(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2017 08:42 pmAnother piece of writing from my memoir class. My intention is to try to post every day, and some days it'll be brandy new stuff and sometimes it'll be bits from memoir class, which was another different and interesting exercise in how I try to shape my words for my audience (or try to deliberately not shape them)
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When you start in the middle looking forwards and looking backwards become equally compelling options, but both require firmer footing than I have. I see my memories time out of joint, but mine is never going to be to put it right. I’m no Hamlet, and I don't think I can, and I’m not sure I believe in right anymore. Beads on a string, and the string broken, and half the beads under the kitchen stove and the other half in a box, awaiting restringing but no one has enough focus so to do.
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When you start in the middle looking forwards and looking backwards become equally compelling options, but both require firmer footing than I have. I see my memories time out of joint, but mine is never going to be to put it right. I’m no Hamlet, and I don't think I can, and I’m not sure I believe in right anymore. Beads on a string, and the string broken, and half the beads under the kitchen stove and the other half in a box, awaiting restringing but no one has enough focus so to do.
I want to tell a story, I want to make narrative out of this, I want everything to lead up to a blinding sense of now. I want to show how I got here and maybe if I can see how I got here, I can see where to go next, or how to go home. I want life to be a game of chess, and if I can see well enough into the past, I’ll be able to predict all the next moves and then I’ll be safe.
My mother and my father (and at least one of my brothers) are so committed to the narrative of bland and happy families that they rewrite stories entirely, and I was never left outside in a parking lot after being told I was difficult to love, I didn’t ever get told to stop waking them up with my crying, I wasn’t ever told I was always going to be a quitter. So I don’t trust what I remember.
I started drinking the summer after eighth grade, sneaking wine coolers, sneaking vodka into Snapple bottles of fruit punch. I drank slowly but steadily through most of my high school experience, I kept this awful tupperware tumbler of mixed hard liquor in my desk, using moments alone to replenish it with a little bit of everything I could reach. Fifteen years later, helping my parents move I got to re-handle some of the bottles in the back of the liquor cabinet, old friends probably all more water than alcohol. I drank beer at parties, but I wasn’t a girl who was going to try to be someone who liked beer for another decade or so. College brought me even more accessible alcohol and it would take me a couple years to really settle into my Keystone Lite and Jack Daniels habits. The immediate effect being blackout drunk, the long term effect having something to do with combining Zoloft with a whole lot of booze. So I don’t trust what I remember.
But I do remember things, and I am here. And maybe there are enough pieces, enough breadcrumbs, enough beads to explain to you, to me, why I am this way, why I got my breasts chopped off, why I didn’t end up dead.
My story is cluttered with people, and maybe I should try to make pictures out of the details, instead of trying to show why I nicknamed Iceberg Iceberg when I wrote about him (Elizabeth Bishop) or how Teach and I found each other and how we left each other, or how Braids broke my heart more thoroughly than any two week relationship ever should have been able to or how I knew I was going to marry Light the moment I saw him in the lobby of the hotel.
I suppose I’ll restart this many times, come back to the beginning and find new angles to try to get to the same point, to be lesson or warning or comfort or contrast. I used to think that things had many beginnings, but only one end. Even that seems too tidy now, and I’m full of sloppier boundaries, stories that bleed into each other.
The truth, a truth, is that I trace my life from crisis to crisis. A truth is that I trace my life from loss to loss. I’ve given up smoking, drinking, self-harm, an eating disorder, drinking coffee, drinking soda. I’ve given up a front tooth, my ovaries and my breasts. I’ve lost friends and partners, I’ve lost six different kinds of faith, and even more kinds of nerve.
I’ve learned I can’t ever control where my brain goes, but I can control some of my behaviors, and so I spend my energy there, trying to be this calm and coherent woman, trying to be amused by just about everything, but even more amused at my own antics. And I worry, so often, about so many things.