SPLIT

I loved finding out from my mother that my first word was “light,” it seems so apt—because so much of my life has felt like a journey from the darkness into the light. And though it never occurred to me until now, even the names I chose for myself reflect this aspiration. “Sunny” was the nickname I chose for myself before I left Minnesota for California. And “Selena”—moon—was the alter ego I chose for myself in my writing many years before I knew what my first word was. When I came across this old drawing of a sun with a dark side, it seemed to me the perfect symbol of myself.

When Britte, Meryl, and I reached New York, we stayed with her psychologist friend Jim, and one morning while he and Meryl were still sleeping, as we quietly talked, Britte admitted to me that she’d been having an affair with another teacher at the high school but that she felt even more for me than she did for him. She loved me, she said. Realizing for the first time in my life that my love for someone was reciprocated worked an almost miraculous change in me. The way I conceptualized it at the time, I seemed to split cleanly into two disparate selves—a dark and a light self—and I found I could transition from one to the other. (I also began to pun, for the first time in my life, because I was no longer afraid of appearing foolish.)

This transition first happened one afternoon when we went into a little theater in a museum—I was smarting over something I thought I’d heard Britte say to Jim—and as I sat in the darkness I decided, with an act of will, to “halt” my insecurity, anger, and sense of grievance. The effort it took felt Herculean, like braking a locomotive with my bare hands, but I left the theater feeling light-hearted. It seems to me now that in that struggle, I finally gave myself over to trusting another human being.