Thinking about Writing Stories (Instead of Really Writing Them)

Remembering the moose who came to visit out Modern Government class with J. teaching.  It was Spring.  It as a perfect day, dry and bright, everything emerald.  It was maybe the third time I'd seen a moose on the property of the school.  The way is was exciting was so much like the way I was excited to leave high school and go to college.  The last moose is the one I remember, though there were others.  It seemed to come up so close to our classroom, as though it wanted us to stick our arms and hands out the window to greet it or to even pet its face.

What kind of story couldI ever write about my father?  One juxtaposing our relationship today with the one we had when I was a kid, when I would ski in between his skis?  Seeing his face as I fell off the chairlift, or when I skied into the woods?

Something something about the boy, Mr. Z.  I do not know if I can write about him, but if not now, when?

I have been trying to read like a writer and have been zeroing in on some short stories.  For example, I just reread a Marissa Silver short story from her collection Babe in Paradise.  But the story made me sad in away that felt shitty, like lonely sad, as the character, an older man was lonely.  I could not really pay attention to the craft of the story because of this; it was distracting, how I felt.

Ideas for Stories

I am constantly writing short stories in my head.  I am never writing them into journals, pieces of paper, walls of bathrooms, or even onto my computer.

A story about a girl named Hazel who has pretty blue eyes.

A story about a girl with a mentally ill boyfriend who is her father's age who collects castle pictures.

A story about a girl whose father lives in a trailer, one with a sprawling apple tree in its front yard.

A story about a stripper who lives in a hotel with her boyfriend.  The boyfriend loves an ugly, fat, pale girl.  The stripper is a junky who has lost her son.  Though the stripper is borderline illiterate, she is obsessed with a certain wrier, poet maybe.  I am not sure who this obsession could be with, Rilke?  Prolly not, how trite and cliche does Rilke get to be after awhile? But really, a stripper would prolly be obsessed with a trite poet, right?

A story about a girl whose mother sews all of her clothes, including her Halloween costume which is a Pterodactyl.  Her mother sews her father a matching costume.  Both parents are junkies and all three people in this family live in a triple decker in Massachusetts. The floors are wide pine with holes that the tend to trip over.  The floors are anything but plumb, thus they are perfect for roller skating, which the daughter discovers early on and does often.

A story about a girl who is fifteen who moved into her thirty-five year-old boyfriend's old new englander into a rural poverty situation.  She realizes staying safe at home, in her role as the black sheep and un-beloved might have been a better choice in her college town. A better choice from being stuck in the cycle of poverty with a borderline pedophile who she calls PA.  They sleep in a half redone attic bedroom and the house is decorated with castle paintings and drawings.  There are also wooden castle that resemble doll houses punctuating the house's space, it rooms.  Their bed's headboard is rough cut plywood in the shape of a castle's wall.

A story about a poor girl who wins a scholarship to an alternative boarding school and who learns her poor friends from the inbred town where she lived her whole life were smarter, kinder, and better.

A story about a skinny, petite, blond girl who tries to embrace wicca to deal with PTSD only to find this outlet is worse than dealing with night terrors without the wicca.  She learns to trust herself, literature, and the institution of education instead.  She is not cured, but she comes to bear life without constant, psychic pain.

Sorry Miss Thisbe

It's true, I stole the name of my blog from the title of this chick's short stories. I read this collection by Thisbe Nissen when Mr. Z was still a toddler. Over ten years ago, maybe?  I remember telling the boy I worked with  about her, them, the book.  I am embarrassed to admit, I did not get her first name.  I only went to a state school, sheesh! Though this writer is clearly not comparable to me in terms of her accolades, achievements, and swanky collegiate background, I felt like I could know her.  Though she'd maybe talk down to me a teense if we met, I feel like she'd mostly be approachable.  And if she were a snot, at least she would have a right to be, unlike the ever so many state school ECE grads I've met these days who truly suck. A lot.  Really?  You majored in Education?  And you do not realize you're lame and and annoying?

