Back to Work

I've been watching Dexter. What three seasons of watching people get stabbed won't do for a trauma you've gotten too comfortable with!

Honestly, it doesn't elicit more than a small twitch anymore. Used to be, someone would get stabbed or have their throat cut in a movie and it would send me into a trance for a while. I'd have to get up and walk around, shake it off. Now it's just a quick jerk into the dark place, and I'm back.

Small trips to the dark place are good for me - I've always been a darkly humored person.

The day of my wedding, I told my friends to let me know my husband-to-be arrived safely, because I was certain a tractor-trailer would kill him on the way there.

Things can't go this well for this long, can they?

I told my husband I want three children, because when one dies, you'll still have two to keep you going. I was serious.

But this is what you do - you hope for the best and plan for the worst, right? It's just smart. It's survival. At least I hope. I hope big. And I have this vague—not belief but—premonition...it will all be grand. Who knows? It could be delusion, another survival mechanism.

But I'm writing this book. I know how again. And my short story was picked up by North American Review, so I can no longer use the "I suck" excuse. I will write every day until I write as well as that again, remembering E.L. Doctorow's words.

Ugh. Hoping I can do; planning for the worst I can do; watching throats get cut and reading coroner's reports and reliving my own police interview I can do. It's all this goddamned work that I can't stand.

Open Letter to the Guy Who Has Volunteered to Be My Husband

I pity myself a lot. I thrash about, stay in my pajamas all day, let the laundry sit in the washing machine, refill my mug with hot water four or five times until the tea leaves have nothing left to give.

I lie down in the bath and blow bubbles. I stare at a shard of grout becoming dislodged from between the tiles. You ask me what's wrong and I look at you like you're the world's biggest idiot. Same thing that's wrong everyday, duh.

There are a hundred pieces of paper scattered on the floor of the office, each one is covered in ink, codes and symbols that mean something to me. They mean I am a terrible writer. They mean I am a coward. They mean I do not have the language to narrate the trip I took to the moon. How many people get to go to the moon? It should have been a better writer instead of me. "They should have sent a poet," exclaims Jodie Foster to the galaxies laid out before her in that ridiculous movie Contact.

There are pieces missing and, instead of writing them, I twirl the covers around me in bed and make myself into a burrito. I stare at the TV. I spend hours feeling my heart slam into my ribs.

I am obsessed with myself. My self. Self self self self self.

And this morning, when I whimpered, having been denied validation by another literary magazine—when I said, "I can't write a story better than this one"—you went wordlessly to our stacks of books, the ones that we don't have shelves for yet, and flipped through all your editions of Best American Short Stories from the 90s until you found the contributors' notes from Rick Bass and Poe Ballantine, both of whom fell into depressions, each clinging stubbornly to a story that had a fatal flaw in it that he refused to acknowledge and change, unable to fully see that flaw but ever sending it out until an editor illuminated it for him, and saved him.

I can't believe my good luck. You cling stubbornly to me despite my flaws, my insufferable suffering!, but some part of you can see the masterpiece, and trusts me to continue to edit, explore, revise, and append until I am the best version of myself.


Or at least the version that will get us some fucking money.


Thank you for marrying me. I've got your back.

P.P.S.

That's not true. I want to tell you everything, but I don't think I can speak the language.

P.S.

And there are some things I just don't want to tell you.

Not Writing

I'm really lost.

The book is printed out and all over my floor. I was hoping that if I squinted just right, I would see the finished product and know what to do to get there.

And then of course, there's E.L. Doctorow breaking my balls:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I've come to the devastating conclusion that I may have stopped writing this book a long time ago. All my obsessively making revisions to existing pieces and letting off steam in these blog posts are just me idling the car at a rest stop, using Armor-All wipes to polish it up. I'm stuck here, and I'm sad and angry and I want more fucking time and less fucking jobs and I concede that it will have to wait until after the wedding.

That's not the part that worries me most of all. The part that worries me is: will I be able to remember misery when I am happy? Or will I engage in subterfuge against my own happiness to recreate the misery I need to connect with to write the rest of the book?

