Ways to Get Out of Here
Claire Sinow
Colic infant, born under Cancer skies, I have no choice but to cry every year on my birthday. I don’t mean to, but it’s on the solstice, and I’m forced to endure the longest day. All that sunlight destroys a baby. It’s unnatural. It deforms me, and my lungs and diaphragm develop faster than my mouth can, so I’ve got a speech impediment—it locks the yearning in the pit of my stomach where it can only rot. Despite years of speech therapy, things still seem to come out wrong. My mom wants to make me happy, but I’m never particular enough. I’m turning nine and I beg her to take me to the science museum. I do not want this, but I want to want. She tells me that this is something she can fulfill. The night before, I can’t sleep; the sun pollutes the atmosphere with the last remnants of obstinate blues which refuse to rest. When we sit in the IMAX theater, my mom reaches across the armrest and puts her hand on my forearm. It swallows me. None of my friends are in town, so it’s just us. She tells me she loves me. I wriggle away. My neck cranes toward the paper sky and the planetarium breathes. A soft wind passes my ankles. I’m consumed by the anamorophic fisheye, my retinas burned by distortion in the corners of my field of view. Galaxies glow overhead and my sight glazes over. I lean back into my chair, close my eyes, and pray for midnight. It’s exactly what I asked for.
These theaters are special somehow. IMAX is a different format, disrupted by turning the film sideways—the strips morphing from 35mm to 70mm, giving a nine-fold increase in area. I’m assured it’s better by all technical specs. The new shape gives the film higher definition, better projecting power, and wider aspect ratios. Nearly real life. By design, the projection covers the audience’s entire visual field and simulates movement. This has the funny side effect of giving about 10 percent of people motion sickness. I am in that 10 percent. I bought “2D glasses” which put 3D movies back to 2D after seeing they reduce headaches. The first time I wear them to the theater, the images still rush at me, and I exit the theater to sit in the lobby for the next hour and a half, waiting for my family to emerge. The copyright has an asterisk, not for IMAX. I go home sick.
For my 16th birthday I get my driver’s license and Penelope gets cancer. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is the best-case scenario from the cancer grab bag, I’m assured; 90% of people live. My mom tells me my classmate’s dad had it twice and was helping guide our family through the diagnosis. After the recurrence of his cancer, he ended up getting both of his legs chopped off. I wondered if Penelope would get her legs chopped off, too, and if she would still be her with 25% of her body gone. He also became a Jesus-fanatic, which, frankly, was an outcome for Penelope that I feared even more. I keep going to school and doing my homework and things only feel okay when I’m not at home. In my kitchen, I sit at the table and watch my mom boil blueberries on the stove—Penelope can’t eat anything raw because of her immunosuppression—and my mom wipes her tears onto her apron. I tell her to put some lemon juice in and she snaps at me to mind my business. I’m supposed to drive Penelope to Jackson Peters’s new girlfriend’s house because the chemo gives her motion sickness. When I was her passenger, we drifted over the dashed lines of the highway ramp and I grabbed the ceiling of the car, as if it would help. After that, I was fine chauffeuring. Penelope comes into the kitchen wearing her 2000-dollar, human-hair wig, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her in it all year. She’s drawn on some asymmetric eyebrows with eyeliner and they make her look surprised. My mom and I both stare at her, and in response she stomps on the ground and wails. She eats a single blueberry and spits it into the sink, dry heaving—we leave.
Penelope met Jackson Peters at Amherst. He is the son of the former IMAX CEO and skips the majority of his sculpture classes to prioritize his bike rides. He told her she could be hot and would consider dating her if she just lost “30-ish pounds,” inevitable on the Raw Till 4 diet. Jackson would bring a backpack filled with spinach to dinner, shoveling handfuls down his gullet one after another. She hasn’t heard from Jackson since her diagnosis—it’s been nine months. In Izzy’s backyard, Penelope and I share a couch and face the couple across from us. With the new girlfriend under his arm, he waxes philosophical, “Chemo’s all just a big-pharma money pit,” Izzy nuzzles herself deeper into his body. He continues, “You can’t listen to the doctors, they’re all in on it too,” and Penelope’s tics shake me. “I know all the guys who run these fruit clinics in Mexico—the U.S. government doesn’t want you to know about this—guys on death’s door, stage IV, back to perfect health, all with the power of fruit.” Leaving Izzy’s house, we exit through the side gate. I have to help Penelope into the passenger seat, and she sobs as soon as the engine starts. When she begins radiation a few months, the oncologist says that the diet suggested by her last doctor is outdated with very little evidence, and that she could have been eating raw food this whole time.
