Split Reel by Gabriella Graceffo
Gabriella Graceffo’s “Split Reel” is one of two pieces selected as an editors’ choice for the 2025 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. This year our editors were drawn to work that demonstrates excellence in prose and innovative approaches to difficult subjects.
The narrator in Gabriella Graceffo’s experimental lyric essay recalls herself in a movie theater at the age of twenty, curious about sex, afraid of contact: “I don’t know how to tell anyone that I’m desperate to be touched and terrified of what might happen if I let them.” Only gradually does her terror take on added meaning. Splitting the reel, Graceffo divides the story of her fascination with film into segments that appear simultaneously, in two columns that can be read sequentially or in pairs. One column focuses primarily on touch and the narrator’s sexual experiences, direct and indirect, the other on her hidden medical condition, how her “body keeps a record of each small damage” in hyperpigmentation and scarring. The editors were impressed by Graceffo’s assured writing and the stunning resolution in this essay, as all of the strands—romance, film, television, skin, sex, touch, marks—come together in the unified closing section. No longer a “silent record,” her body becomes “a language [she] can teach others to speak as [she] learns to speak theirs in return.” —CRAFT
1A
I slip into a crowded theater to feel close to people without being seen. My elbow just barely on the armrest, I watch the film color the room yellow then blue, each face in my peripheral blurred by light. I am twenty. I don’t understand the language the characters in the film use, the language the people around me know—instead I look at their mouths, each gesture, feel the current of laughter and nervous tics as the film drags along in spots. Couples lean inward throughout the theater, one in front of me whispering in Dutch as the boy feeds popcorn to the girl. A man two rows ahead turns back to shush them. I feel his eyes lock on mine and soften, a look somewhere between threat and innuendo. My throat tightens squeezes releases when he turns back to the screen. Bodies have a language I’m desperate to learn, one I thought I knew but have never really understood at all.
The woman beside me wears perfume that smells like the magnolia trees back home, and I briefly imagine kissing her. I don’t know what she looks like, having hurried into the theater well after the lights dimmed. Her hands are older than mine. Each time she takes a sip of her coke, she wipes condensation from her fingers, and I can’t help but stare, distracted from the film. I have only been kissed once, and it wasn’t pleasant. I want to be taught, to be perfect, to be connected in the easy way lovers find themselves together on-screen. Every time I try—if I try—something goes wrong. It’s easier, somehow, being in this city where no one knows me, where I am just another tourist, where there aren’t expectations I fail to meet. It is also the loneliest I’ve ever been.
Before the film ends, I leave the theater and rush into the street, still unseen. A man walks toward me, his footsteps made staccato by alcohol; I cross to the other sidewalk, then return. I weave the road, again and again. I never let anyone get too close.
1B
The old CRT television hums when I hover my hand just above the screen. It feels like smooth fur, or mold on strawberries left out too long. I press my fingers closer, millimeter by millimeter, until a shock sends me squealing backward. They haven’t taught us in fourth grade about electrostatic induction or anode voltage, so it seems like magic. It’s worth a little sting.
On nights I can’t sleep, I turn on the television to watch the static. My brother says it looks like snow; I see people dancing. And mouths, opening and closing. Knees to my chest, I track the movements and try to carve out patterns.
I flick the television back on and sit in front of the static. The white light catches on my shins, on the many scars there. Some are overgrown, new skin bunched across old. Most look like bruises but don’t fade. Each doctor escorts my parents from the examination room to ask if I’m okay once we’re alone, having overlooked the notes in my chart about hyperpigmentation, weak bones, and an assurance of safety. I stopped playing sports, pulled out of tomboyish roughhousing, knowing my body keeps a record of each small damage.
The television is safe. I can live in movies without anything staying on my body. The women on-screen have perfect skin; when they’re touched, they don’t carry the mark of it. If there’s blood, it washes off and a bandage covers the fake wound. I watch and keep watching, ignoring how jealousy eats a hole in my stomach.
