funny you should ask that, Terry

Funny you should ask that, Terry. Three weeks. Harry and I lasted three weeks. His parting words to me were: “And that’s my limit for being criticized by a woman.” I didn’t see him after that. He went to New York to meet an interested agent and wound up getting an apartment with his prize money. Not long after that there was a bidding war for his book, which he sold for an amount of money we will not discuss, as to this day the specific figure has the power to induce hives. He bought a house in the Adirondacks to kill beautiful things and tell himself stories around the campfire of his own greatness.

After he left, I walked to the lunatics’ cemetery to have a cry. There was a strange hissing sound in the grass and I looked down and saw a tiny creature, a mammal of some kind no bigger than a mouse. I couldn’t tell you what it was, really; it looked like the magical friend in a fantasy novel. If I’d taken another step I would have squashed it flat, but there it stayed, raising up on its hind legs and bristling and baring its teeth, hissing at me. I suppose I must have been approaching its burrow or whatever, but it gave no quarter! I crouched down and now this Lilliputian warrior was spitting mad, hopping and spreading its paws. I was so infatuated I forgot my heartbreak for a moment—my first instinct was to clutch Jason and show him. But Jason was gone forever. That was the first moment the reality of what I had done really caught up with me. I sat back on the ground, all the air left my body. I had lost the right to share the smallest wonders.

A vole, maybe? I don’t know.

I finished my last years in Texas in a state of near neutrality to what my future held except the time and location of my first drink. The immolation of the body a consecration, every hangover a benediction. Or whatever crap writers use to turn cowardice into valor. I didn’t actually write a word I wasn’t repelled by. For every action there is a reaction, and it stood to reason I had been a party to destruction and thus had lost the gift of creation. But this was not the case. The news came to me that Jason had sold a movie pitch, and my imagination was never more fertile than it was conjuring scenarios for the glamorous new life he had left me for. (In these scenarios there was no ambiguity that HE had left ME.) Sometimes I would see a couple in public, the man resting his hand on the back of the woman’s neck in a gesture I have always found so brutally tender it makes my heart fall into my stomach, or find myself running a finger along my own scarred thumbnail the way Jason used to, or some other small provocation I would use to listlessly sleep my way through a ring of some of his other friends who had stuck around. It was both over- and under-kill. Diane Galvan’s daughter, the prophecy fulfilled, had been left behind.

At least Austin was a good city for that; a high degree of intelligence and planlessness were virtually prerequisites for residence. Musicians referred to it as “the Velvet Coffin”—you can live such a comfortable life there you will never be compelled to leave to start your real one. I got a job with an organic cleaning service—well, yes, that is another word for it: an eco-friendly maid. Terry, if you gave me a rag and some white vinegar you would not recognize this studio afterward! I didn’t mind it. I’d spent so much of the previous years with status-obsessed males that I saw honor in servitude. Cleaning someone else’s house is one of the great anonymous acts of love. Our customers were mainly in west Austin, all the tech industry nouveau riche. The things that people who can afford organic maids buy! Lawn gnomes in ten-gallon hats around koi ponds made of plastic rocks, all-white shag carpeting, chandeliers in the bedroom. But this was where the universe had directed my anonymous acts of love and it was not my place to question it. Freedom is the enemy of happiness.

In one of these houses there was a kid home from college: a skinny, entitled, resentful child passing through life with a perpetual sneer. He was always around when I was working and would make an exaggerated display of annoyance at my presence while managing to place himself directly in my path as much as he could: wanting to watch the particular television in the room I was cleaning or waiting until I was in the kitchen to become imperatively hungry. His eyes were small and he was acne-prone, yet the majority of available wall space was devoted to photos of him throughout his undistinguished academic and athletic career. Some empathy was required for an unphotogenic credit to no one entombed by the brittle fantasy of his mother. One day I was cleaning his bathroom and there was a quite unmistakable stain on the shower door at waist level. In deference to the more delicate listener, he had committed the sin of Onan and left it for me to find. I would like to say this was my “come to Jesus moment,” as it were. But actually it was a few weeks afterward, when a client mentioned casually to my boss that she preferred an organic service to the more traditional because it was a relief to her to be dealing with members of her socioeconomic class. At home I reevaluated my position. I did not love these assholes, and did not want to clean their stupid tacky houses. I couldn’t continue being a spectator of the pity parade of my life, I had a destiny, and it was time to get serious about it; I would not be defined by the dramatic departure of all the men in my life. I was inseminated with purpose! As it were.