The title story, "Out of The Girls' Room and Into the Night" blew me away on a few levels, mostly for its simultaneous girly and lyrical quality.  Adored it.  You can find the book's description, of course, here: http://www.amazon.com/Out-Girls-Room-Into-Night/dp/038572053X

Here is what the book's cover looks like (kind of post camp counselor-sh):

I also loved how she was super attractive, but not overly hip or too, too pretty: 

I could have been her, again, sans the upper east side upbringing. and also, sans the ability to roll out analogies with adorable, almost sophistication. Analogies ripping quick, rolling deep, effortless like lipgloss out of a purse and onto almost pretty lips.  

I tries to read her novel, but was not interested.  It seemed forced and pretentious.  But her short stories have stayed present, in the knuckle of my mind.  Phrases like, "The night went off like a gun in a car,"  are etched into my memory and define, for me, what good writing sounds and even feels like.  She had a later book, and I think it was a novel that read like inter connected stories or it was another book of short stories; I am too lazy to look this up.  It was called, The Good People of New York.  I read this, too.  And I liked it.  

I am Helping you Because You are My Mother

I am Helping You Because You are my Mother and You Asked Me to Help You....

(a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY ROUGH DRAFT)

(Below is a classic example of when a wannabe writer tells, and um, does not show; but the germ of my idea out there in this piece of writing, for the most part.) 

I heard this once:  

"I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you."  

And for some reason I always remembered it.  I kept on thinking about it as I was reviewing the rules of parallel construction when I had to take the teaching test.  I thought it was the most perfect "almost exemplification" of this rule.  It is not actually parallel construction.

However, the sentence's rhythm, especially within its context--a loving, loyal daughter speaking to her mother--creates a lulling like a lullaby sound and feel. When parallel construction is used, often the reader feels a sort of lulling, at least into understand a text or speaker's meaning.   This sentence--and so it also is for many sentences employing parallel construction-- ushers in a definition of meaning, an offering of an explanation in such a pretty, lyrical way that you simply cannot forget it.  These words from her daughter are like a stanza from a hidden poem that might have discovered. It’s a song, loved by many, but perhaps not yet covered in any great way. Her daughter's words are tattooed in my brain.  They were etched into the rhythm of my memory.  They have become part of my song, or at least, they have become part of my own voice.  

As she relayed the story to me, my eyes widened with anticipation.  But I wanted to stop her, too, to distract her at least a bit.  For the rest of the story, especially its ending, was going to be rich in a way that I wanted to prolong.  But mostly, my impatience and excitement overtook my desire for prolonging the pleasure from a story, this story in particular, and so I needed the details, and needed them rapidly.  I breathed in and willed myself to remain as silent possible.

But I needed to ask her and so I did.  "Did Lacy think you were crazy, Nancy?  Did she ask you why you were dong what you were doing?"

Nancy cackled in a girly way that lit up her fifty-something-year-old face.  "Lacy told me, she yelled it to me, she screamed in my face, her face was so red, she was like rage itself, she said,  'I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you.'"

She launched further into the story, full forced, her voice intense.  Her body leaned this way and that, clenching and relaxing feeling every feeling it had felt all those years back.  Her hands and fingers molded the air, illustrating the scene and setting up the stage of her memory.  Her engagement right and wedding band jingled as she gestured, her finger thin to the bone.  I knew it was wrong to be jealous of her sickness induced skinniness. As she spoke I saw.  Her daughter, in a state almost as crazed as her own, flung the arm of the futon out the window.  Fake teak, splintered and graphic hit the ground without apology.  And then the futon's cushions, and then the TV, and then a single piece of the kitchen table, a lone leaf.  Among true, autumn  leafmeal, lay (look up--problem for Violet!) the remains of Dice's furniture.    They were hurried in this endeavor.  It needed to be finished before Dice returned from his mid shift factory job.  They held their breath hoping that his son would not somehow come home early.  It was imperative that the mom and daughter evict this father and son timely, quick quick!, before any sort of interruption could arrest their cathartic, cleansing solution.  They looked around their small, tired apartment, dull in its practical construction.  Their own TV, table, and beds remained.  School pictures and artwork created by Lacey and her sister, Megan hung neatly, zealously almost usurping the loneliness that invited Dice and his son into their lives in the first place.  In a hard scramble pile, looking very much like an earthquake victim's former life, was their new beginning.  Gingerly and then plainly, the teenage girl and young woman stuck their heads out of the apartment's window.  If they blurred their eyes and pretended just a little bit: below them were bodies without arms and arms without bodies.  