Sometime in my childhood, the IMAX company switched over to digital projection for money reasons. They tripled their theater numbers by gutting production. Digital’s cheaper to make, but shot in only 2K, half the resolution of the old version. The images are blown out, a 100-foot blur swallowing your body from all angles. Theaters chose to downsize the screens, shrinking the problem until their shortcomings slipped beneath the eye’s perception. Seven-story screens dwarfed to one-tenth the size and half the resolution. Aspect ratios shifted, cropping up to 40% of the image. The company still continued to market these showings under the name IMAX, despite hardly resembling what was there before. Film is an illusion anyway, 60 frames per second is just a series of still images tricking the mind into motion. The eye can only see up to 48. I don’t think I noticed things were different.
It’s midnight and I see the specter from 50 feet away. For the last few months, his existence was marked only by his car jumping from one parking spot to another. Each time it had moved I imagined him racing to Celeste’s house the night before, unable to contain his excitement to be with her—but when I see him here, his willowy body rolls up one vertebra at a time, a vessel incapable of that sort of eagerness. As I move closer, he crosses away, and for a moment we orbit each other. I cannot discern if he cannot see me, or if he simply does not want to. He drifts away, but I refuse to let him leave me again. I yell to him, “Adam!” My voice wavers so that the second half of his name is even louder, a battle cry. He turns to look and I scream as we lock eyes, “I need to talk to you!” A moment passes and he is unmoving in the deserted street. I can still hear the echoes bouncing between the concrete buildings surrounding us, before being consumed—my ears ring from the silence. He says nothing but considers me. I take his stillness as an allowance to approach.
Standing in front of him, everything in my body is vibrating, adrenaline making each muscle violent. He steps even closer so that I must crane my neck to look up at him. When he exhales, the white of his breath obscures the tar night. His voice is much smaller than I remembered, “Oh. Hey.” Each word has meaning. He stoops to hug me, and I hope his coat insulates from my shaking. It just starts spilling out of my mouth “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean for it to happen like this.” When he lets go of me, I can only look down at his polished black leather shoes. The corners of my mouth quiver like they’re attached to fishhooks and I can’t stop myself, “I wasn’t trying to ruin your relationship, it was none of my business, she shouldn’t have told Celeste about us, I begged her not to.” This is a lie I repeated to myself enough until I believed it. He only laughs. “Oh yeah, I thought you were getting revenge on me or something.” Revenge for what, “You know, because I think I was kind of awful to you.” It’s possible that he’s self-aware. I grin violently, blacking out for a second. His face drops, “I’m not proud of it.”
I remember exactly how hard I had to press to snap those mice’s necks
And how soft their fur was
I remember the fingers thrust on cervix
And when they wouldn’t die
Choking on air
Muscles violent
Begging for rest
I pressed harder
I point at what he’s holding, a 12-pack of Miller Light. “Give me one of those.” He fumbles over the package, unable to break it open, and I just stare at his face. I forgot how wide his head was. I also forgot how handsome he was. I just sort of assumed that he must’ve been uglier than how I pictured him. He explains that usually he writes with a handle of vodka in one hand, drinking until finished, but he was out, leaving him to venture to the liquor store. Why didn’t I worry more about him? At this point things blur. I chug a beer and then another. We talk about women’s pockets and my pants and Kaiser Permanente and lithium and him seeing Bohemian Rhapsody at IMAX and his coat and the little swastikas on his coat buttons and that “aren’t you Jewish?” and “aren’t you also?” and his girlfriend got him something from Muji. He lights a cigarette. “I thought you quit smoking,” I say. He responds, “I did.” I’m visibly shaking now. He asks if I’m stressed, and I am stressed, but it’s only because it’s him.
He rifles through his coat and pulls out a tiny, circular pill case. Unscrewing it reveals a rainbow of little capsules, and he swirls them around with his pointer finger and they rattle against the metal. Picking a few out with care, he jabs at my crossed arms with a “here, come on.” I unfold my arms reluctantly and his hand lingers over mine for a moment before pulling back—two and a half little red pills sit in my palm. “What are these?” I ask, embarrassed by somehow not knowing his vices. “Oh!” His voice is suddenly juvenile, “They’re just Adderall. Now, I don’t deal, and I don’t just give these out, but I like you a lot.” I stutter out an “Oh I don’t need these,” but he misses my point. “No I don’t need these either, they prescribe me double what I take and so they just keep piling up.” There is a push and pull of our hands. He is intent on giving them to me. I shove them as far down into my pocket as they will go. I ask him to sit on the curb with me. “No, come on—I’ve got to go, I’ve still got that paper.” I’m a wanter, and I want him to stay, but he can’t.