If I watch the static when the sun starts to rise, I can see my reflection in the screen, the static touching the edges of my face. Once I’m bored, I switch off the television, feel the fuzz and then the shock.
It’s one of the few touches I can guarantee won’t last.
2A
The first sex scene I encounter is in a museum theater full of old couples. I didn’t expect it. I’d seen abbreviations of sex on network shows and had known what my mother was fast-forwarding when we watched Titanic together. This is the first time seeing the act in full. It isn’t arousing, only awkward among the elderly men and women as I tuck further into my chair.
The movie has two sex scenes. I look away from the first, focusing instead on the light pouring from the projector’s mouth, all the colors sifting through dust while the fictional couple moans. The second scene I do watch. The camera shows both the man and woman naked but only focuses on her pleasure. I lean in as the close-ups move across the screen, sharp angles on her skin from the shadows. It’s fascinating, what bodies look like in a tiny frame, how they can be cut and shaped into something new.
After the screening ends, I walk into the smallest corridor of the museum: a glass stairwell overlooking the museum’s reflecting pool. The wall makes an envelope of light around the room. I found this spot as a child, entranced by the water lapping at the wall, expecting it to flood my shoes. Today, the pool is still.
Museumgoers move around me in the water’s reflection. I stand there for what could be hours but is probably minutes. Families occasionally pass through, docents with groups in single file behind them, a teenager who blows a vape near my ear before going upstairs. Someone brushes my hip—I jolt, immediately every hair standing on end. The man apologizes and shuffles away without meeting my eyes. My skin buzzes, prickling with anticipation of a new bruise, a new mark.
I don’t know how to tell anyone that I’m desperate to be touched and terrified of what might happen if I let them.
2B
Keep still, she tells me, and I do. I couldn’t move if I wanted, too scared the curling iron will spear through my neck and surely cut off my head.
The other girls lie sprawled across the bedroom watching Scream on the mini-TV, she and I sitting on a flower rug crusted with sugar from gas station candy. I keep my legs tight beneath the edges of my dress, hyperaware that they could see the scars if I’m not careful. I barely know them, only invited because one of their especially Texan mothers said it would be rude for me not to join since I’d overheard them making plans. It wasn’t kindness but obligation, a trait nurtured generation to generation, the same one that made me agree to come.
Heat snaps into my neck and I jump, which only makes the curling iron burn me again. I said keep still! The two other girls look over at us, stopping their conversation about the efficacy of hand jobs at twelve.
One points at my knee, where my dress has ridden up. You don’t shave?
I clamp one hand around my neck and the other around my knee, shaking my head. My mom doesn’t want me to yet, I say, and I know it’s the wrong answer by the sound she makes. The girl with the curling iron tugs my shoulders and suddenly we’re in the bathroom, the tap running, and she shoves a disposable razor into my hand. She keeps the door open when she leaves, staring at me from the flower rug. I understand the command. I cut myself three times, blood running into the water.
When it’s done, the other girls stare at my legs, the fresh cuts and old scars. The one on the rug gives me a look close to pity while I listen to a girl die on-screen.
At least they look like hickeys, one of them says, tapping her neck. Makes you look like less of a prude.
3A
In an AV class, I learn to write scripts for commercials and PSAs, recording them as voiceovers set to free stock footage. Each video is precise and exactly what I expect. Between assignments, we watch old movies to study cinematography. The teacher has a penchant for Jimmy Stewart, so we analyze Rear Window for weeks. Watching the protagonist spy on other people, I feel a little less shameful about my obsession of peoplewatching; I’ve been scolded all my life for staring, and here is a man with binoculars snooping on his neighbors, clearly worse than my casual hobby.
Unlike me, he has a girlfriend. Their conversations don’t feel real, the handoffs too rehearsed, the cadences overly rhythmic, but I love that about them: everything goes according to plan. In real life, I keep to myself, watching other people’s romances in cafés and bookstores, wishing I knew how to access intimacy without a script.