Then I got a call from New York.

It was a woman I’d worked for prior to Hogwarts. She had just taken a position as culture editor of an “aspirational” Condé Nast fashion and lifestyle magazine whose key demographic was single urban women with a median annual income of $103,000. Within a year I was a contributing editor. The last thing I’ll claim is that the experience did have its charms. I’m still a girl. The effervescent closing minutes of a gala in a dress you could never afford when the ties and morals become looser, models in the background smiling with too much gum like the children they are, or being the girl reporter sent to disarm famous men, the way their brains short-circuit when you turn them down. Not that I mean to exaggerate how frequently I turned them down. I took secret pleasure in passing through the housing projects on my way to the East River promenade to run; the men in athletic jerseys two sizes too large and women in painted-on jeans with behinds so protuberant it seemed like they had to be inflated a reminder of the street my mother lived on, the unrecognition in all of their faces that we had anything in common. I attempted to justify this life by remembering that Joan Didion had worked for Vogue and gone on to great success and great love. Of course, Sylvia Plath had also worked for Mademoiselle…

Had there ever been such an ingrate? Yes, I was aware that any job in the existing journalistic climate was like a fairy tale, let alone at a print monthly. No, it did not escape me that this was the archetypal dream job of a romantic comedy protagonist. But history was repeating, Terry. The city was a perpetually self-altering maze of DISTRACTION: who can get in where and where happens to be worth getting into at the moment and who hates who—which is easy enough to keep track of because everyone hates everyone, though for reasons mysterious. (The reason is always jealousy.) But you persist through this byzantine web of snubbing and status anxiety based on nothing but ephemeral patterns of condensation and the reason is the party, not even the party itself, the line to the party and the promise it implies of better fashion, better people, better intoxicants (please). The fact that it will simply be populated by the same people making the same migration is missing the point. And, of course, the line is only an advertisement because it’s not like you’ll be standing in it like some loser.

However, for all that amused about this life—and only the worst prig would pretend it’s unamusing—there was one problem: it didn’t belong to me. This person who had just hours ago stumbled home to throw away the ripped stockings and scrub off the smeared mascara of the night before, who was now wearing a Roberto Cavalli skirt of a certain length because she would be appearing in the “leg shot” of a third-tier morning show segment, and riding in the elevator with gazelle-like women smiling their hatred while behind each other’s backs they posted unflattering pictures of each other online—this person was a double, the changeling of Galvan family lore. She was as far from the person I was supposed to be as the maid in Texas cleaning up some kinesiology major’s come stain. I was helpless, the victim of an identity thief I was always chasing, but never fast enough or clever enough or, in my heart, prepared enough, to catch.

One night I was at a book party with the changeling’s friends—young, striving journalism types, most of whom worked for publications devoted to less frivolous fields than her own. But to tell the truth, Terry, I believe that most journalism is fashion journalism. It’s a sea of flume: au courant opinions and half-formed analysis as rigorous as cocktail party chatter, the educated gliding on the winds of their own pontification. I came to call them—and make no mistake I lumped myself in this—“the Bitterati.” Because everyone in the circle was a frustrated something else; their unwritten novels and screenplays kindling for their enmity for Malcolm Gladwell or Jonathan Franzen, anyone whose success was more comfortable to malign than attempt to emulate. Sometimes I would end up drunkenly in their beds without letting them touch me to amuse myself. Sad satellite males, not a real man in the bunch.