I picture her rage attack, their rage attack, on a day very similar to today.  I look at the window and see an evening similar to the one they saw that same day.  And then I look outside of her window, over fifteen years back.  And I see: all Dice's belongings, as well as his son's.  Everything broken, scatters, but also clumped in a sense, all dead, ruined, embarrassed and demeaned.  The young woman, the teenager, and now I saw this all.  And Nancy, today, she looked at the debris again as she had all those years back.  We looked as they had beneath them, and they began to sense a quiet so profound it was nearly heartbreaking.  Their apartment was now their own.  It was filled now only with their own things, cast offs not contemporary to the setting of that decade, the 90's.  Their present, a mother and her two daughters who became so quickly enmeshed with this leaching monster and his sad son was now their past.  It was a matter of the furniture.  

"Everything they owned, their whole entire lives was now..." Nancy inhaled here, pausing, and looked at me.  I looked at her.   This particular pause in the story was like an epic rock and roll pause, "It was out of the window and on the ground outside."  She exhaled, looking out the window of the restaurant, but I knew she was really looking outside the window of that long ago apartment she shared with Lacey and her other daughter, Megan. 

She giggled now, a noise or motion that seemed forced in order to shake a kid of permanent sadness.  Shaking her head at the younger, unbalanced woman she was once.  She explained,  "It was going nowhere, we weren't safe.  Dice had stolen jewelry, cheap stuff from the girls several times.  And their allowances had gone missing.  At first, Nancy had thought it was Dice's boy.  His sad eyes, never changing, not even at dinner, not even when they were laughing together.  She had believed with her whole entire heart that the meetings were supposed to get you better; they were supposed to help everybody, right?  Her sponsor told her to pray about it.  her sponsor told her to read a page out of the AA book, a page that ushered the ex user into a mindset of complete acceptance, as acceptance, it was believed in the meetings, was the solution to all of their problems. 

Dice, she had realized soon after he moved in, had never really gotten clean.  Sure, he was done with booze, it was a sloppy high that little to take the edge off.  But Dice was a heroin addict.  And he would never change, ever.  

Nancy's voice got higher and faster the deeper she went into the story.  "Violet," she told me, speaking my name to engage me in a way that I could hardly not bring myself to it was  the meditating that did it.  It was the meditating that led me to this."  She shook her had again, "I knew we had to cut up the furniture with the electric knife and the ax.  I told you, I swear to you right here in this restaurant, it came to me while I was in one of my many trances at the Buddhist Center.  I would go there sometimes three times daily.  I let Lacey and Megan make their own supper all the time, for god sakes.  I do not know what Dice and his son ever ate; I do not think they did.  I knew Megan would cook for Lacey; that much I did know...” She looked down at her plate of half eaten salad then.  It was a look that portrayed a shame, the kind of shame that only certain people live to articulate. The look struck me on a visceral level and it felt like seeing a  familiar, but long forgotten enemy at a party--a mean, mean bully from middle school who rushes momentarily back into your life, if only for that night. .  I shook for a moment, and then shook the shaking off.  I took a sip of chowder.  And I waited.

 "But I know that my girls were there alone... With them!  God knows what could have happened.  I did not know.  I did not care.  I was meditating.  Anything can become addictive, anything."  She looked at me and waited.  She wanted me back at meetings.  She said, really without saying, that I should drop a class, work less hours, stop spinning.  She wanted me to be a follower of hers at the local AA meeting.  