I go to the theater four blocks from my apartment and watch reruns of old movies, black-and-white romances with Hollywood starlets that always seem happy in the end, if I look past certain details. There’s a bar in the foyer, and I arrive early so I can look for a middle-aged couple that comes to every showing; they coordinate their outfits and I want to see what they’ve come up with this time. Pink button-downs and navy pants. A bit lackluster. On the other side of the bar, I notice a classmate from a seminar sitting there, watching me watching them. He waves, but I only recognize the movement once I’m already sitting in the theater.
The next week, I see him again at a department-sponsored film screening. We’re a few seats apart, and he walks over before the movie starts. I mumble something and he asks me to repeat myself, but I can only stare at his fingers, striped with fine scars and calluses. I wonder what they would feel like on my skin, if they would be smooth or rough. He notices and tells me he’s a classical guitarist, asks if I want to touch them. I reach out without hesitation before I realize I don’t know him, don’t know what he’s capable of, and snatch my hand back, fear a hot blade in my throat. Please, I just want to watch the movie, I say. He shrugs, calls me puta under his breath, and sits as the lights fade.
I don’t watch the movie. I don’t even remember its name.
3B
By fifteen I fall in love with creature features: Jaws, Jurassic Park, Godzilla, The Mummy, Frankenstein, any film with some spectacle of the nonhuman. I watch every behind-the-scenes DVD feature to learn how the actors transform into monsters with prosthetics and paint. It’s a game: try to see the person inside the monster suit, the wires inside the animatronic.
At fifteen, I start wearing makeup. Heavy foundation and winged eyeliner, a separate tube of cover-up for my scars. I’ve only gotten more with age. I don’t wear skirts without tights, never shorts, and keep my arms out of the sun.
We could talk about treatment, if you want, a woman tells me one day. She looks at me across the receptionist’s desk in the waiting room of the esthetician’s clinic where my mother is having melasma lasered off her face. I glare at the receptionist: dewy skin, strong lips, blonde hair freshly dyed. Perfect product placement.
I’m here for my mom, not me, I say, wishing I could go see-through in the armchair.
She juts her chin toward my jeans and long sleeves. It’s 104 out. I used to hide myself, too. We can help.
I’m not interested.
Okay, but if price is the issue, we have lots of small treatments and payment plans—
I’m under eighteen.
She stops, the sales pitch abandoned. My mother informed me of the clinic’s age policy when I’d asked if they could do family pricing for hyperpigmentation treatment. Jaw clenched, I tug on the edges of my shirt.
I watch The Twilight Zone when we get home, part of a school assignment. A woman begs her nurse to remove the bandages wrapped around her face after another reconstructive surgery. The doctor warns her that should the surgery not be successful, she may be separated from society to avoid frightening others with her disfigurement. After the bandages fall away, the camera shows a close-up of a beautiful woman, the pig-nosed and fish-mouthed medical staff devastated at the failed procedure.
I snap my laptop closed. I understand the irony, the point. But it feels like a betrayal all the same.
4A
The blue film is dyed blue. The stripper dances and sways, never quite in focus on the projection screen, everything a shade of cobalt. A woman’s voice croons “Autumn Leaves” through the speakers set up around the dark auditorium. It’s beautiful, the shapes and sound of the porn film made into an art piece.
I look over at my professor, curious what he’s feeling as he sees the audience’s reactions to the project he spent so long creating. The woman next to me blushes; the men behind snicker about their Pornhub preferences. I don’t pay attention to them for long, too absorbed in watching the dancer on screen, wondering how many men ogled her in burlesque halls and strip clubs in the 1950s and ’60s—if the way my own body responds to hers makes me less of a feminist. The woman on-screen, Juanita Slusher, saw her dancing as a form of creative expression. She said she loved what she did.