The party was being held at a certain ostentatious hotel penthouse bar that may or may not have been cool at that point, but it was irrelevant to me because the waitresses were golden sylphs who glissaded across the floor without their feet touching the ground and the bathrooms with black reflective tiling and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water were designed for licentious abuses, and such imperial disdain for taste and restraint was irresistible to the Diane in me. That night a storm was coming. There was a bank of black cloud over Jersey City like a single ominous protozoa. It felt like the wake for a god. At our table after the customary Franzenfreude, the conversation turned to a recent David Brooks article. A frequent contributor to the Times’ Book Review, Brooks adopted a posture of sort of Oscar Wilde superiority and announced that evolutionary biology was the “phrenology of the twenty-first century.” He expounded on his umbrage: the nerve of biologists trying to usurp the province of artists and philosophers. This line of reasoning has a name: Human Exceptionalism. Essentially this is the belief that while there is no God, human beings have preferential status in an otherwise random universe, thus giving the educated permission to worship themselves. I recalled something I had picked up from random reading, that the physical structure of the neuron is no different than lightning or a tree; an ideal form for the flow of energy—something so beautiful it had to be true. I did not contribute this to a conversation taking the absence of God as a given. I was supposed to be an observer, my art concerned what was eternally true, and here I was caught in a maze whose existence was defined by being different than it was the week before, on what was in fashion to hate. Of course I had once argued fiercely with Harry for espousing the scientific school it now depressed me so completely to hear dismissed, but any argument has way more to do with your feelings toward the arguer than whatever is actually coming out of his mouth. And this time I did not argue back, I let a learned fool publically dismiss the mysteries closest to my own heart to not appear frivolous. I wrote about OLFACTORY EMPIRES and THE POWER OF PINK in an office place with a designated “Crying Room”—what could I say without sounding like SUCH A GIRL? I was taken most seriously when listening to men listen to themselves.

The clouds descended, consuming the opposing cityscape entirely except for a dim red light from the W Hotel providing a Fitzgerald homage. A woman joined our group, an old undergraduate friend of one of the Bitterati stopping by to stay hello. She was a movie producer visiting from Los Angeles, a pretty blonde woman of the type that I’m normally disposed to hate on sight. I may not have been enamored of my company at the time but I certainly didn’t want my monopoly on their attention disrupted by a blonde, leggy Californian. However, she was one of those unusually socially adept women who knew when she was being perceived as a threat and responded to it by courting the woman who felt that way and putting her at ease. As it happened the conversation between us was effortless, transitioning smoothly between our delight in the latest political sexting scandal and favorite highlights from Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter feed and professing polite jealousy of each other’s accessories and bodies. We began discussing a recent think piece on Slate regarding that keystone of modern feminine anxiety over whether a woman can “play by a man’s rules.” She sighed with exhaustion that this was still subject to debate: the world was filled with countless examples of women who were perfectly fulfilled by their achievements and were having too much fun to notice if their happiness was incomplete by society’s standards. I was happy to pretend to agree with her, as if I personally knew an abundance of such women, as if my thirtieth birthday was not approaching and this question never kept me up at night. She didn’t have long to stay before her next engagement, so we exchanged cards. Her smile flickered when she looked at mine. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been enough to drive me to the edge of persecution fantasies, but she carried herself with such warmth and maturity that I convinced myself I was seeing things.

After she left, her friend from our group proceeded to explain to us her unfortunate romantic situation. Apparently she had invited a charmless younger man to live with her, everyone but her seeing him as having the social graces of a baboon. This wearied me. She was so pleasant and well put together and her legs were up to my chin—what did it mean if she was as hopeless as the rest of us? More details emerged about the sad cliché she was caught in: the boor in question was a screenwriter (at which there were knowing scoffs, though half present had a partial draft of a screenplay lying around somewhere) who came from Austin (more knowing scoffs) and dressed like he’d walked off a community theater production of Midnight Cowboy.