When she comes to my door to say someone has died, I ask, “Was it Adam?” and she says the word “yeah” like how you would pensively agree to lunch plans the next week.
I remember those two skeletons at the Mütter Museum and how they held hands
How your smoke stung harder than my own
I was so mad at you when it happened
But now I’m running out of ways to say come back
I sealed those two and a half pills in a small envelope and wrote his name across the top—the only thing I had left of him. My friend threw them in the trash without asking. A stranger says you must mourn for nine days, and if you cannot cry for that long, you may pay someone to cry for you. I am distraught when I can only make it to day six. His phone gets disconnected, and I’ve stopped being able to reach his voicemail. I can no longer recall what his voice sounded like.
I’ve only just learned IMAX doesn’t stand for anything. I had always thought it was an acronym. It’s just a made-up word.
The cuts covering my fingertips are filled with galaxies, humors bleeding out of me in pinpricks of starlight. I promise Penelope that if her cancer comes back that she can have my bone marrow. She seems shocked, and maybe I’ve been a bad sister. She tells me the harvesting process would be very painful. I can only think of the first book that made me cry, My Sister’s Keeper. Anna sues her family for the medical rights over her body so that she doesn’t have to donate her kidney to her leukemia-riddled sister, but she ends up dying in a car wreck anyway and they take all her organs. I had reread the last chapter every night for a week to force out tears. Eventually, when nothing came out anymore, I destroyed it, ripping out those five pages of her death to save, and threw out the rest. Penelope describes the needle they plunge into your hip bone, but I’m not listening, instead trying to focus on the highway crossover. I think about the energy transfer of crashing into the highway barrier. I say to Penelope that the pain would be a dumb reason to not do it.
Years later, at Penelope’s graduation dinner, they serve bone marrow, which I can only stare at. The fat percolates through the char and drips down the cremated bone. A single sprig of parsley, karpas, rests on top. I think of when he had cut his hand making dinner, the blood dripping down the skin of the onion and soaking into the cutting board, absolutely indistinguishable from the way an un-rested piece of meat will ooze upon incision. My uncle tells me to take a bite, as his fork sinks into the fatty flesh. When I refuse, he calls me cowardly. I do not refute his point, and it hangs over me for the rest of the night. I’ve gone vegan by now—my body on furlough.
During the first teenage fight I had with my mother, she thrust her hands at me and exclaimed, “Where did my sweet little girl go? I want her back!” I don’t think I noticed things were different. Penelope revealed to me recently that my mom had miscarried between me and my brother, which is why we are three years apart. In the theater, I tell this to Adam, about how I had protested being alive. I stare into middle space at the screen, unable to meet his gaze. “We don’t talk enough about birth trauma,” he says to me. The lights go down, and he leans in to whisper in my ear, “It takes a lot to be brought into this world—I didn’t ask for it, either.”
Claire Sinow (Scripps '21) is learning how to say sorry a little better every day.
These theaters are special somehow. IMAX is a different format, disrupted by turning the film sideways—the strips morphing from 35mm to 70mm, giving a nine-fold increase in area. I’m assured it’s better by all technical specs. The new shape gives the film higher definition, better projecting power, and wider aspect ratios. Nearly real life. By design, the projection covers the audience’s entire visual field and simulates movement. This has the funny side effect of giving about 10 percent of people motion sickness. I am in that 10 percent. I bought “2D glasses” which put 3D movies back to 2D after seeing they reduce headaches. The first time I wear them to the theater, the images still rush at me, and I exit the theater to sit in the lobby for the next hour and a half, waiting for my family to emerge. The copyright has an asterisk, not for IMAX. I go home sick.
For my 16th birthday I get my driver’s license and Penelope gets cancer. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is the best-case scenario from the cancer grab bag, I’m assured; 90% of people live. My mom tells me my classmate’s dad had it twice and was helping guide our family through the diagnosis. After the recurrence of his cancer, he ended up getting both of his legs chopped off. I wondered if Penelope would get her legs chopped off, too, and if she would still be her with 25% of her body gone. He also became a Jesus-fanatic, which, frankly, was an outcome for Penelope that I feared even more. I keep going to school and doing my homework and things only feel okay when I’m not at home. In my kitchen, I sit at the table and watch my mom boil blueberries on the stove—Penelope can’t eat anything raw because of her immunosuppression—and my mom wipes her tears onto her apron. I tell her to put some lemon juice in and she snaps at me to mind my business. I’m supposed to drive Penelope to Jackson Peters’s new girlfriend’s house because the chemo gives her motion sickness. When I was her passenger, we drifted over the dashed lines of the highway ramp and I grabbed the ceiling of the car, as if it would help. After that, I was fine chauffeuring. Penelope comes into the kitchen wearing her 2000-dollar, human-hair wig, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her in it all year. She’s drawn on some asymmetric eyebrows with eyeliner and they make her look surprised. My mom and I both stare at her, and in response she stomps on the ground and wails. She eats a single blueberry and spits it into the sink, dry heaving—we leave.