However reverent my professor was with the material—the blue film given to him by his grandfather in what I assume was a rite of passage—I can’t ignore the way my skin crawls thinking about the image of her in a man’s hands, her body displayed at film festivals and exhibition halls like this one long after she died. The found footage is legal to use without consent because of added intertitles and chemical manipulations which turned the black and white movie blue. Though the cyanotype chemistry abstracts her form, nudity blurred, the piece still feels like a violation without the dead woman’s permission. But I keep watching, unable to look away.
In the university’s darkroom that afternoon, as I print negatives on acetate sheets for my own cyanotypes, my friend raves about our professor’s work while she processes a film reel in a handheld developing tank.
It’s a love letter to her, and it’s beautiful, but I’m not sure her body is his to share, I say. She nods, leaning against the drying cabinet full of student film. Neither of us has dated anyone, and all our professors and classmates think we’ve been in a relationship for years, attached at the hip in every class. And I do think about her that way sometimes. I almost tell her in a dozen conversations but never do. I would trust her with my first time, with my scars, but I can’t read her body to know if we speak the same language, if my translation of interest is correct.
I wait for something with more certainty, which never comes.
4B
Hot singles in your area—babes who want YOU! Click here to get in contact. I hit every exit button as pop-ups flood the computer screen, the motions routine by now. Refusing to pay for movie rentals or streaming services, I learned video piracy early. Closing porn ads on the less-than-legal sites became second nature. After dispensing with four more pop-ups, I finally press play and the opening credits for The Breakfast Club appear in the video window.
A message pings across the screen: My name is Helga. What’s yours? Even though I know she isn’t real, that clicking on the banner will infect my laptop within seconds, I hover my cursor over it, tempted. I picture a Scandinavian woman in a milkmaid dress, but never get so far as imagining her breasts before I suppress the thought and shut down the browser. I tell myself that I’m just jealous of the way other girls look, their clear skin, how they’re confident in a way I never will be. Almost an adult, this lie has been habit for three years.
I open a new browser and go to a blog site, where I use a fake name and fake pictures. You’re catfishing? my stepbrother asked once. I shook my head. No, I just don’t want to be me for a little while. It isn’t romantic in any sense—I learned that lesson on accident using Omegle at thirteen. Instead, I make friends on the internet sharing film and television recommendations, sending links to the pirated videos and counting down the seconds so we can watch them together at the same time.
The site isn’t regulated, and I know there’s porn on it if I were to look. I never have. Thinking of Helga, I go to the search tab and type sex + scar, hit enter before I have time to second-guess the impulse. Video clips fill the screen and instantly I know I’ve made a mistake: naked women with hot wax poured on their chests, spiked tools that look like pastry cutters digging into their skin. I gasp and my hand swipes over the trackpad, seeing countless women and countless men marking them. Nausea squeezes through me. I click out of everything, breathing hard, staring at the bedroom door to make sure it stays closed.
Hours later, I can’t sleep, not from squeamishness, but because I realize my body’s scarring could be desirable, if I let someone mark me. And that I could be willing to let it happen, even though it disgusts me, if it means I wouldn’t be alone.
5A
There is blood, but not much. The first person to express clear interest, I’m glad it was a man I was already friends with, though I knew the lesbian who’d taken me under her wing when I’d come out as bisexual would be peeved it was a man despite my preference for women. He taught me how to kiss, how to relax so he could slip inside, and I listened. Now, on the bed in an apartment I’m renting in Tuscany for a graphic design internship, I stare at the blood on his fingers.
I’m sorry; I should have said something, I say as he washes his hands in the kitchen before returning to me. I feel scraped raw, his nails sharper than they should be. He shrugs, and I remind myself to relax as he touches me. I’ll leave in three days and never see him again, so when things go wrong, I won’t have to face him. It was the reason I said yes when he asked if I wanted to try something sexual, despite my fears, and I never shared those with him. When he sucks on my neck, I don’t tell him I hate the feeling. When he bites the skin above my collarbone, moving my shirt back, I don’t tell him it will scar. He checks in with each new action, but I hold my tongue to keep myself from ruining the moment, trying to train myself into liking the idea of being marked with sex.
