Outs and Ins (Ongoing)

A work of fiction becomes a personal essay, gets rejected, finds new breath as a journal entry—and could circle back.

May 21, 2025

Monday, April 12, 2021 (First submission)

“Wanna chug?”

The pre-beach beverage combo is Manda’s invention—a shot of espresso washed down quick with a beer. It’s before noon and we’re gulping at the coffee bar of the train station café. Manda finishes her glass and unfists a mix of coins onto the counter. The owner sweeps them into his hand, picks out the ones he needs, and slides back the rest. I take my last swig and, walking out, she challenges me, a race to the train.

We run through the station’s bare corridors.

Nearing the exit ramp, a mouth of daylight ahead, she pulls at my shirt, so I trip her. Almost falling, she yells.

“I’ll fucking get you!”

Hearing her words echo between the tiled walls, she shrinks into herself. I apologize for her profanity to a woman I pass, and I wait for her, catching my breath, on the platform outside.

---

The bus pulls away from the road and travels a tortured strip of asphalt. We stop in a lot surrounded by thicket. The sound of pulsing insects, the ocean’s roll. A young couple and their toddler, each wearing sunglasses, unloads after us—the dad carrying towels and a blanket, a tent, their son tugging at his free hand. We head toward a dirt path, and the bus drags away. The trail cuts through litter and duff, pine and eucalyptus, leading us to a set of stairs. Down the steps, and the trees become shrubby—the smell, like sulfur, seaweed, decomposition—then the stones break off into sand.

We come out from under the shade, and the beach is bright ahead. Beyond it is a wing of teal ocean traced by islets and cliffs, the sunlight gleaming in shards on the waves. Manda slings off her sandals and begins plodding toward the wooden shacks and striped umbrellas to buy beer. She’ll probably hang around and practice her Portuguese with the old man who works the stand; chugs make her chatty. I sit in the sand, untie my sneakers, put them in the backpack I’ve been left behind with, and reach for my phone.

---

I stand up and begin toward our usual spot. I hike past kids destroying a castle, a leathery couple set out in chairs. Put-together people are oiled and sandless on smoothed towels; this is just a part of their routine. A saleswoman is marching, her cooler swaying, singing about a dessert—a creme-filled little cake, a cold sting against my ribs. Manda’s with an armful of beers, out of breath. She unloads the icy bottles onto my chest; I take off the backpack and wedge them in.

We maneuver through rocks and knee-deep water to reach the cove. When we make it, we’re alone, blocked from view.

I weigh down the blanket with sunscreen, books, and sandwiches. Manda opens another bottle for herself and buries the rest near the water. Walking back, she pulls a gym sock out of her pocket and unwraps some plastic baggie that's been tucked inside. She takes out weed and what might be the most heinous pipe sold in Lisbon, metal and wrapped in a sticker that says ‘CANNABIS’ in melty green letters. She holds it next to her face and grins. I tell her she can just put it in the backpack next time. She loads a bowl. We light it and pass it until it’s ash.

---

Manda looks like she’s lived her whole life naked on some Southern European shore. Relaxed, high, rambling about something.

“You don’t feel like you’re trapped?”

Coming from the Gulf, we can’t get used to the cold Atlantic water. She runs, flops in; she gets it over with. I take my time wading out before dipping under. I swim until I can’t see the floor and look back at the beach, at the limestone boulders that stack and merge into cliffs. I turn to face outward—the ocean goes on.

“God! Imagine how fucking tremendous this must have seemed, like, back before we mapped it, navigated it,” Manda says, paddling up next to me.

Her hair is slicked back, her lips are purpled—having trouble keeping up with her ideas—making her words sound mumbled, cute. I ask her what she means.

“Making reality by breaking it, suiting it to our needs. You know, pinning dead critters to boards. Always declaring some objective comprehension of it: ‘I am a human and because I am human, I can, I should, I need to, I will understand—all of you listen—I understand!’ Explanation, explanation.”

Like a cartoon, she wags her finger toward a sky she sees as illustrated.

“Then, a great theory, or medicine, or technology that we need, or that we may need in some way that someone may think of, is introduced. Then this great technology or whatever is kicked aside—a new one developed by a more capable human who better understands.”

The tide carries us back to shore. We find the floor and regain our weight.

“And I’m a part of this, I know. Listen to me here, trying to talk about human nature.”

She falls ass-first onto the blanket. Sand sticks to her.

“But don’t you think it’s insane? This relationship with the world, this relationship with reality? Propped up on so many assumptions.”

I don’t give her a response.

