I liked her best when she was puking her guts out, more than once, in a mini dress, can’t remember the color, maybe cream, fall 1998, rural New England, by a big tree, then another, after the dance at which I’m pretty sure she didn’t dance but at which I’m absolutely sure she did a great deal of underage drinking, after which I helped a few guys prop her up, walk her back to her room in the little house for upperclassmen where I put her to bed, where she puked again, all over the spread on her twin bed, which I’m pretty sure I later inherited. I do love a hand-me-down. Vulnerability. Rigid self-appointed authority demoted, somewhat disgusting, disarmed. Then back down the gravel road in the dark, across the little causeway into co-ed Kendrick, down the stairs to the room I shared with a round-faced Ritalin addict who sold drugs out of our mini-fridge. The sight of her now sends distress signals along my own vagus nerve, freaks out my brainstem. Something’s not right down here. I hardly know, anymore, if we ever liked each other, beyond that night. I hardly recognize the strong chin that once glistened, winningly, with disgorged matter, the deep, hard set of disapproving eyes, suburban wardrobe, blow-dried hair, cute glasses, her crimped lips souring the air with words.     

– Estelle Bajou

Author’s Note: I write as a person with Korsakoff syndrome might compensate for gaps in memory through confabulation, “caught,” as Stanley Kunitz put it, “in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.” “Feast of Losses” falls somewhere between recollection and a reflection on how we connect, the people we grow into, and how it feels to grow apart.