DEAR LOVE,
Here we are. We have caught up with time. I sit now writing this book we have been living. I arrange my years. You help.
I write at my baby sister’s desk. Her closet, the walls, the décor, tell a tale of lovely girlishness. The desk is snug against a wall that displays birthday cards and posters from girlfriends, collected over the years. Sweet cartoonish drawings of hearts, portraits, hands holding hands, fingers entwined. Handmade coupons for Hugs and certificates proclaiming Besties Forever. Streamers and deflated balloons are taped to make a border around the cards, like arms embracing a bouquet of flowers. The messages on the cards and posters are all declarative affirmations. You are amazing! You can do anything! You’re the coolest person I know!!!
Oh, the gorgeous language of teenage girls, spilling over with exclamation points and youthful certainty. My sister has a glorious sense of healthy entitlement. She asserts what she wants, what she feels she deserves, and seeks to claim that and only that. She isn’t swayed by the trials, needs, or opinions of others.
“But I have compassion for him,” I’ve said to her, describing a relationship. “It’s just where he is in his personal journ—”
“You’re crazy,” is her reply.
One woman’s crazy is another woman’s love.
I’ve slipped into her life like a photograph into a frame. I have a sly hypothesis: Writing while living with this set of parents will give me what I need. As though through osmosis, I will cultivate the audacious certainty my sister has from growing up with them. I will watch the way they love one another, and absorb what healthy love feels and looks like. I will learn this love, pat it onto my cheeks, rub it into my heart.
Even in their womb of love, as I narrate my life, I tear up often. I love the act of writing, but revisiting certain memories is painful. Whenever my eyes water, I look away from the screen and look to this tableau of a sparkling personality that laughs at her own joke. Taped across two walls are black paper letters spelling, “The goal of life isn’t to live forever. It’s to create someth—”
And that’s it. Merely one of the million reasons I adore this girl. She’s unabashedly herself, ever ready with an eye roll or raised eyebrow. She is as ironic as I am earnest.
My laptop is a white MacBook from 2009. I call it the Mothership. It has a dent on its screen, courtesy of a 4-year-old’s elbow dug into the plastic sometime last year. It’s laughably decrepit, dingy, and uncool, with smudges and crusty things I baby-wipe off every few months. I love my laptop. Papa bought it for me, years ago. This and the gold necklace from him and Momma are the two material possessions I’d rescue from a fire.
“So what are you writing about?” ask Momma and Dad. “What is it exactly?”
I want to reply, “The riot in my soul.” But that isn’t what one says to one’s already nervous parents.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “We’ll see.” Which actually, isn’t that much better for their anxiety.
But bless their hearts, they let me stay, they let me write, they encourage. What a gift they are. They worry, of course, watching me tug my emotions from room to room, now, talking aloud to you. Oh yes: I now talk aloud to you. It helps me write. They exchange thin-lipped looks and express concern, for my progress is felt soley by myself and remains invisible to everyone else, save for you. All they can see is me squirrelling away in a closed room for hours on end, emerging only for meals and to run.
And that’s all right. Only I have to feel certain. No one in my immediate world—let alone the larger—is expecting, wanting, or asking to read this book. Yet I’ve invested my entire past, present, and future into these pages. It’s both daunting and thrilling, the utility of futility, of no stakes and every stake. The words author and authority both come from the Latin auctor, which means originator. I love this. I am my beginning and my end—the ultimate authority in my life. As I author my origin story, I meet my child-self. I encounter the teenager I was. I meet the 22-year-old who moved to New York in a blizzard with two suitcases and a dream. She, like my sister and her wall of radiant love, glows with unblemished audacity. Faith yet to be broken.
I ask her, “May I borrow some?”
“Silly,” she says. “Courage doesn’t belong to solely one person.”
So I reach and take hold of faith like it’s a dandelion filled to the brim with wishes.
I’ve given myself a year to write this book. If the Earth can begin and complete a rotation in one year, surely that’s time enough for me to sort an orbit of my own. Lit by audacity, I travel forward by circling the past.
FOR TEN HOURS A DAY, I write my whole self in hope it will make me whole. I leave my laptop only to eat, sleep, and run.
Purposefully, I haven’t joined a gym. I’ve always hated the bar-like gym scene, and I refuse to continue my maniacal two and a half hour workouts. Now, I run through woodsy trails and suburban sidewalks surrounding my parents’ house. I’m eating much more, sleeping eight hours a night, and my pallor is starting to pink.
I love the privacy and anonymity of our days. The only people I spend time with are my parents, the characters in this book, and you. In New York, like all other New Yorkers, I was rarely without my headphones. Even when your phone has died or you aren’t listening to music, your headphones stay, dimming the chaos, acting as armor. Men tend to be slightly less aggressive when they think you can’t hear them. Here, I run without headphones or even my phone. I write in my mind, listen to my breath, the birds, wind, trees, grass, the sound of things growing. Sometimes, I’ll recite Momma and Dad’s address, town, state, and zip code, like a dazzling prayer, bright with mystical powers.
The fist that was my heart is unclenching. New York is a hardened, hungry creature, grim, competitive, curt. Nearly every conversation is highly sexualized. Bangkok pulses with the promise of sex. In Bangladesh, the boundaries around women are violently oppressive.
Sleepy, quaint Beaverton is aloe for the blistered soul, soothing burns collected from life spent as a girl in this world. For the first time since puberty, I’m not a sexual object. It’s wholly new, bizarre, and heavenly to spend entire days free of uninvited words and touch. I feel asexual and invisible in the best of ways. I feel like a newt, sexless, squishy, blobbish, neither coveted nor endangered, neither flaunted nor itemized. The sensation is extraordinary—to be safe and without form.
The other morning, I woke up feeling I forgot to do something. A task I was supposed to fulfill, but neglected. It took me a second to identify the pull and when I did, I was horrified. The thing that felt forgotten was the attention of men. From age 15, I have been dating, auditioning, performing, and being photographed. Some of my greatest highs came from my sex appeal.
How vile. I itch. I feel restless. Then suffocated. Then testy and impatient for no apparent reason. I move through withdrawal as I renounce and release my harmful attachments. The space they leave fills with humility and freedom.
You cannot escape yourself when writing about yourself. Seems obvious, but this fact humbles me nonetheless. Furthermore, I’ve been talking and typing aloud. Every word. I didn’t begin the habit intentionally. But I’ve learned there’s magic to it. When I hear my words, I confront myself. The corners I’ve ignored, the tricks I excel at, the cycles in my life, echo in the space before me, demanding I listen. I face the dissonance. I hear the symphony. I compose the new.