I took a breath.  I put a spoon filled with chowder into my mouth and considered my furniture without her.  I looked into the road ahead of me and I felt the sort of loneliness that kicks you from the inside.  It kicks and then seems to, almost at the same time, hollow you out like a kid's jack o lantern.  But you've got no scary face.  You've got no face.  You're hollow and you're forgotten.  You were going to ornament a festivity, but then you became flawed, and you were tossed.  The air outside was brilliant, clear, sparkling, fall sunshine, eclipsed only by the occasional deep evening clouds.  I wondered if she was part of my forever.  Was she going to be the mother I never really had, or was she going to be a soft memory usurped by sadness, sadness over losing yet another person.

"You cut up all of all of Dice's furniture and threw it out the window with your daughter's help?"  I asked.  There was no point of clarification; it was not really a question.  It was a silly stall tactic. And Lacy helped you, being the dutiful daughter that she is?"  I imagined Lacy just then.  And though I knew my days of friendship with Nancy were numbered (she was not a proper mommy sub, nor was she interested in the job, she was dying after all) I felt the familiar pang of jealousy I always did when Nancy talked about either one of her daughters. Lacy looked like me a bit.  Were wee a similar height, build, and coloring.  She had a broader, more ethnic looking nose.  I thought, "Jewish?”  when I first saw her.  But then her crucifix style cross looked more like a rosary in it gaudiness, cheap carrot gold with fake ruby gems dotting its slender chain.  Lacy was certainly more endowed than me, but I will not e that this is not saying too much about her bust size.  I could see her cross skimming her cleavage in a way that suggested nice girl, bad girl, simultaneously.  

"How many meetings are you going to?" Nancy furrowed her brow and continued with, "And when was the last time you went to a meeting?"  Did you go here, in town?  Or did you go south to the city.  I know you're lonely and I do not blame you."  

At least she empathized somewhat.  I was stuck in this tourist town that became nearly deadly in its dullness over the autumn, winter, and early spring.  I had tried forgiving the men at the meetings in my town, but I could not bring myself to.  I loved myself more; I had to.  And the meetings out of town took time.  It was too much time away from Sammy, and Sammy needed me.  His dad was in a fucking shelter after all.

How could I tell her that I was finished with all of it.  The idea of sobriety bored me to tears, and then there was “my using” and how it was not the true issue anyhow.  I had PTSD from abandonment issues.  My boarding school days--I know, poor little rich girl--among other abandonment examples had essentially fucked me for good.  And soon, she would be leaving, too. "I'm trying, "I smiled in a pleading way.  "Love me," is what I meant. "Invite me to your family's Halloween party. Anything,"  I wanted to shout. 

I looked out into the autumn evening and then I looked at her old, tired face.  How long would she be here?  Even if she did not choose to leave me, she was being pulled away from this planet faster than I could control.  My throat tightened as I saw a hospital bed in my mind. Cancer.  And then the worse thought, "Does she really even have cancer."  I had been around in, or avoiding AA for so long that I had become pretty apt at picking out all sorts of cons.  It was true that I was most certainly still ridiculously naive; however, I got hunches that others missed, too.  And I had to wonder at the authenticity of her sickness.  She'd been stage four forever.  

I saw her check her watch then.  And I saw where she was going in her mind.  Lacey. The prettier version of me.  Me, with an ethnic nose and bigger boobs.  Me, with a mom.  And I saw them crouched by that garden style window, ugly in its function.  I see the ceiling pop corned.  I see the carpet, that depressing, apartment, beige carpet.  It is the kind of carpet that echoes, "Lower middle class, lower middle class." Mom and Lacy together.  They have gotten rid of the monster.  And they will always rid themselves of any monster, together, the two of them.  Today, Lacy's cross, Nancy's sensible Aerosole shoes.  In those days, Nancy is more sluttified.  Plunging V-Neck, tight, camel toe jeans and her daughter, probably fifteen the day of the furniture, in an equally sluttied up outfit.  Like mother like daughter, slut like slut. 

