SOPHIE PANZER
cw – suicide
Family History
I met the great-granddaughter of a famous 20th-century writer at a hostel in Dubrovnik last summer. We were both college students – I was studying her relative and she was studying to be an opera singer. We went out to eat and sightsee with a few other solo travelers. The group badgered the opera student constantly for a performance. She laughed us off and it became a running joke where we tried to catch her off guard, thinking she might relent if we asked at the right moment. Walking the old city walls – sing! Eating gelato in Loggia Square – sing! Floating belly-up in the Adriatic – sing! Again and again she refused. Here? You must be joking. Or back at the hostel, No, I’m tired. We began to wonder if she was lying. It wasn’t until her last night that she stood at the front of the lounge and unleashed a soaring aria. There were twelve people in the room and every single one was motionless; even the bored Croatian teenager at the reception desk was transfixed. When she finished we rose to our feet and applauded. She smiled, bowed, and left the room. A few hours later I found her crying in a toilet stall. I wet paper towels in the sink so she could press them against her swollen eyelids. She said she loved to sing but she hated performing for people – she went to school for opera because she felt she had no other skill, no other choice. She didn’t want to go back but she didn’t want to do anything else and she felt her life was devoid of purpose and shouldn’t go on. Her great-grandfather was as famous for his suicide as he was for his novels. My professors had assigned readings about how fame had corroded him, how the demands of his audience had been too much. I asked if she had anything on her. She handed me a bottle of little blue pills from her pocket and I poured them down the drain. I told her that she didn’t owe us anything and that most people have no talents to speak of and it was ok if she wanted to be like the rest of us and only sing in the shower. I don’t know who I am without this, she said. You have to believe you’re better, I replied.
Sophie Panzer is the author of the chapbooks Survive July (Red Bird Chapbooks 2019), Mothers of the Apocalypse (Ethel Press 2019), and Bone Church (dancing girl press 2020). Her work appears or is forthcoming in New World Writing, Heavy Feather Review, MAYDAY, hex literary, The Lumiere Review, and others. She lives in Philadelphia.