“You know, like, that because we have access to nature and the ability to comprehend it, we have a right to it. And, before any of this, there are the assumptions that we actually even have access, that we can even comprehend. It’s fully nuts. All we’re declaring with all these assumptions is that we need a belief to validate our ownership of nature. Or, humankind needs a belief to validate its ownership of reality. God, and that’s all without even trying to get into the ‘why.’ Does any of that make sense?”

She applies a new layer of sunscreen. I sit down next to her. She covers my eyes.

“Don’t breathe.”

Sprays my face.

“And then, I’m sorry, but we have to live with the effects of this insanity. In actual society, we have made up, real-life ranks based on all this. There are seriously humans whose beliefs have authority and others whose beliefs, like, just don’t.”

Already half-drunk, she’s forgotten about the beer I dug up for her. I open it and take a drink.

“I don’t know, though. Maybe I’m starting in the wrong direction. I don’t want to talk about who sits where in some baseless hierarchy, about things that don’t make sense. I’m trying to get at something else.”

She’s staring ahead at the water.

“Like, if I walk myself through all of this and again reach the conclusion that life is the way it is because a few dudes permitted themselves to make it this way, then I can defend myself from being seen as silly for imagining it all a different way on my own. I can imagine a different relationship with nature, or a different relationship with perception, or anything. I can remember that I don’t need permission to imagine what kind of existence I might want.”

The sun has dried my shorts.

“I don’t know. I think I’d like to view the world through the eyes of a swift, or maybe an angel, whatever that is. I mean, what does the ocean look like when it’s not a thing to cross? How does it move when we aren’t trying to use it?”

I lie down and spread my shirt over my face.

---

This landscape, the cold ocean, beach cakes for less than a buck—here, everything feels tried. Some of the streets are older than the States. The cafés are staid. There are sets of men who visit the same ones at the same time and sit outside at the same tables every day. People walk slowly to the metro and meet up with their mothers for lunch. Old castles can be toured as museums.

“I’m loading another bowl. Do you want some?”

Things here are unbelievably inefficient. The amount of stores we have to visit before finally getting what we want, or finding out we won’t. The amount of time it takes to receive a package. The way we’re seen as Americans. Locals question our living here as if we have some get-rich-quick scheme, and my explanations never satisfy them. America is still seen as a place to go to, not come from. Once deep-sea navigators and colonizers, the Portuguese now see themselves as poor. For the older ones, a dictatorship is still raw in memory.

“Hey, Hardy.”

Warm weather keeps the windows open. Even from inside our place, I can hear arguing, a newbie playing the trumpet, a moan, a woman balcony-monologing about respect for the home, for the sacred, about how inappropriately loud her neighbors have sex. Some other American with his snarky opinions of ex-colleagues. Clothes whip on the lines. Construction. A passing mob of lads, completely trashed, a bit disappointed in the nightlife this evening. The knife sharpener’s whistle.

“Hardy.”

A car stereo bruising.

“Hardy, I get it now.”

A piercing laugh at someone else’s expense.

“Hard, listen: I know what I want.”

--- Manda narrates ---

I feel like, with me and an audience, the public, with anyone, I’m always going back and forth between nudity and self-smothering, nudity and shame or fear.

One day, I’m raw, uncut, unplanned, first-take, off-the-cuff, the me that I am with myself, me without a notion of what me is, you know? I try to clear my head of rules and norms and anxieties, ask people my real questions, answer questions fully and honestly. I try to address all of the things I notice in facial expressions, movements, in the topics people avoid—rather than pretending that I don’t notice anything out of politeness or embarrassment, rather than hiding myself, when we’re all clearly hurt about something, or nothing, and just coping with what it means to be creatures who need to cope.

But then a few days or weeks later I’m completely fucking mortified. Ah! You know? What have I done? I expose myself out of what, at the time, I think is self-respect; out of respect for other people’s minutes, mortality, and then, next thing you know, I’m at the hospital being diagnosed with nothing more than a fucking anxiety attack. My head spinning off because it’s all become clear—in trying to display sincerity, I made it theater. I invited critique, or even worse, skepticism. I allowed it to be misunderstood, cheapened it. Priced and sold an invaluable.

I’ve gone from being vast, an unexplored ocean, to a person mapped and navigated. Simplified and reduced—I’ve been pinned and in a million different positions. There are now entirely new me’s in others’ minds that I have to challenge before, I’m afraid, they gain as much authority as the one in my own. Me’s that I have to spend months of effort—planned texts, rehearsed conversations, careful outfits—to refute, to complicate. And can I ever, really? Can I ever really change an insultingly reductive perception of me? And is a perception ever not insultingly reductive? Especially considering that these perceptions aren’t even clean, but tainted with centuries of insultingly reductive interpretations. I become a projection, an idol, a lie—my own, and then not even.