Penelope met Jackson Peters at Amherst. He is the son of the former IMAX CEO and skips the majority of his sculpture classes to prioritize his bike rides. He told her she could be hot and would consider dating her if she just lost “30-ish pounds,” inevitable on the Raw Till 4 diet. Jackson would bring a backpack filled with spinach to dinner, shoveling handfuls down his gullet one after another. She hasn’t heard from Jackson since her diagnosis—it’s been nine months. In Izzy’s backyard, Penelope and I share a couch and face the couple across from us. With the new girlfriend under his arm, he waxes philosophical, “Chemo’s all just a big-pharma money pit,” Izzy nuzzles herself deeper into his body. He continues, “You can’t listen to the doctors, they’re all in on it too,” and Penelope’s tics shake me. “I know all the guys who run these fruit clinics in Mexico—the U.S. government doesn’t want you to know about this—guys on death’s door, stage IV, back to perfect health, all with the power of fruit.” Leaving Izzy’s house, we exit through the side gate. I have to help Penelope into the passenger seat, and she sobs as soon as the engine starts. When she begins radiation a few months, the oncologist says that the diet suggested by her last doctor is outdated with very little evidence, and that she could have been eating raw food this whole time.
Sometime in my childhood, the IMAX company switched over to digital projection for money reasons. They tripled their theater numbers by gutting production. Digital’s cheaper to make, but shot in only 2K, half the resolution of the old version. The images are blown out, a 100-foot blur swallowing your body from all angles. Theaters chose to downsize the screens, shrinking the problem until their shortcomings slipped beneath the eye’s perception. Seven-story screens dwarfed to one-tenth the size and half the resolution. Aspect ratios shifted, cropping up to 40% of the image. The company still continued to market these showings under the name IMAX, despite hardly resembling what was there before. Film is an illusion anyway, 60 frames per second is just a series of still images tricking the mind into motion. The eye can only see up to 48. I don’t think I noticed things were different.
It’s midnight and I see the specter from 50 feet away. For the last few months, his existence was marked only by his car jumping from one parking spot to another. Each time it had moved I imagined him racing to Celeste’s house the night before, unable to contain his excitement to be with her—but when I see him here, his willowy body rolls up one vertebra at a time, a vessel incapable of that sort of eagerness. As I move closer, he crosses away, and for a moment we orbit each other. I cannot discern if he cannot see me, or if he simply does not want to. He drifts away, but I refuse to let him leave me again. I yell to him, “Adam!” My voice wavers so that the second half of his name is even louder, a battle cry. He turns to look and I scream as we lock eyes, “I need to talk to you!” A moment passes and he is unmoving in the deserted street. I can still hear the echoes bouncing between the concrete buildings surrounding us, before being consumed—my ears ring from the silence. He says nothing but considers me. I take his stillness as an allowance to approach.
Standing in front of him, everything in my body is vibrating, adrenaline making each muscle violent. He steps even closer so that I must crane my neck to look up at him. When he exhales, the white of his breath obscures the tar night. His voice is much smaller than I remembered, “Oh. Hey.” Each word has meaning. He stoops to hug me, and I hope his coat insulates from my shaking. It just starts spilling out of my mouth “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean for it to happen like this.” When he lets go of me, I can only look down at his polished black leather shoes. The corners of my mouth quiver like they’re attached to fishhooks and I can’t stop myself, “I wasn’t trying to ruin your relationship, it was none of my business, she shouldn’t have told Celeste about us, I begged her not to.” This is a lie I repeated to myself enough until I believed it. He only laughs. “Oh yeah, I thought you were getting revenge on me or something.” Revenge for what, “You know, because I think I was kind of awful to you.” It’s possible that he’s self-aware. I grin violently, blacking out for a second. His face drops, “I’m not proud of it.”
