On "The Boxer"

and Ms. Lew's book club

It’s 2016. Mr. Fallik has just introduced us to Simon & Garfunkel and killer clowns are on the loose in South Florida. The year is really just a stage for the fear that lived in my body to reach its crux, perform its one man-show to exhaustion. When we learned about the devastating outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, I didn’t sleep for weeks, too preoccupied by the possibility of my contracting it. When we started seeing signs planted on front lawns around Miami Shores with the caricature of a gangly mosquito to warn us of Zika virus, I wore my long-sleeved uniform to filth and doused myself in bug spray everyday. The fear of getting bit, of course, mutated and grew teeth; I noticed liking my body more when my arms were covered.

It was around this time I started realizing my fears of being secretly and collectively hated by my friends were maybe not so outlandish after all. Maybe my anxieties were just clues pointing me to a grim truth: the group-chats I wasn’t in, the behind-my-back discussions of my fickle eating habits, or lack thereof. So on the days where I decided to eat at all, lunch started being had in Ms. Lew’s classroom, where we’d animatedly debate whatever latest tome she’d thrown my way. When she noticed the pace with which I devoured books in English class, she began assigning me extra classics to read, curating a private syllabus. A way of ensuring I was a fully formed reader by the time college rolled around.

It felt embarrassing to admit at the time, but Ms. Lew was probably my best friend. She was hard to please, which I liked. It made her desire to spend time with me mean something. It corrected the narrative that I was difficult to love. When she first arrived at Miami Country Day, she requested a small blue table be placed at the edge of the hallway, for no reason other than her desire to sit and observe. She appointed herself an unofficial hall monitor, a role for which she became widely known among students. “Stop running!” she would shout at passing boys. She was not particularly well-liked for it. I, however, was devoted to her.

In the mornings, I’d get to school early to sit with her and talk about Harvard. She would ask me to toast her a piece of raisin bread, carefully spreading peanut butter across its surface. She delighted in my being both highly opinionated and French, often asking me to translate poems or teach her curse words on demand. But more than anything, she loved the way I read for survival. She was the only person who did not treat my obsessive tendencies as something to be corrected. When I professed, with great conviction, hating War and Peace (I could not for the life of me remember anyone’s name in a cast too big, with names “too Russian”), she handed me the most frayed copy of Persuasion to ever exist, and told me, simply, to stop complaining.

Despite my tenacious reading habits that first led me to Ms. Lew’s company, I had never considered characterizing myself as a writer. The name felt ill-fitting—too modest, perhaps, or insufficiently impressive to distinguish me among my peers. It didn’t matter that I had won every single English award since my arrival to MCDS, or that my essays won contests, or that a poem I’d written the year prior had been published in a Poets&Writers Magazine. The idea did not occur to me until I began writing for the school newspaper, spearheaded by Mr. Fallik—Civics teacher and indefatigable advisor.

I changed my email signature to “Eva Harari | Writer and Journalist for The Spartacus” which didn’t change until my eventual promotion to Editor. I developed a sincere attachment to the title. It made me feel important for the first time, less because of the insinuated authority that came with it, but because it felt true. And when so much of my girlhood was spent fictionalizing myself into a person others may like, that honesty carried weight.

In the very back of his classroom, Mr. Fallik would often find me cooped up in his storage closet, laptop resting on my knees as I outlined my articles or revised my own teenage manifestos on the misfortunes of heartbreak. The small planet of that closet was perhaps the only place I felt safe at school. It was, for all intents and purposes, my zone. With the lights off and the glow of my computer screen, the fear stilled. Sometimes he’d pop his head in to remind me about deadlines and follow-up emails, or to offer me a selection of his seemingly endless supply of Trader Joe’s snacks, but for the most part, he let me be. I think he knew what it meant to have a room of one’s own. Even if it was borrowed, temporary, and 25 square feet.

I can’t remember what led him to introduce our class to “The Sound of Silence” one day, but I remember thinking they had the saddest voices I’d ever heard. Which was a pretty colossal testament coming from a 7th grader with an exclusively angsty taste in music. When he projected the music video on the smart board, the song had officially replaced War and Peace: it was impossible to understand and far too haunting to bear. Its subtle criticism of cultural modernity implied that society had replaced spiritual meaning with hollow symbols of progress. Afterwards, in the closet, I started feeling enormous guilt. For the darkness to be illuminated by my computer—by this gross interruption of human connection—was I forfeiting to Simon & Garfunkel? Was I proving their point? I stopped writing with the lights off and the stillness of the closet became unnerving, reminding me an awful lot of that empty, spacious sound. I worried it might even find a way to creep in.

It’s no secret I was scared a lot, but I’d never been freaked out by a song before. In retrospect, it reminded me a lot of meditating, a thing I always found impossible to do. When my mom would pick me up early from school on Tuesdays to take me to therapy, I always dreaded the beginning of our sessions when she’d ask me to close my eyes and clear my thoughts. This therapist whose name I can’t remember said it with such conviction. I was the kid who watched Peter Pan with her fists clenched—too concerned with Wendy and her brothers making a safe return home to enjoy their whimsical adventuring of Neverland. I read Alice and Wonderland once and never again, traumatized by the notion of being trapped in a lawless, backwards world without any grasp of control. Surely she knew panic lived in my blood, that there was no such thing as simply quieting the noise.

I told her about “The Sound of Silence” while I sat on her suede couch that was stained in three places. She said it wasn’t normal for 13-year-olds to fixate on things as severely as I did. She called them “my obsessions” like they were pets or a stamp collection.