I know a lot of mothers and wives have achieved a remarkable balance between writing and living, but I am so far from it, I ache. I physically ache, thinking about a distant future in which I can write fearlessly, freely, and for hours. Do I need to sequester myself to some abby to finish this book, alone and far from the things that make me feel complete?

Or should I just buy some pot?

What Dreams Do Come

I made a wonderful discovery this morning: I still dream of her!
I was beginning to worry; I hadn't seen her in a while - a few months maybe.

For the first two years, I dreamed of her two or three times a week. In the dreams, my depth of understanding varied. Sometimes I had no idea she was dead and acted totally naturally: fighting with her, hating her guts, pitying her, dancing around a thrift store with her and laughing.

Sometimes, I was breathless with fear. "Something bad happened to you," I said in one. But I forgot what, until her boyfriend entered the room.

In others, I was amazed that she was back from the dead - almost as much as I would be in real life. What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead!

One time I even said, "We have to call the medical community! This is huge!"
Then I recited her Social Security Number when she asked for it, and I knew it in my dream because in real life I'd filled it out again and again and again.

In that same dream, I said I was sorry that death sucked so much; she'd said no one in the afterlife would talk to her. I said I was sorry and then I sobbed into her shoulder, "It's been so hard on me, you have no idea."

I suspect this last part had nothing to do with her death, at all.

This morning, I dreamed I'd had a baby. A boy. And I was welcoming my friends and family to a park to meet him. She arrived, a little rotund and greying, with these outlandish turquoise spectacles and colorful outfit. I called her "Grandma" and hugged her, and noticed that it felt all wrong. Her being dead, for one. But mostly because I never saw this happening - not when she was alive. And it makes me wonder, at what point was it too late? At what point could the course of her life have led her instead to a park to celebrate her first grandchild?

I could spend the day making a list of moments - and those are just the ones I was there for. It's not exactly the If Only I'd... trip. It's more an aching wish to see how all her alternate universes have played out.

My favorite dream - and this was pretty early on - a spider had stolen her simple gold necklace, which she hadn't worn since I was a child, and had spun it into a web high in the rafters of a barn. I said, "I'll get it down for you," but she didn't seem to care either way. And after struggling to get up there and realizing the danger, I decided to just let it be. That it was more beautiful that way.

When to say When

I did it because I was bored of the Murder Box. I know every scrap of paper in it. I know how many counseling sessions Victims Services paid for; I know exactly how much the mortuary wrote off the bill as "professional courtesy;" I know the three causes of death stated on the certificate, and I know the time of death, to the minute (which actually has nothing to do with the time she died, but the time when a living witness confirmed it, which was three days later. Never mind that for three days, she was as metabolic as a spinach salad.)

And because I'm an animal and animals will sniff around places of interest until they exhaust themselves or get driven off, I ordered the coroner's autopsy report from my home state.

And because I'm impulsive, impatient, and twitchy, I opened it right away.

And because I'm a selfish ass who's afraid of having a single private moment, I read the first page out loud to my fiance.

And because I did that, I undid the perfect, shiny veneer of polyurethane that my self-protective brain sprayed over the top of everything after the trial two years ago. I chiseled it off in short curls that fell off the sides of that horrible moment that I saw her, and I scraped and sanded until the rawness of those following days was restored to its original beauty.

Two years ago, I chose not to look at the photographs they presented as evidence in the trial - it was the one thing I didn't want to know - I gave myself that in a gesture of loving compassion. And then I undid it by reading the very thorough and unsugared prose of the coroners report of the scene as he found it. Of the body as he found it.

I put the 12-page report back in my purse without going further. I was shaking. I snapped at my fiance when he made a sound - a sound like he'd just discovered me poking holes in myself with a rusty pair of scissors. And I snapped at him and told him not to say a word and not to tell me I couldn't and shouldn't do this, because I had to do it. I will not only read, but illustrate, tattoo on myself, and eat each page of that report - crumple, chew, chew, and swallow every single page regardless of the risk of bowel obstruction.

Because I am an animal. A dumb, sniffing animal, hoping to lift my nose at last and turn to the pack and say, This - This is what it is.