” In second grade I got in trouble for reading during reading class — we were in the middle of one of Frog and Toad’s many benign adventures, and I had stopped listening to my classmates. The book hidden in my lap was The Giver. Faced with Jonas’s discovery of all the pain and ecstasy of the world, I had no fucks to give for Frog and Toad’s antics. My indignant second-grade self wanted to know what exactly was the point of school if not to, you know, read. I got a “red card,” the bane of all eager-to-please high-achieving students at my school, for failing to respond on my turn during a popcorn reading.

I could go into great detail about my love for words and language, wax poetic about the curve of a “u” before explaining how the Great Vowel Shift caused our orthographical representation of that sound to stray from its original, but a hundred people who read could also tell you that. The part of my story that involves reading and my love of words is familiar to every quiet girl who has ever identified with Matilda or Hermione, everyone who loves Jane Austen more than life. I became an actor, and later a linguist, and later a writer, for all of those familiar reasons. I believe in the transformative and powerful magic of stories and words and names. I could write endless missives about the beauty and intricacy of language. But you are here; you know. I am not alone.

What is different for me is my vehement dislike of listening to a book. I have always hated audiobooks. No matter how old I get, auditory media will always bring me back in time to one summer vacation during elementary school when I was recovering from eye surgery. I picture myself in the living room, curtains drawn, with a patch over my eye, listening to the Tales of the Old Republic cassettes. It will be days until I’m able to see again. Now, the room might be in a different house, the cassette tapes are now digital media, but the sense of being trapped inside my head — cut off from the world — is the same.

Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.

It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later in bed staring at the ceiling, her mom’s voice calling for her over and over. She’d imagine mountains folding into each other like origami paper, the sky cracking like glass, a boy in class passing her a love note. Next she’d be sitting in her mother’s car on the way to grandma’s house, December having passed with no notice from her.

She didn’t mention this to anyone at first. It didn’t matter much anyways—she was young and there was a lot of time to waste. There was always more where that came from.

So she let time pass like that. Sometimes she willed it on. When exams came during high school, she’d think about the future—apartments in New York, weddings in the snow, herself disappearing into the world with just a suitcase. When she was done, she’d pick up her term papers.

It wasn’t until she met Matt that it became a problem.

My father has an unusual affliction. He doesn’t see it as a problem—he might not even realize he has it. For as long as I can remember, my father has been beset by Spoonerism.

My dictionary defines Spoonerism as “a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect.” It was named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who was notoriously prone to this type of mistake. While my father seems to do it intentionally at times, he also seems to do it compulsively.

When we were visiting my sister and her family in DePere, Wisconsin, my father—an avid angler—expressed his earnest desire to go fishing on the Rox Fiver. You would know it better as the Fox River. And he doesn’t just say it once; he’ll tell my mother, “The Rox Fiver, Sandy! Let’s go fishing on the Rox Fiver! Don’t you want to go to the Rox Fiver?” My sister’s husband famously tried to get my father to indulge his Spoonerism by repeating questionable phrases in front of him. For example, he kept saying the name of former Green Bay Packers football player Cletidus Hunt — or worse, the phrase “cunning stunt” — as well as the town where he and my sister attended college, Beaver Falls. Fortunately, it never worked.

The first thing to understand is that we are very beautiful.

Deploy your imagery of choice. Reach for gemstones, for edibles: crystal skin, laughing emerald eyes, hair like gently burnished gold. Peaches and cream. The blush of sunrise staining fresh water. You may mix metaphors. You will be forgiven.

The second thing to understand is that it means nothing.

It means nothing because we have been beautiful for years. And years. Think of the highest number you can count to without your mind wandering. Go ahead and double it. They say attention spans are low these days. Double it again. Square it. Square the square.

You are not even close.

In the beginning, when they said we would live forever, it was a moment of great rejoicing. Surely we deserved this. We were the most beautiful, after all, and now we would be beautiful forever—our beauty a gift to the world that would keep on giving. The universe had looked down and said, yes, you are doing everything right and so I am rewarding you with more. Everything was coming up roses.

And continued to come up roses for the next several thousand years. But slowly, our people got tired.