On Witnessing

Jan 06, 2026

On Witnessing - Literary essay AI illustration of a barren tree by Marble & Ember

Marble froze the city in beauty.
Ember remembers what it means to remain alive.

The train was already moving when she chose the seat beside me.
There were other empty seats. She looked at them, then at me, and sat.

Her coat was too big for her. It swallowed her shoulders. She smelled faintly of soap.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

I told her I was going home, and she nodded, as if this confirmed something.

Then, without waiting, she told me where she was going, and why, and who she had just visited, all in one breath.

Her daughter was dying.

She said it plainly, with the same tone someone might use to remark on the weather.

Cancer.

Her daughter was forty-five years old, had once weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds, now weighed under a hundred, and she laughed as the number left her mouth—not because it was funny, but because it surprised her.

I didn’t nod or smile, didn’t interrupt her, didn’t ask her to explain.

The train rattled on. Outside, the fields slid past in long, tired strips.

The year before, she’d had a stroke. She touched her left arm to show me how it didn’t always obey her, though it was better now. She used to be a dancer, had worked in hospitals, and lived alone in a house on a mountain. The air there was clean, she said, and sometimes too quiet.

She spoke quickly. If she slowed down, the words might falter. Some sentences ran into one another. Others stopped before they were finished.

I wondered briefly if she was confused. I wondered if she was lonely.

She asked where I was from. I told her. She frowned. She didn’t like the place. A woman couldn’t walk alone there. People had told her not to go out after sunset.

I knew it wasn’t like that. I could have said something. I didn’t. Correcting her would have turned this into a matter of fact. And this wasn’t about facts.

Some men had threatened her, she told me. She kicked them. She had been a dancer and knew how to use her legs. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. She moved away anyway.

I didn’t nod or smile. I didn’t interrupt her or ask her to explain.

I let the story stand the way it wanted to stand—tall in some places, crooked in others.

Her husband had gone to North Africa to build houses. The work, she said, was secret. He had been taken to places she couldn’t name and paid in gold.

She watched my face as she spoke. I stayed still. I didn’t show disbelief and I didn’t invite it. She looked away and went on.

Her husband had never even had a fever, she said, and then, one day, he suffered a stroke. She spent four years taking care of him. At the end there was cancer too. When he died, she remembered the Alpini singing at the funeral. She remembered touching the grave. After that, she didn’t remember much at all.

She looked straight ahead as she spoke. Her voice didn’t change.

For three years she barely slept. She felt as though she wasn’t alive. Slowly—very slowly—she began to dance again, with elderly people, in a small circle. That was how she came back.

She reached into her bag and took out a small bottle. The liquid inside was the color of honey. She held it up.

“It’s not tea. It’s Jack Daniel’s with water. Because I like it.”

She took a small sip and put it away.

“We have to keep going.”

After a moment, “You know.”

She didn’t look at me when she said it. Still, I knew she was speaking with me, not at me.

She had never said she was in pain. It was there the way weather is there, whether or not you name it.

When the train slowed, I stood. I told her I had to get off. I hesitated. I didn’t know what to say. “Have a good evening” felt wrong. I put my hand on her arm. Her skin was warm.

“Take care of yourself.”

I meant: I saw you.
I meant: you’re allowed to keep going.
I meant: you don’t have to perform here.

She looked up at me and smiled. A wide smile, real, and still shy, as though she weren’t sure she was allowed to receive it. There was gratitude in it, even if she didn’t yet have the word for it.

I got off the train. The doors closed. The train moved on.

I don’t know how sane she was. I don’t know how much of what she told me was true. I don’t know what happened when she got home, alone in her house on the mountain. I don’t know whether her daughter is still alive. I don’t know if she kept dancing.

What I know is that she was not finished. She was uneven, excessive, difficult to place. She moved forward carrying damage, contradictions, stories that didn’t line up. Nothing about her was preserved. Nothing about her was resolved.

She was still in motion.

And for a while, she wasn’t alone inside herself.