I stared for a while into the clouds across the water, then excused myself. I walked to the subway. It was summer and the air was rank and sweet with the garbage bags piled on the sidewalks. Steam drifted up from grates in the sidewalk, and a busboy walked down stairs cut directly into the sidewalk. This image always appealed to me, like the pavement was made of water. Distracted, I bumped into an old homeless man sitting in a wheelchair. His pants were bunched around his knees as though he was sitting on the toilet. The combination of my horror at having collided with a crippled homeless person and the grotesque comedy of his appearance, his pale, shrunken genitals, caused a burst of defenseless laughter to escape my mouth. He howled like a banshee, the way people do when their high is disrupted: Who are you to laugh at ME-E-E-E! Who are you to laugh at MY BO-O-O-O-ODY! I hurried down the sidewalk to the next avenue, telling myself to concentrate more on my feet than my pity. Distracted, I came within inches of stepping into the path of a bus. The wind of it swept my bangs aside. On the subway, my car pulled abreast of another one on a parallel track, you know how it is when for a couple of seconds, you have a perfectly clear view of the train next to yours and there is something inscrutably cosmic about the experience, like some vignette out of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I hoped I would see sex, or a murder. There was an elderly Asian man standing in the other car. He was wearing a dark overcoat though it was summer. He reached into his overcoat and flung several white shapes to the roof of the car. They were white paper butterflies. As they descended he reached into his coat again and produced a fan, which he waved back and forth, causing the wings of the butterflies to flap. They ascended once more, circling each other. Then the other track dipped and that train went down another tunnel and out of view and there was just the reflection of a drunk girl crying. Distracted, I wound up at the door of one of the members of the Bitterati. Lying in bed later that night he asked in earnest what I was doing. He had known me from my old days in the city and saw it, the thing inside myself I was flailing so wildly to prevent anyone from noticing. The next morning, I hid my panties in his bedding without telling him; his girlfriend was an editor of a Brooklyn literary magazine who had acted superior to me at the last Nick Denton party.

It was around then I started fabricating. The first time was innocent enough: I quoted a source as saying something that when I checked my notes for the exact wording there was no record of. This puzzled me until I realized—it was not something this person had actually said, but something I wished she had. I filed it as it was. Call it the frustrated novelist’s revenge. Call it petulance. In the months before the piece ran I was a wreck with anxiety. Right alongside my stupid pride over this dizzyingly pointless defiance was the child’s dread of getting caught. I never was. My artistic ambition expanded shortly: fabricating whole scenarios and characters. “Fabulist.” It had a certain ring to it. I convinced myself there was a nobility to fabulism the same as there was servitude. Certainly a thrill. As my folio increased, so did my dread. I had vivid fantasies of being escorted from the office through a corridor of whispers; not being able to eat in public without feeling the incriminating stares. My face flushed at the thought. It was the highlight of my day.

Finally, the woman who originally brought me to the magazine requested to meet me for a drink under clandestine circumstances. The blood drained from my fingers, I sailed to our appointment in a state of grace. Finally! She told me the magazine was folding and requested an up-to-date copy of my CV—she knew of a position opening at The Cut. I gave her the CV and blew off the interview. The magazine went under and I celebrated my unemployment with denial, changing nothing about my lifestyle. But the maze reconfigured around me; I did not come from a family and no longer had the institutional backing of Mr. Nast, and, not so gradually, I could no longer get a table at this restaurant or breeze through the door of this club. Inevitably, that same penthouse bar became my staple; my inner Diane would always have a place there, like Cheers or The Shining, and by the end I was going there almost every night. This wound up being counterproductive: in spite of my declining status there was always some venture capitalist who had briefly been a lit major in undergraduate who would cover the bill and occasionally propose marriage. Women who believe that men prefer dumb and hot to smart and hot are probably neither smart enough or hot enough. Men will always want to possess what they fear they can’t. The changeling would never lack opportunities. But it’s commonplace that you don’t change until it’s time to change; by now I couldn’t tell the difference between a party and a bunch of geese honking at each other, and I had grown bored wrecking myself on shoals of cock. Not to mention what was now a small mountain of credit card debt. A creditor actually beeped in while I was on the phone with my father telling him I needed help.

And that, Terry, is how you came to have this imaginary conversation with a grown woman living in her father’s basement in Pittsburgh. That is how I came to fuck up my life this much.