I remember exactly how hard I had to press to snap those mice’s necks
And how soft their fur was
I remember the fingers thrust on cervix
And when they wouldn’t die
Choking on air
Muscles violent
Begging for rest
I pressed harder
I point at what he’s holding, a 12-pack of Miller Light. “Give me one of those.” He fumbles over the package, unable to break it open, and I just stare at his face. I forgot how wide his head was. I also forgot how handsome he was. I just sort of assumed that he must’ve been uglier than how I pictured him. He explains that usually he writes with a handle of vodka in one hand, drinking until finished, but he was out, leaving him to venture to the liquor store. Why didn’t I worry more about him? At this point things blur. I chug a beer and then another. We talk about women’s pockets and my pants and Kaiser Permanente and lithium and him seeing Bohemian Rhapsody at IMAX and his coat and the little swastikas on his coat buttons and that “aren’t you Jewish?” and “aren’t you also?” and his girlfriend got him something from Muji. He lights a cigarette. “I thought you quit smoking,” I say. He responds, “I did.” I’m visibly shaking now. He asks if I’m stressed, and I am stressed, but it’s only because it’s him.
He rifles through his coat and pulls out a tiny, circular pill case. Unscrewing it reveals a rainbow of little capsules, and he swirls them around with his pointer finger and they rattle against the metal. Picking a few out with care, he jabs at my crossed arms with a “here, come on.” I unfold my arms reluctantly and his hand lingers over mine for a moment before pulling back—two and a half little red pills sit in my palm. “What are these?” I ask, embarrassed by somehow not knowing his vices. “Oh!” His voice is suddenly juvenile, “They’re just Adderall. Now, I don’t deal, and I don’t just give these out, but I like you a lot.” I stutter out an “Oh I don’t need these,” but he misses my point. “No I don’t need these either, they prescribe me double what I take and so they just keep piling up.” There is a push and pull of our hands. He is intent on giving them to me. I shove them as far down into my pocket as they will go. I ask him to sit on the curb with me. “No, come on—I’ve got to go, I’ve still got that paper.” I’m a wanter, and I want him to stay, but he can’t.
When she comes to my door to say someone has died, I ask, “Was it Adam?” and she says the word “yeah” like how you would pensively agree to lunch plans the next week.
I remember those two skeletons at the Mütter Museum and how they held hands
How your smoke stung harder than my own
I was so mad at you when it happened
But now I’m running out of ways to say come back
I sealed those two and a half pills in a small envelope and wrote his name across the top—the only thing I had left of him. My friend threw them in the trash without asking. A stranger says you must mourn for nine days, and if you cannot cry for that long, you may pay someone to cry for you. I am distraught when I can only make it to day six. His phone gets disconnected, and I’ve stopped being able to reach his voicemail. I can no longer recall what his voice sounded like.
I’ve only just learned IMAX doesn’t stand for anything. I had always thought it was an acronym. It’s just a made-up word.
The cuts covering my fingertips are filled with galaxies, humors bleeding out of me in pinpricks of starlight. I promise Penelope that if her cancer comes back that she can have my bone marrow. She seems shocked, and maybe I’ve been a bad sister. She tells me the harvesting process would be very painful. I can only think of the first book that made me cry, My Sister’s Keeper. Anna sues her family for the medical rights over her body so that she doesn’t have to donate her kidney to her leukemia-riddled sister, but she ends up dying in a car wreck anyway and they take all her organs. I had reread the last chapter every night for a week to force out tears. Eventually, when nothing came out anymore, I destroyed it, ripping out those five pages of her death to save, and threw out the rest. Penelope describes the needle they plunge into your hip bone, but I’m not listening, instead trying to focus on the highway crossover. I think about the energy transfer of crashing into the highway barrier. I say to Penelope that the pain would be a dumb reason to not do it.
Years later, at Penelope’s graduation dinner, they serve bone marrow, which I can only stare at. The fat percolates through the char and drips down the cremated bone. A single sprig of parsley, karpas, rests on top. I think of when he had cut his hand making dinner, the blood dripping down the skin of the onion and soaking into the cutting board, absolutely indistinguishable from the way an un-rested piece of meat will ooze upon incision. My uncle tells me to take a bite, as his fork sinks into the fatty flesh. When I refuse, he calls me cowardly. I do not refute his point, and it hangs over me for the rest of the night. I’ve gone vegan by now—my body on furlough.
During the first teenage fight I had with my mother, she thrust her hands at me and exclaimed, “Where did my sweet little girl go? I want her back!” I don’t think I noticed things were different. Penelope revealed to me recently that my mom had miscarried between me and my brother, which is why we are three years apart. In the theater, I tell this to Adam, about how I had protested being alive. I stare into middle space at the screen, unable to meet his gaze. “We don’t talk enough about birth trauma,” he says to me. The lights go down, and he leans in to whisper in my ear, “It takes a lot to be brought into this world—I didn’t ask for it, either.”
Claire Sinow (Scripps '21) is learning how to say sorry a little better every day.