Beyond her asinine labeling of my habits, I sort of liked therapy. This was, of course, before high school catapulted its dramas at me. Before love and real deceit and the dismantling of a life. At this age, I could still have fun with manipulating her into believing I was alright. That, and the exciting opportunity to flex my story-telling muscles as I monologued, mainly so as to keep her from talking. I told her exactly what she wanted to hear and once a week, when my mother was brought into the room and we volleyed insults back and forth, I watched her face crumple. There was something extremely satisfying about deceiving a supposed professional, the one person meant to have the tools necessary to crack open the mess of my brain and rearrange it into something coherent.

About a week after our introduction to the saddest song ever written, I came into Mr. Fallik’s classroom irate. I told him I didn’t like the song, and that not only did I find it completely depressing, but it was his fault I was being haunted by it. I insincerely thanked him for his lesson on music history and marched to the closet to work on my article. A half hour later, he knocked to recommend “The Boxer” and stop fixating on random things that played no role in the greater chronology of my life.

I ignored the latter half and did as I was told. I probably played it 15 times during the stretch of our class. It was a song about the sometimes humiliating endurance necessary to keep fighting when life repeatedly knocks you down. A young man surviving isolation, poverty, and disillusionment in a relentless New York City finally arrives at the image of the boxer: a figure battered but unyielding, defined less by victory than by refusal to quit.

“In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
’I am leaving, I am leaving’
But the fighter still remains”

I was not a boxer, or a young Paul Simon, but a girl standing at the precipice of something massive. I was staring into the gully of my adolescence, which would become a masterclass on shame and the carving of a self in the rubble. And yet, I had never experienced a song so resonant in its depiction of the way my mind could turn on itself. The feeling of being felled over and over again by the invisible opponent, or what middle aged women deigned “my obsessions.” Even as I promised I am leaving, I am leaving, some stubborn, impossible part of me always stayed in the ring.

“The Boxer” became the soundtrack to that year, backdropping the bus ride to school in the mornings and the aftermath of arguments with my parents. But beyond that, it, at last, became a reckoning with the idea that there was something lodged in my brain. Some idle thorn that snagged onto every passing thought, fear, and confession. I couldn’t let things go, predominantly because I couldn’t stand failure. And not seeing everything through to the very last pulse of its wings felt like failing.

Listening to it, I was reminded of a young Eva trying to reach God’s ear, the anecdote of a 5-year-old me draping myself along the foot of my bed and bringing my hands together in prayer. I’d pray to my Cinderella slippers or The Magic Treehouse series, starting every one with “Dear God” like an out-loud diary entry. I think I had seen this in a princess movie before. I convinced myself that if I didn’t pray every night, everyone I loved would die a gruesome death and their blood would be on my hands. I can’t remember how long I performed this ritual for until one day my dad walked in on his little Jewish daughter praying to an object and had to explain to me that Jews are not allowed to idol worship. I was beside myself with worry. Not only had I betrayed my own faith and would presumably pay an inconceivable price for my treachery, but I would have to face the enormous fallout of not being able to pray everyone into safety.

That’s where I found God. Deep in the girl-well of my fear.

My parents were never the kind to label; certainly not when it came to handing out diagnoses to their children. I was raised by two French/North African immigrants who resisted diagnosing kids with anything other than a cold. And even then, it could be remedied at home without doctor intervention or the need to freak anyone out with a big, scary fuss. They were hugely against telling kids there was anything wrong with them. When they eventually conceded to the therapy as a last resort, I think a part of them was always worried about what labels would be thrust my way and my inevitable internalizing of them.

So I cheated my way through therapy, and I found little corners of the universe where it felt quiet enough, dark enough to sit still and write. I read like it was the antidote to fear. I obsessed over things that felt harmless at the time: my body and food and female friendships. I didn’t know how to navigate it all without a name, without a category to contain me. To move through it all unclassified—to exist without a label—was its own kind of torment. Free floating like that, it was a great pain to know there was something wrong and know that learning its name would propel me further into my own fear.

Halfway through the following school year, Ms. Lew got sick and retired. I was asked to write a tribute to her legacy for the paper. When I first found out she was leaving, I was devastated, but beneath that lived something harder. I was so angry that she’d left me alone in what felt like an increasingly unmanageable ecosystem. In the closet, I was drafting interview questions and listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s discography when her email came through.

“Please take the Harvard bear. Please take the pictures off the bulletin board and ask Miss John to hold them until I know. Also there’s a loaf of bread in my bottom desk drawer. Please throw it out. Call me whenever. Much love, me.”

I took the bear and the pictures. We wrote to each other often. About Harvard and moving away and Sense and Sensibility. When she died a few months later, I didn’t know what to do with the hope she had in me. Did it just die with her? The only person on the planet who thought of me, already, as an accomplished writer. In her eyes, I was never “my obsessions,” I was just a horizon—a future she never doubted. Her last email to me read:

“Thinking of you. Let me know what you're reading. Give my love to all! Really getting better! Much love, me.”

---

I’m revisiting Mary Oliver’s poems. They make me feel 14 again, enchanted with whatever mysterious enlightenment lives in the woods. And I’ve been listening to “The Boxer.” On the train, I carry The Night of the Gun by David Carr (because one must always have a book reserved for public transit). I’m writing furiously, entirely because of that hope. Entirely because it didn’t disappear with her.

Much love,

Me