All grays pale next to southwestern Pennsylvania in winter; it is the gray caked to the paneling of a dark car that seems unwashable, like an innate feature of the car itself. The men in Carhartt jackets with complexions like the car paneling, ruddy-faced and thick-wristed teenagers going to vocational colleges, girls with nail art and striped hair extensions. I was suffocated with repulsion and heartbreak. I would have offered up every particle of my being to save them and given anything to not be around them. People would ask if I was HERE TO STAY and I would coyly say WE’LL SEE as if I had some trick up my sleeve other than deflecting my humiliation. I got dinner with a cousin my age, having to suggest a restaurant that was not TGI Fridays. She lived in a neighboring county with her husband and two young children and worried about the quality of the school district. I asked why they didn’t move closer to the city and she looked at me like a Martian. She had two kids and her husband was laid off. She called me “Moneybags” and looked at me with the suspicion that many local women did, that I considered myself to be an alien visitor, that I wasn’t voicing what a stuck-up bitch I actually was. The suspicion with which my mother would have looked at me if she met me today, the snob she had dreamed into existence. The worst kind of snob: a failed one. I ran into an ex at the 7-Eleven who was opportunistic enough to believe this was an opening; I deflected, suggesting he find me on Facebook, only to be informed he couldn’t currently afford Internet access because of his child support situation. I began running again like I had not since Austin. But Austin summers are hot and wet and louche and Pittsburgh winters call to mind the vision from Norse eschatology of a wolf swallowing the sun, so it felt like I needed it to: grim survival. This feeling appealed to me so much I would wear my running clothes when I went to bed and be up and on the streets while it was still dark, just the sound of my breath and the horn of a coal train. This ensured there would be some motion in my life; otherwise I could spend minutes on end staring at a Diet Coke before sipping it.

Jack Kelly was equally stymied by the fact of my existence each time he was confronted with it. My long-suffering stepmother had finally left him and he had become so set in his ways he derived more satisfaction from the conviction no woman could understand him than he could from the understanding of a woman. And he’d developed the hoarding instinct common to the obstinately lonely—acquiring whatever junk from thrift stores and yard sales to create a consoling fortress of clutter to best recreate their inner state. In opposition to our respective dynamics with my mother there had always been a cold strain between us, but epic rows erupted over this junk; I challenged him on the utility of a foam cushion with no casing or for that matter a piece of furniture to go with it or an intricate lamp made of popsicle sticks that didn’t actually function as a lamp, his defense was what a bargain they had been—given the current state of my finances perhaps I could take a lesson. But what truly stunned about the relationship was its perfect symbiosis. He treated me like an egg whose safekeeping he had been assigned by some highly ironic cosmic pedagogue and I cleaned his house.

Soon enough he recruited me for his pub trivia team. Though I had started attending meetings of my benevolent cult, I needed some kind of activity other than running; my father made sure there was always a Diet Coke in front of me, and by the end of the night I would be caffeinated to the point of trembling. I don’t have much to contribute to the literature of sobriety except that you discover the miraculous truth of every platitude you’ve ever heard and that in the cold light of biochemistry it means experiencing every single moment of every single day (excluding, naturally, the number of SSRIs and the antianxiety medication I was taking). He just needed someone who knew popular culture. All my life I’d had a child’s veneration of my father’s intellect. He may have possessed little aptitude for converting it into material gain, but the sheer volume of information as un-triaged as the yard sale items he was acquiring had been a source of pride for me in a my dad can beat up your dad sort of way. It was also his only quality that my mother uniformly spoke highly of. She liked to say I’d inherited his brain and her balls. So it came as no small surprise to discover he cheated at pub trivia; discreetly eavesdropping on other teams when stumped, or filling in answers after pencils were down. His team had long been champions, and this Machiavellian commitment to victory in an environment with this low of stakes made me unexpectedly proud. It was nice to know there was some winner’s edge in my blood.



