One Love

He wasn't the first, nor was he the worst. He certainly wasn't the last.
He just... was.
He was neither good looking, nor smart. He was a tedious and dull conversationalist. He didn't have any passions, to speak of. He didn't believe anything. He wasn't a very hard worker, but he wasn't spectacularly lazy, either. He wasn't particularly good-hearted, but he wasn't evil. He didn't seek any kind of greater good; he didn't really seek anything at all.
He just kind of... was.

He was a friend of friends. We ran loosely in the same circles. He was always just kind of... there. He wasn't particularly outgoing or funny. In fact, the only reason I noticed him at all was because I found him vaguely repellent. He had bad skin. Not acne, per se. Not the sort of grotesque acne that, when outgrown, would give him a certain pockmarked ruggedness. He just had random pustules. Mammoth whiteheads in odd places that would stay around for days. I couldn't talk to him without wanting to reach out and pop them. His chin was minimal and it seemed like all of his teeth grew in on top of each other right in the front. He was a little bit shorter than I am, and a little bit pigeon-toed. He laughed at his own jokes and did Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations. We had nothing in common. Except Bob Marley. We dated for six months.

He bought me a One Love bumper sticker for my car, which pretty much guaranteed my getting pulled over all the time. He said we had that One Love. That universal, all encompassing, gather up the world in a happy ganja haze kind of love. I nodded and averted my eyes. I am not a Rastafarian, but I do understand One Love. It's the kind of love that sees a boy whose parents are in the midst of a messy divorce, whose lifelong friend and older brother-figure is dying of AIDS. A boy who dropped out of college because it was just too hard and it made no sense to him. A boy who loved a girl who was maddening and foreign to him. A boy who was trying to be a man and had no idea how. A boy whose heart had been broken by people he loved the most; a boy who needed love. It's the kind of love that sees through the pimples and the pigeon toes and commits to six months of excruciating boredom and squalor because she wants to help this boy.

But people are not puppies or kittens. They cannot be gathered and cared for and fed and then released back into the wilds of their own lives. I mistook my compassion for humanity in general for commitment to this one particular person. For six months he tried so hard to be someone he wasn't, could never be, for me. He hurled himself against the wall of my expectations over and over, always coming up short. Even worse, I degraded him with my loving efforts: I paid his rent, I gave him rides to work when his own car got repossessed, I tried to dress him and feed him and convince him to read. I didn't let him be who he was, find his own way, make his own mistakes because I was so intent on improving him. I am ashamed by the sheer hubris of this notion as I write.

I was young, inexperienced, reeling from my own broken heart. Rather than face my own mess, I went about trying to keep someone else's house. In my effort to hide from myself, I coated my intentions with love, with generosity, with compassion. When he asked me to marry him, I almost threw up. I told him no, that couldn't possibly happen. When he sobbed and said "Where am I supposed to go?" the ornate Emperor's clothing I had constructed fell away. I stood there in my naked cruelty and had no answer for him. He wasn't an intellectual, but even he could see that I had never really loved him. I was in love with the idea of transformation. I was in love with myself. I had been using him for half a year to tell me the things I didn't believe about myself: that I was beautiful, that I was good, that I was lovable, that I was loving. I told myself I was helping him.

I shared this story with a friend who said I made my ex-boyfriend sound pathetic. "I think you should talk more about his good qualities, in more detail. The way you've described him, nobody would want to date or be him." I didn't disagree with this critique. In fact, I spent several hours trying to think of good qualities to balance out the portrait I'd painted. I couldn't think of a single one. Not because they weren't there, but because I had never bothered to see them. I spent six months of my life in a relationship with someone I found repellent, someone I didn't see except for his flaws. I spent six months of my life looking into the mirror his adoration held up for me, admiring nothing but my own warped reflection. I never looked around the jagged edges of myself to see the person who stood before me. No, he was not the pathetic one in our scenario.

He moved across the country after we broke up. I have no idea what happened to him. I haven't thought about him in years. As I remember him now, this half a person I dated but never really knew, I wish him well. I hope he found someone who, unlike me, treated him well. Someone who appreciates him for who he is. I hope that he continued to believe what we used to sing along with Bob Marley: "Every little thing will be all right."

Exploding Unmentionables: An Intensely Personal Book Review (Sort of)

 If you've ever given birth, you'll understand what they mean when they say "the urge to push". Urge is putting it mildly. There is no wondering whether, perhaps, you may or may not be ready to push. There is no weighing the consequences. There is no sense in telling you not to push. There is no worrying about what people will think of your pushing. There is nothing in the world to do except push.