When I was fifteen I was at my father's mostly.  I did not have the sophistication to wear a bra that helped.  I wore make up to hide, not invite.  And I wore my clothes at least two sizes too big.  Nobody bothered to tell me I was a petite, especially not my mother who was five foot seven inches tall.   My petite grandmother, whose height I had inherited, was so ugly and had double d breasts to boot.  She was not me; she was nothing like me in her frumpy, matronly overbearing almost sickness.  I tried to borrow my friend’s femininity back then.  I remember friends literally being about twice the size of me.  So I then took to learning how to look female from Seventeen and from the ratty college students who lived in my town.  And I tried to cover some seamy episodes with my conservative preppiness.  I did not blow my boyfriend, thank you, do you notice my Keds?  No, I did not puke when he came in my mouth, do you see my impeccable Champion sweatshirt tucked into my Gap Jeans?  Note how my bob hairstyle is undercut professionally. Look, my mom does not speak to me, but she picked me up from school in our Peugot.  Instead of saving me from the monster, she pushed me out the window.  She looks out with relief, as she sees me broken, a bird who permanently is unable to fly.  I am stuck in the clump of furniture debris tossed, ended lives; I am outside of the window.  It is autumn again and I am alone; it is growing cold.  I’m scared because I am with Dice and his son.  My artwork has long since been forgotten.  I close my eyes to remember a puffy sheep water- colored with an intensity I no longer remember.  I am scared out here without my artwork, without my childhood belongings, and I am hiding with and from thee kicked away men.  Do you hear me?  I am calling you name? 

My mother will survive as will Lacey, Megan, and their mother.  They are crafty and can cut up furniture just short of an hour; it is a quick autumn, evening’s work.  I am calling to her, I am screaming her name, “Nancy, please, it is not too late for me, I can see out the window.  I can see myself below.  I need you to come out here, now.  I need you to help me get back inside!”

Later--about a week later--October 2, 2011

I was reading an interview with E. Schappell's man, Rob Spillman.  He writes about started where the story starts, not starting before this.  For example, if a man shoots a gun in a car, not writing about the man putting his socks on, finding his keys, and then getting into the car, but shooting the gun off in a car!  This was not his example, prolly obviously.  Fuck! I cannot write anymore.  But I am trying.  I am like the dilettante craftsman, building sloppy birdhouses, punctuating my already shitty yard was something sad.  Spillman also speaks to the notion of writing with confidence.  Um, yeah.  I will try to get to this.  

Castle

I just finished Jennifer Egan's gothic literary novel, The Keep.  If I think of heaven I think of it in this way:  it is always autumn there and it is the nineties.  I look the same way that I did when I was nineteen, men's Levis sliding down my babyish hips, long blonde hair.  The difference will be that I wear smart looking eyeliner and a bra that helps.  When I am in this always autumn heaven, I am writing, and I am writing better than, but in a similar way to Ms. Egan.  All I know is that I need to show and not tell.  I need to stop with the modifiers.  I need to get to hate point, to start where the story starts, to stop with the over explanation.  and I need to fucking write.  I know what good writing looks like, but I have no idea even how to imitate it.  Sucks.

I do not want to get too deep into my description of the novel.  I loathe book reviews.  I am sitting here trying to imagine The Keep, its tower, it's windows, its edges, turrets, and all that.  And I am now remembering Berto.  I am the real 19 again and I am living with a creepy 42 year old due to scratch the fucked up itch that is my ever so fucked up daddy issue.  He makes, in terms of money,  what I make now.  Mind you, today I am not even working.  I get a teensy bit of cash for being a mom from the babbydaddy.   Berto made about 20 grand, tops, in those days as a tutor and busker on his odious instrument.  And he would exclaim, upon learning that a colleague, friend or peer made 50K or whatever that he wanted to ask them, "What, do you live in a castle?"

