Two Steps There, Four Steps Back

Creative Nonfiction Piece, written July 2025

 

I like Jeannette Walls’ writing, tore through her book in the way good books make nothing else matter. She was the first person I saw write about their traumas as centralized, cohesive, interconnected with her identity. She was not stuck in her past but knew what her past gave her. She respected her past, but still needed to understand it.  

​

I wanted to be where she was, not envy, but curiosity. I turned pages over quicker now for answers to my own questions.  

​

There were a short few paragraphs about her careless, abusive, beloved father throwing her pet cat out the window. Quixote was not coming with for the next part of the journey. It was only one of the vignettes, short, the pacing moved me through to another episode. 

​

 She gave it so little detail. Some people’s horror occupies a few lines. My mind has been stuck in that page thick for years, stuck in the simple horror.  

​

I draw the railroad parallels to myself. Instead, I came home from school, summer camp, grandma’s house and my dad made up lies about our childhood pets “visiting a friend.” But the kicker is, they never came home, and we knew all his friends.  

​

One day, I did not come home either. 

 

 Good writing holds you for years, builds anticipation even without structure or resolution.  

​

I always wanted to write about the past, about the family, but felt I could never get it all right. How could I do it all justice? Above all else, most things don’t resolve, only cycle, loop. 2 steps there, 4 steps back. 

​

Honesty above everything, my hands shake now. I am sounding cynical while claiming hope like high noon waters. I am always writing about the family’s sins and running home to whiplash heads with a constant “I love you so...” 

​

My father is my biggest supporter of my writing now, brags to faces I struggle to remember. “She’s a published writer. Check this out,” he gushes and pulls out one that is honest. And when they ask what I write about he is not shy to tell them -- “me!” It is not the one I would have shared; I fidget with my bracelets and shift while they digest me. 

​

Beading together my interconnectedness like the straight lines I am chasing, I find I am always confronting past versions of me.  

​

Her writing has haunted me for years. I am without resolution too.  

​

But resolution was never the point.  

​

~KJ   

This piece is my original work. Please do not copy or reproduce it without my permission.~