He takes off his shirt, and I see circular scars dotted across his arms, all the same shape and size. I’ve never seen them before, his scars hidden just like mine. If they bother you, I can keep my shirt on, he says, blunt as he’s always been. I shake my head, staring at the floor.
No, it’s okay. I have them, too. I don’t let anyone see them, even though most of them are faded by now. I still see them even if other people can’t. Seeing his burns makes the tension in me ease, if only slightly. I pinch the edge of my shirt, hold it for a moment, then lift it over my head and look with him at the scars across my skin, the ones still dark and those almost gone.
I don’t even know what most of them are from, I say. My body doesn’t heal right, so any scratch or cut or even a bad bruise stays for years and years, I explain. He nods, his fingers drifting toward my skin, and I catch them and carry his hand the rest of the way. The movement is light, almost reverent. He doesn’t comment on the marks he made but doesn’t make another. I trace the outline of each of his scars. I wonder if anyone else has touched his scars this way, and I can’t decide if I like him touching mine.
I…I think I want to stop, I say.
Sure. Do you want me to leave?
No, stay.
I grab his hand, flatten it against my sternum. We lie there for a while, skin to skin, until I can’t stand the feeling of open air on my scars anymore and put my shirt back on. He does the same. He holds me through the night.
I turn on the television out of habit. The only thing that comes through the old system past midnight is the Italian home shopping channel. Two women on-screen sell lotions and creams, one of a thousand advertisements I’ve seen promising skin cell turnover and scar lightening, but the channel is more entertaining to watch in Italian than English. Maybe just for the novelty of it. By the time I think to turn it off, the hosts have switched to cordless vacuums. But where the idea of skin bleaching usually stays in my head, needling me for hours, this time it’s easier to ignore.
He leaves the next morning and I never see him again. Two bruises sit on my neck, another on my collarbone. I hate the way they look and don’t pretend to love them. The night feels like an even exchange, three marks for the knowledge I should have known but had refused to accept: that another’s touch doesn’t have to scar if I don’t want it to. That my body is not a silent record, but a language I can teach others to speak as I learn to speak theirs in return.
5B
The movie flickers over rows and rows of cars, all our radios spooling sound across the drive-in lot. After the first film, some spinoff of an old franchise, I leave the driver’s seat and sit on my car’s hood with another girl. We can barely hear the opening theme on the radio as the next movie starts. Our hair hangs loose across the windshield; mine catches on the wipers. The girl, a half-stranger from the college hosting this first-year bonding activity, laughs and pulls stray leaves from the strands. Her thumb grazes my shoulder blade, right above a patch of scarred skin.
I bolt upright, and the hood bows inward with the sudden movement. Her eyes are amber in the projector light. I almost say so when she points to the car beside ours. Look! I think they’re having sex, or at least hardcore making out. The car has tinted windows, and shapes move inside it, the chassis dipping left and right. Heat crawls up my neck as I settle against the windshield.
Hey, you’re an art major, right? she asks.
Yeah? Why? I answer.
Some of us are doing temporary tattoos back at the dorm if you want to join—it’s like henna but stronger. I want a solar system on my back but don’t trust the other girls to do it right. You know how to draw, though, so you’d be perfect. Is that okay?
Um…yeah. I swallow, then nod. Yeah, sure.
When we get back, she doesn’t waste time stripping, lying flat on the rug with the expanse of her back exposed. Other girls cluster around the room, helping each other with bottles of ink paste someone bought online.
I straddle her back and pipe circles along her spine, the bottle tight in my hands so the lines are straight despite my shaking. By the time I draw Saturn, I’m too absorbed in the work to be nervous.
Did you hear me? she asks, turning her head back to look at me.
No, sorry, I—
She chuckles, the movement rushing through me on top of her. I asked if you wanted me to tattoo you?
I freeze, everything cold. I shouldn’t do that.
Why not? It’s safe and fades in a few weeks. And I’m not half-bad.
