You Made Me Do It

You suggested I write this. You, the writer, couldn’t. You tried writing the refugee story. Many times, many different ways. You failed. And failed again. Maybe failed better. Still you couldn’t. More than two years after you and I met in Lesbos, you were still trying. You tackled it from one direction, then another, to no avail. You were too involved, unable to disentangle yourself from the tale. You said that you couldn’t calibrate the correct distance. You weren’t able to find the right words even after numerous sessions on your psychiatrist’s couch.

I should write this thing, you told me. You called it a thing, flicking your hand with a dismissive Levantine gesture. Every idiot thinks they’re a writer; they’re not. Every dullard thinks they have a tale to tell; they don’t. But I should. I have a good one. You insisted I write the refugee story, as well as your story and mine. This thing.

I told you I wasn’t a writer. I could form sentences, present ideas and so forth, but not write a memoir or a book that anyone would necessarily want to read. Who said anything about publishing, you said. I should write my story; no one has to read it. There are enough books out there, you said. Why add more? I should write to make sense of my world, to grasp my story. Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless? One puts a story in a linear order, posits cause and effect, and then thinks one has arrived. Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

You contradict yourself all the time. You know that, right?

I know, I know. You are large, like Whitman. You contain multitudes.

If writing my story will not simplify my life, will not make more sense of my narrative, if I can’t publish and become a gazillionaire, why should I do it?

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

And whatever you do, you said, don’t fucking call it A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos, just don’t.

I’m writing now. I’ll tell your tale and mine.

I’ll write your story for you.

I plunge.