I want to be inconceivable.

I don’t want to stop living, to hide or guard myself for fear of misunderstanding, dismissal, manipulation, adoration. I want to live like nude each day, and then I don’t want anyone to be able to recall it! When the day ends, when the interaction ends—boom, restart. I want to erase people’s memories, I want to escape perception. Trapped by a mind, a different trap every mind I meet. I want to melt time, to live like a liquid. Who remembers the water they swallow? An intimate and essential and forgotten experience, not expected to be anything more than exactly what it was—pissed out, passed on, the end. Let go!

I want to be unfathomable!

I could change my name. Take no name. What’s a name supposed to mean to me if I don’t want anyone calling it? I’ll delete my social media, hire people to wipe me from the web, change my hair, dye it gray, and never stick around.

I want to do this over and over again, exist over and over again, and leave nobody to pin it on. I don’t want anyone to expect me to even acknowledge the person they thought I was yesterday. I don’t want to pick up anywhere except for somewhere completely…

Friday, September 13, 2024 (Email submission to [Lit Mag] editor)

80.88 KB1 file attached

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 (Email to [Lit Mag] editor)

“Hello [name redacted],

Good morning! I hope you've been doing well.

I'm messaging to ask for permission to include your feedback on my previous submission in an upcoming Substack post. If you'd prefer that I retract [intended to say “redact” here, I think] your name or the Journal's name, I completely understand. Please just let me know!

Additionally, how embarrassing, would you mind forwarding me the feedback you provided? It seems that [my email provider] encrypts all previous emails if one finds themselves locked out of their account...

Thank you,

Elise”

Thursday, March 13, 2025 (Edits made)

I want to be unfathomable!

---

“A new leaf,” Manda says.

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

A few weeks ago, I reread this work and found Manda tragic. Is that surprising? In her proposal, rather than in her predicament, of course. An existential crisis is reasonable. Her proposal, her solution, however, I no longer find to be.

I wrote this piece while revisiting Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, specifically his chapter “Being for Others,” and considered it to be an experiment. I wanted to portray the ideas he presents in this section of text in fiction form.

I took it on as an intellectual and artistic challenge more than anything. Could I absorb Sartre? Could I become Sartre as he was in the moment he came to these conclusions? Could I write a character, Manda, who consumes and becomes the entire story while simultaneously refusing his theory?

I was 26 at the time, and I did. I both swallowed and rejected him completely. I’m now 30, and I should report that coming out of this state wasn’t so easy. In No Exit, he writes, “Hell is other people.” I probably should have known better.

In her monologue, in her overtaking of Hardy and the narrative, Manda says,

“I’ve gone from being vast, an unexplored ocean, to a person mapped and navigated. Simplified and reduced—I’ve been pinned and in a million different positions. There are now entirely new me’s in others’ minds that I have to challenge before, I’m afraid, they gain as much authority as the one in my own. Me’s that I have to spend months of effort—planned texts, rehearsed conversations, careful outfits—to refute, to complicate. And can I ever, really? Can I ever really change an insultingly reductive perception of me? And is a perception ever not insultingly reductive? Especially considering that these perceptions aren’t even clean, but tainted with centuries of insultingly reductive interpretations. I become a projection, an idol, a lie—my own, and then not even.

I want to be inconceivable.”

If I tried again now, years later, to engage with this piece of text, it might continue more like this:

“I don’t want to stop living, to hide or guard myself for fear of misunderstanding, dismissal, manipulation, adoration. I want to live like nude each day, and then I want to claim myself, my right to define myself. I want to own my actions, my intentions. I want a say in how I’m seen, how I’m understood. I want to allow myself fluidity, contradiction, sophistication, and trust that these aspects of my personality will flesh me out as human, as living, as life, rather than product or object. I want to be remembered for inspiring confidence in humanity, in nature, in balance. Minds are not traps but new rooms, each one a new space for collaboration, for negotiation, for development, for discovery. Discovering new ways to see myself, to see the world, to see the other.

I want to be my own. I want to claim my name and the ancestors that led me to it, the processes and flows and events that placed me.

I want intimate and essential experiences, I want to remember them. I want more room, more rooms. A respectable house and prestige and lots of money!!! This story published!!! More stories published! I want to participate in artist residencies all over the world and work alongside intelligent and ingenious novelists and painters and actors and playwrights, sculptors, musicians, fashion designers, and beyond! I want to show my work in well-known galleries and museums and…

To be continued.

Elise’s Substack

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?