I shake my head, a knot tightening in my chest. No, I’ve got these…I just don’t—
Hey, hey, no pressure, she assures me. She gestures at my hand on the bottle. We could just do something on your hand, if you don’t want to take any clothes off.
I consider her, looking at the expanse between my thumb and forefinger. There is an old scar, but it’s faint after so many years, only a whisper of purple left. Rubbing the skin, I look at her and give a soft nod. Okay. I’m almost done.
She sits up after I make the last mark, shirt bunched around her neck and draped across her front, and holds my hand in hers. The ink is colder than I expect. She takes her time piping the floral design, each petal and the long stem I asked her to draw. When she finishes, she blows on it, and I can’t help but memorize the shape of her mouth.
Try not to touch it for a few hours, but if it smudges, it’ll fade fast.
In my own room, hand dangling over the mattress to keep the design safe, I order my own bottle of ink paste. It had never occurred to me that I could choose the marks on my body, the pigment it holds.
When the ink arrives, I start piping designs everywhere, over the scars, between them, incorporating their shapes into the tattoos. And when I get good at it, I decide I want to show them to her.
And I do, scars and all.
The tattoo gun buzzes in and out of my skin, a handful of orange blossoms beginning to crawl up my forearm. The hum of the needles reminds me of the sound of film running through a projector. I only get botanical tattoos, the first a lavender bundle that I rub when I’m anxious; it never fades, no matter how much I worry the skin there. But I don’t mind.
What other tattoos are you thinking about? The tattoo artist flicks a glance at me, eyebrow raised.
A fern somewhere, a little rue on my ankle, maybe sage behind my ear? Probably tea leaves since I drink so much matcha. I’m still trying to decide on placement more than the designs, really, I say.
It’s smart to think about. These things are permanent, right? She laughs, finishing a leaf that curls around an old burn from cooking oil. The scar looks like the leaf’s shadow, just as I’d asked.
All right, I think we’re all done, she says, holding up a mirror. Anything else you’d like me to do?
I point my finger along the edges of the blossoms. I’d like these a bit darker, just to make sure they’re fully defined.
She agrees and adds bolder lines, careful to use my freckles and hyperpigmented scars to look like color variegation on the petals. While most of my scars have faded, new ones still hold strong. I don’t hide them now, but I do try to help my body heal after the damage. I follow every step of tattoo aftercare to the letter. A week later, I rub moisturizer across the new tattoo, the black ink bright on my skin.
Can I touch it? I look at my partner, the one I never thought I’d have. He smiles when I nod, his curls mopped over his forehead. I guide his finger lightly over the tattoo, the lines still raised as the swelling dies down. He’s gentle with it, as he is with everything between us unless I say otherwise. Our love, years of it now, has the kind of softness I associate with old celluloid, a pleasant blurring at the edges of our bodies. Which is only appropriate, as our early dating consisted of watching Casablanca and other romances on his television, wrapped tightly together under a blanket with the heating broken in the dead of Montana winter. He has never made a scar on my body, but knows every inch of me as I know him.
That night, we go to the theater and watch another movie on film, the projectionist shuffling above us as she inserts reel after reel. We share popcorn and butter drips down my wrist, across the tattoo, before I wipe it away as the credits begin to roll.
I’m careful with the tattoo, this one and the rest.
I want these marks to last.
GABRIELLA GRACEFFO is a poet, essayist, and photographer based in Missoula, Montana. She received her MFA in Poetry, MA in Literature, and PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (English and Psychology) from the University of Montana. Her writing, which explores themes of sexuality, trauma, chronic illness, place, and artmaking, has appeared in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Hippocampus, and more. She serves as Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest, Program Coordinator of The National Poetry Series, and Editorial Assistant to Julie Stevenson at Massie, McQuilkin, & Altman. She is currently working on her memoir-in-essays and a novel. Find her on Instagram @gabi_graceffo.
Featured image by Noom Peerapong, courtesy of Unsplash.
