I Hope You’ll Hear Me
Original Creative Nonfiction by Liz
Listen to “I Hope You’ll Hear Me.”
Before you took your life in a mid-Missouri park, you came to my college graduation party and gave me a reading I’ll never forget. You looked into my eyes and told me: “You’re wild like your mom” — a woman who once hopped on a stranger’s motorcycle — “but you’re not afraid of it.” You read my then-boyfriend next; you told that handsome narcissist he’d always relied on his beauty to get what he wanted. You pissed him off so fully he spent the rest of the night in my childhood bedroom, where I did what I had to do to keep the peace.
You were still there when I rejoined the party, and I wish I’d told you how right you were about both of us, how special your reading made me feel, how desperately I needed to be reminded of my wildness right then, how completely I’d become a bound, muzzled thing. So I’m telling you now, and I hope you’ll hear me.