Berto was not the sort of boyfriend you'd bring to meet your friends, as he'd prolly already hit on them in some sort of creepy way.  He had he worst titty fetish I've elver come across, which was prolly linked to not growing up.  I seriously have never met such a breast obsessed dude.  And for those of you who know me at all, I was not the girl for Berto.  I am still so ashamed of that relationship.  What I wanted then, and still want now is an adopted father, the kind who will stop my night terrors.

Don't you dare fucking laugh, but this is my dream relationship:

In the blog I am trying to boycott, this idiotfuck, Disclosure write of Go Go Rach, and her rightfully stressed out response to the pseudo academic MA, "Therapy is needed."  I would argue to him, "Personality is needed, Douche,"  But it is not worth it.  But, this lame as fuck response popped into my head as I posted my sick as sadness picture of the teeny bopper movie and shameless admission of this blog author's daddy complex.  Um

Berto and I lived in a rural tenement; however, in my mind, its windows, the hand hewn beams, the wooden floors... All of it equaled a castle.  I still believed in "the program" back then.  Interestingly,
in some ways, it kind of worked...until it didn't.  I realized living with Berto took more out of me than I ever had imagined possible.  He was so hateful underneath what only appeared as mentally ill and partly perverted.

He had a castle sticker, a sparkling one, that he put on his throat losenger tin.  I bought him this sticker after he told me how he felt about people who made a normal amount of money.  I can see it there, in between by the clutch us in his used car that smelled like every kind of health food you could imagine, but mostly of garlic.  I can hear the tin opening.  I can see his long fingers.  I can remember what it was like to feel you had a future so brilliant you could afford to emotionally mutilate yourself with a mentally ill boyfriend.

The castle of Berto's imagination would be some sort of lefty, green-as-fuck hastily put together commune compound deals.  Think the commune on Lost.  WACO without the guns.  Maybe something that Michael Rapunzel of Western MAssachusetts would have built, with his, um, fifth thousand a year.  That commune, but nicer, more nineties.  The scared cult of daddy.  This, below, but much, much nicer, with a mote.

Here is what I imagine the castle looking like from the Keep.  I have very few fantasies of Europe.  If any, I dream of going to Sweden, alone, most certainly without the boys.  I would rent a clean room (think minimal, Raymond Carver, Hemingway...), and I would walk and write.  I would also visit middle class family's houses so I could peer into their bookshelves and admire their castle-looking chimney.

Fuck, do I love those; and I have only seen them in Swedish design blogs, like this blog where I have spent hour after hour lusting with an intensity that seems foreign to my bod:  http://dosfamily.com/all-home-tours/

I will find a castle/chimney/wood-stovey-thingy later.

As for the castle in my mind, and prolly yours, too:

I had such a terrible day today.  The rain crucified me.  I was running on empty.  I was astounded by her--Jennifer Egan's--articulation of addiction.  Though I was low and depressed all day, her articulation, her poetic ability to fucking GET IT--stayed with me all day.  It seemed to punctuate--to pierce--the lowness of the day.  Yesterday, Mr. Z's big day was good.  He was so terrific when he came home from his day.  All I could think of as I listened to his low manly voice and concentrated on the circular, unjaggedness of his Polish baby boy cheeks was the song Pink Moon.  That lullaby melody, Nick Drake's perfect, harmonized sweet voice.  My perfect boy on his first day of being older, going to the place where there are no more babies.

In the novel, The Keep--I have tried to get to this and I am in such a tangent spiral--the female protagonist is a meth addict, not an opiate addict, like me.  However, her description made perfect sense to me. During this shitty as fuck day, I hung onto certain parts of her novel:

     Egan's character is using here:


I smoked my fist pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing pampers in his face when he walked in the door.  I wanted to be on the same side again.  So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute of every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more; the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper an bang on the door.  The looking out of the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky.  And I was bak on top.  We were going to make it, Seth and I.  The voice in my head was back again, telling me to write stories, too may to write down or even tell from one another.  


And she is not here:


And after all the horrors, the searches and arrests, after losing Corey and those dark blank months in the hospital, after all that I was relieved just to be alive and clean and have my children back, the two that were left to me.  I moved carefully, like the world was made of glass.  I got the job at the college and finished my BA and started a master's in writing.


