Love’s. Old. Sweet. Song.

Jessica Cuello’s essay, “Your Life for Another,” was our Literary Non-Fiction winner of the 2025 Robert and Adele Schiff Award. This year’s prize remains open until July 15!

I began going through old boxes to find documents from the time period in “Your Life for Another.” As a child, I’d saved diaries, notes, letters, and school work. By age five, I think I was already trying to stave off loss by keeping my own personal archive. There are hardly any photos in the water-stained box that contained these items, but there is a single photo at my college graduation with the friend in this essay.

I’ve kept a binder of student notes and letters since I started teaching in 1996. It contains hundreds of letters from students, and there was a time when I used to read them on dark, discouraging days. I no longer have that need, perhaps because I’ve finally separated my own needs out from teaching, but I still have the heartbreaking note from the essay.

In the box, I found my reading syllabus for Ulysses from 1993. How beautiful were those documents that organized the learning we would do in a class. I still love to look at them.

Against all conditioning of my formative years in public schools, I marked up my copy of Ulysses to make this collage. Books were not ours; books were things borrowed from schools or libraries. Even when I began buying my own books, I would never dare mark them up: I owned them, but they were not mine. This is one of those rigid inheritances that I’ve slowly relinquished. As for the collage and its commentary on the essay: the loss of female friendships hurt my heart more than any romantic loss. I thought, for years, that the loss of a relationship was a personal failure. I thought that you had to martyr yourself in order to keep a person.