Letter to Myself About A Bad Puzzle

on abuse and private mysteries

art by Alma Haser

Dear E—

Sometimes, beginning when you are quite small—maybe five or six—you’ll find a puzzle piece or two. But you don’t know how puzzles work. When your mother sees that you have them, stashed away in the piano bench, she’ll pick them up and look at them. She’ll say, “Don’t let anyone see these.”

You’ll learn, through context, that there’s something shameful about them. The next time you find a puzzle piece (although you won’t realize it’s from the same puzzle), you won’t know to hide that one, either. You only know that you keep stumbling into these odd problems or predilections that require attention.

One of these problems causes your mother to take you to the pediatrician. The pediatrician says that you’re fine (you’re not). No one is able to explain why you had to go to the pediatrician in the first place.

By the time you’re in school, certain people can sense that something’s not quite right.

You flinch constantly.

Your high school counselor asks flat-out if you were sexually abused. You’re so angry about being asked an irrelevant, ridiculous question that you stop seeing her.

Your abusive ex-boyfriend keeps teasing you about abuse that you insist didn’t happen. But he’s so wrong about everything else in your life that it only makes sense that he’s wrong about this, too.

You keep thinking something is happening to you in bed while you’re sleeping. You accuse three different people of doing the same, crucially specific thing over the course of over ten years. They all deny it. You later realize that none of them were doing it, even though you honestly believed that it was happening. This is called a flashback.

(One, two, three more puzzle pieces.)

Things get worse. You have nightmares that cause you to wake up screaming up to seven times a night. You can’t sleep unless you’re sitting up. Your nervous system is as out of whack as if it had been scrambled in a blender.

(Something is shifting; something is moving beneath the surface.)

You tell your therapist. She does not suggest new puzzle pieces or hypnotize you to bring back “repressed memories.” But she does help you to see what you are slowly seeing: the picture that would have been on the box, had there been a box to guide you.

And when you travel back to Taiwan for the first time in five years, it takes seventy-two hours of halting, anxious conversations for the therapeutic work of decades to finally fall into place.

(There are still pieces missing; there will always be pieces missing. But this is what we think it looks like; here is the puzzle.)

If it were possible, you would send the whole thing back. You want so badly to send the whole thing back. Or maybe there is no puzzle. Maybe you made the whole thing up. You tell yourself that you imagined all of it. You also tell yourself that it’s no big deal.

But it’s been years.

It’s too late.

So, my darling—this is where you are now.

This is how you must go forward.