My first meeting I walked past the door three times. I had to employ the athlete’s trick of visualizing myself walking through the door to finally go through with it. I sat by myself. Young women who avoid processed foods are not in large supply at meetings, and I thought if I looked haughty enough it would mask how afraid I was. It didn’t, and people smiled and said hello without making a federal case of it. The banality of redemption. One woman near me told a story to her friend about how annoyed she was her email had been hacked because of all the typos in the spam attributed to her. Another blue-collar archetype sighed to his friend he wasn’t getting younger, nobody is. I wondered if anyone in the room had partied with my mom. We read a passage from the Big Book, something about how going to prison opened a door. There was no blinding epiphany or anything like that, it’s more like…like candles on a winter night. Just knowing that you are not the only one in the dark is enough, maybe. But that’s between you and the God of your understanding.

This group met in a black box theater. Diane would have appreciated that.



Of course I thought about her. This was not New York, things did not change here; there were moments when the past bled through the page more strongly than the present. The smell of onions and pierogies on the griddle in a restaurant, the rhythm of bumps crossing over a bridge, the gasp of cold air opening a freezer door in the grocery store—it was hard to predict what would cause the unfurling of some Proustian apparition that would trigger the desire to dive into the nearest bottle. I meditated on the irony that it was Diane who had inspired in me the faith in destiny and that even from beyond the grave was the most likely to derail it. It made me feel closer to her; I was sure she was on a cloud somewhere pleased with the dramatic tension. I prayed for the clarity to distinguish the desire for a drink and the need for one and, for all I know, she helped answer it.



My abstinence included men as well as alcohol. There was no shortage of housecleaning to be done. However, one development around this time was Mark resurfacing. For several years he had been living in New York and working for Tribeca Productions, but he would be leaving before long because he’d finally cobbled together financing for the feature he’d been working on back when we were together. It pleased me that Jason and Harry were wrong: they had perceived Mark as a loser in the same way they perceived all less predatory creatures. As if any man who spent less than every hour of the day obsessing over how powerful he was could hardly be entitled to the same oxygen supply, let alone to come into his own in his own time. Yet it was also bittersweet to feel that I possessed the Midas vagina: destined to lose men before they became something. (My resentments were well fed by the martyr’s conviction that this was a larger cosmic scheme of persecution as opposed to the result of simple decisions made by myself.)

At any rate, we had remained friends and met for the occasional lunch during my time in the city, but he had been in a relationship with a sweet girl who supported his ambitions without being overly burdened with her own. I was genuinely pleased for him: Mark had found a Mark! But that had recently run its course and we were talking again often, sometimes for hours. The sound of his voice was logical and comforting, and my local sponsor, while as well-intentioned as could be, harbored too much of a girl crush on me to hold me accountable. She was a waitress who had never lived more than a few miles from the home of her birth and had read every issue of the late magazine of my employment and her head swam at the idea that I had lived in a world that she thought was a fantasy invented for grocery checkout counters. Mark saw through my prevarications and, though his nature was no more confrontational than it had been since we were together, now when my actions or my own interpretations of my actions started to spiral he would just chuckle tolerantly and say, “Okay, Lee.” And then I could laugh too, a small vacation from hating myself from the vantage of his tolerant amusement, the creeping sense that I might actually deserve it. Forgiveness. Okay, Lee.

Then he mentioned he was going to the Sundance Film Festival, they’d be putting him up in a halfway decent hotel. As his end was covered, he could float me the airfare, no sweat when I paid him back. I was quiet.

“I mean this in as casual a way as I can,” he said.

I said I’d think about it. Head and heart were at yet another impasse. You can’t go back again, that’s not how growth works. Conditions change, and you can’t attempt to recreate a set of preexisting conditions as though the same design flaw isn’t there. But…suppose conditions change to permit the emergence of new conditions. This chiding, knowing Mark, the Mark who FINISHED THINGS, was not the Mark of the past, and for the first time in my life I was sincere about getting well—the creeping sense that I deserved it. Of course this could just as easily have been an argument made from fear and because it was cold. The instant I believed I had reached some kind of clarity, breath fogged the window. I was now thirty years old, and had more than once made the threat in the past that if I reached this age unmarried and unpublished I would throw myself under a train. I knew Mark was a good man, and was sad to imagine the leggy, deserving blonde woman on the other coast with a young, Texan time bomb in her bed, and the good men in her past she hadn’t settled for believing she was happy playing a man’s game.

Settling.