But even with all that, which I was grateful for and knew full well I didn't deserve, I can't exactly say I was happy.  Relieved yes.  Lucky, yes.  God yes.  All that.  But I thought happiness only came from getting high, and I was never dong that again, never, ever, even if it meant not being happy one more day in my life. 


And she falls in love and realizes that this feeling is like being high; she is happy again:

The excitement that rocks through your body when you're a kid like lust does when you're a grown up: just pure excitement--for Christmas, for grape Kool-Aid, for playing in a treehouse--I felt all week long as my teaching night got close.  I started reading again, finishing a novel every few days.  On my lunch break I'd sit outside at my picnic bench and listen to traffic, those big loops of sound, and behind it I'd hear something else, barely there, so shadowy I tried not to scare it away by paying too much attention, but I knew the voice was back.  

In my memory, the character talks about how teaching is like a high, but when I just went bak to my kindle, I do don't see it.  But I was so outta my mind with identification while reading that I was speed reading.  I am pleased and calm and confident about this:  If I were still in AA, I would be thinking I "got her disease" and I'd be thinking my fucking disease knew her disease.  I'd utter that it is "the blue that knows you, it knows where you live, and it is never going to forget" echoing the Kate Braverman story I read in high school straight outta The Best American Short Stories.  But now I realize:  She used and so did I.  I get the whole feeling of being blown away that comes from getting loaded, whether your deal is meth or opiods.  And I totally get her , as she is literary; she discusses her addiction and her writing voice as if they are nearly one n the same, which is so fascinating.  What I am writing here, and what Egan depicts through her character seems so real it is almost tactile; I feel it viscerally.  Being at a meeting, and hearing someone, even if they're literary like S.P.: it is bullshit.  It is the epitome of inauthenticity.  Interestingly, Braverman writes about this same inauthenticity in AA in her latest book of stories, Small Craft Warnings.  I love seeing her progression as a writer and as a person in this way; I was completely impressed.  I did wonder how much of my own experience I was bringing into my reading.  But this is what we do as readers.  We read autobiographically, or at least many of us do.

Shitty Man

All I have ever wanted is to be in love.  The relationship I am in is time consuming, and I am rarely rewarded the way I want to be rewarded.  I have been with this man forever.  He continues to do obtuse things.  I am crazed by his inability to make me feel special.  It makes me insane.  Lobster meat instead of flowers.  Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit.

Good Night Nobody

I cannot decide which loss is more difficult to bear: the loss of my immediate family or missing my youth. I cannot believe my son is now the same age as I was when my parents split apart.  I was  forced to spend my weekends out of town with my unstable father.  Fantasizing about suicide, but then regaining my my more even demeanor by looking at all of my Espirit shirts hanging in my closet.  Even today, over twenty years later, I remember sitting on the carpeting of my father's rented house.  And I remember one Espirit shirt in particular, it's coolness large in my thirteen year old's mind--its ragged white and maize colored, college lined strips, soothing me.  Sometimes I consider writing about them, my family.  I would rewrite some of it, to fit them into my mind in a more loving way.

If any of you, my family,  were to ever read this, I am talking to you as I was back then:

I love you.  I am mean because I hate myself, and the little one is not as sweet as she seems.  I need your help, please help me.  I cannot ask you because I did not realize I would need to, and because I do not trust you.

But I miss:

The hill in our back yard

Mom's melon baller

The tupperware contained mom makes chocolate milk in

I miss the university the shirts you two both had, the grey ones with maroon lettering.  You two made me think that silly, low brow, overly average college was a kingdom of coolness, an epic academic environment.

I miss dad throwing the pasta outta the strainer so it'd bounce offa the cabinet and on to the counter, just to make me laugh.

If I had known it was all so fleeting, that once we left that place, that'd be it, I would have held onto you with everything I had.

I canot believe it ended, all of us. I thought it was a forever thing.  I never stopped loving you.