David Foster Wallace's description of a work in progress: “a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floors of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”

There's no way to know what truckload of mental suitcases the reader brings to any bit of writing at any given time. As a compulsive writer and an avid reader, the most gratifying experience for me is when I read something that collides with me and has me screeching on the brakes and sending that mental baggage flying: exploding unmentionables in a colorful, embarrassing mess all over the place.

Mrs. Hagstrand was my 6th grade teacher. She was so beautiful to me with her flowing skirts, nubbly sweaters and thick ankles. She was Jewish, and therefore exotic in our small Vermont town. She wore chunky, ethnic jewelry and a sleek bob. I wanted so much to be her. I tried to dress like her, write like her, talk like her. I wanted so much for her to see the potential "her-ness" in me. I wrote a book of poems for a creative writing project. I barely remember the poems - a vague recollection of one about a unicorn - but I remember working and reworking them to make them sound just right. Earlier that year I had won a state-wide creative writing contest and had my story displayed outside the governor's office. Full of 11-year-old anxious excitement, I awaited my turn for a private conference for the teacher; for the praise of my latest literary endeavor. Shattered and sick to my stomach, I listened to her explain meter, rhyme scheme, feet, stanzas, all a blur of her red pen and the tears I tried to swallow. "Well Suzanne, I've seen you do a lot of things well, but this isn't one of them."

At some point, the diary I have kept since I was 6 years old became less a record of events and more a blank space for experimentation. Fragments of thoughts, poems, I'm sure a lot of angsty feelings, ideas about things outside my small existence, quotes from songs, books, conversations, magazine articles that resonated with me. I wrote frequently and abundantly, a place I could not only be wholly myself, but also to try out who I might want to be, how I might want to think. When I was 14, my whole family moved to China. Rather than fly out of New York or Montreal, we drove from Vermont to Los Angeles, stopping all across the country to say goodbye to family and friends along the way. A month in the minivan with my parents and siblings, drifting farther and farther away from my childhood home toward what might as well have been another planet. I kept myself busy with Aerosmith and my journal. My older brother kept himself busy reading my journal while I was asleep and repeating parts of it back in conversation while I was awake with a gentle, mocking smile.

The year I dropped out of college, my roommate and I spent all of our time in a coffee house. Writing and letting each other read it. We met some other aspiring writers (who wasn't an aspiring writer? Perhaps the aspiring rock stars?) and spent many a caffeine fueled night - bleary eyed, half-starved, electric - talking, writing, creating with the pretension that only 21-year-olds or established writers can pull off. That roommate remains one of my closest friends. In a recent email, she told me "Your words have kept me afloat this year."

I have the skeletons of short stories littered throughout my journals. Ideas I wanted to explore tangled and left to die in the brambles of poorly developed fictional characters, stilted dialogue, and broken plot lines. I stopped writing much because I didn't like to write fiction. I had stories to tell, but I wasn't famous enough for an autobiography, "important" enough for a memoir, but I got bored with fictionalizing it all. I started this blog as an outlet for that pent up writing. Every time I go to press "publish", my inner censor says: "Why are you publishing that? So much navel-gazing twaddle. Who would want to read that?"

In a prose creative writing class in college, my professor told me I could write tone very well. He told me I could make the reader really feel something, but that my plots went nowhere. I said wasn't it enough to make the reader feel? "Well no!" [pregnant pause in which his ruddy, jowled face seemed to reconsider] "No. No it's not." [quietly, as if to convince himself].

A few months ago, I said "screw it" and started this blog.

I read Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields when it first came out. I had never heard of him before but I read a review by accident as I was stuffing the newspaper into the wood stove and I was intrigued. In part, the book explores how the literary vehicle of the novel somewhat outmoded and tedious. Our current culture craves reality because it seems to be in such short supply. The literature we crave is the real or seemingly real. He speaks of elevating non-fiction from mere memoir or scholarly pursuit to the lyrical essay, the literary collage. I read it all in one night and couldn't sleep for the fire it started. A writer, a good writer, a published writer had defied genre and the literary world with this manifesto, this justification for my journals. It was as if, like my brother, he'd read my journals while I was sleeping and was repeating my thoughts back to me. Except instead of mocking, he returned my thoughts to me in this amazing, eloquent, intelligent, resonant collage. Serendipitously, he sent me a signed copy of the book which is now dog-eared, annotated, underlined and full of coffee stains. "For Suzanne - Good luck with your own writing - Glad to hear this book pushed you in interesting directions."

I went to hear him speak the other night at the library. I shook his hand afterward and told him thank you.
"Your book has liberated my writing. Thank you."
"You're welcome. You're the person I wrote that book for."