Even now with my fortunes at their lowest and his at their peak, I viewed Mark as settling. Was it possible my entire twenties were just a dress rehearsal for the same mistakes to happen again and again? Was it possible in light of my entire twenties to dismiss a man I knew would be a good father?

There was another consideration.

The reason so many writers are drinkers is simply because drinking and writing are both ways to manage the darkness. Now I had stopped drinking, leaving no choice between the terror and the work. I had gotten back to it, my real work, for the first time in years. I was like Victor Hugo locked nude in a room with only paper and pencil. Was that Hugo or Dumas? Or entirely apocryphal? Irrelevant. There was no man in my life, no piece to file, no romance with my own destruction.

I had no more distractions.



Things are getting out of hand. What does any of this have to do with YOU?

The objective of this letter is to accept responsibility, repay debts, and ask forgiveness.

I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore. Recently a cousin posted the Christian the Lion video on her Facebook and it was the version where at the moment the lion runs up and hugs those guys it plays “I Will Always Love You” and it would have taken a forklift to lift me up.

Your first movie is about to come out. I hear it’s pretty bad. You and the director fought like cats and dogs. I am not worried about you. This life is not for the faint of heart, and I know your heart is an endurable piece of meat. I hear you break hearts. (Of course, I have gathered far more intelligence on your activities than these pages reflect.) The party line of my gender is to vilify a man who is cavalier with the female heart without necessarily excavating why he became this way. But I know you are the wound you are because of me and, like the sick bitch Pygmalion I am trying not to be, it gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore.

I remember the morning you left. The bright spring sun and the sound of the grackles. You sitting hunched on my stoop, your back as lean as a two-by-four, and seemingly as brittle. Your truck in the gravel lot with an oversize army navy duffel bag in the back, pretty much everything you owned. I was on a lot of pills, but had the presence of mind to grab Zion by the collar and prevent his escape. You made a comment about the price of dog-skin boots. I sat next to you and would have liked to have rubbed your back, but even I was not cruel enough to comfort you.

The look in your eyes. As a gifted youth of course you had chafed at the notion that you would have a superior appreciation of art with maturity, but only now did you finally understand the majority of the country and western corpus, or the book of Genesis. Could it be true? Could it be true I had fallen out of love with you just like that? You did not ask because you were too tender to hear me repeat the lie.

Of course it was a fucking lie!

Why did you have to believe me? Why did you have to leave?

I touched your shoulder and you flinched. I said you should get a back rub before the drive. You asked if I was offering you a fuck. I told you I didn’t want to do that. You observed that mine was the species of self-sabotage that caused the maximum level of inconvenience for others.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said.

“I guess you can take it and shove it up your ass,” you said.

I listened to the grackles. This sound didn’t occur around Harry’s house. He shot all the grackles with an air rifle and now they stayed away.

You stood.

“There is a light in you that can change lives,” he said. “And no one is trying to destroy it more than you. Enjoy becoming your mother.”

My face was hot with weeping I had not noticed. I stumbled to my knees and clung to you, shaking and burying my face into your abdomen.

I should not have said I didn’t love you anymore.

“Go,” I said.



The thing is, if this letter serves its purpose, if I really and truly seek forgiveness for the way that I wronged you, the thing that follows that is—

I don’t need you. I quit drinking because it was time to quit drinking. I started working again because enough already. I am a cockroach. I am Diana Ross. I am in the slow, arduous, intensely uncinematic process of not becoming my mother, and I need a man to save me like I need a hole in the head.

But I miss your brain. Talking with you was like a sandbox of infinite dimension, infinite joy in what it could become. You are the broken angel who brought my worst self to light, an exorcism in recursive loop. You are my favorite person in the world, and more audacious than forgiveness, I want to feel your hand on the back of my neck again. I want to feel the tip of your finger on my broken thumbnail. I want to feel like you have the longest, greediest arms, holding me all to yourself. I want to feel that you are proud of me. You are the mythologist that became the defining myth of my heart, and actually setting my pen aside, abandoning all flights and digressions and epistolary tap dancing and actually sending this means—

It means—

There is nothing more to say.