The wrong sort of story

Today, I woke late. It was cold in my apartment-- this year, I have stubbornly refused to turn on the heat, as little as I am home and as much insulation as the thick stone walls of my building provide, but last night was a deeper cold. My mouth tasted of last night's last Jim Beam. The daylight was dull through the shades, and when I pulled them back, the whited sky stretched long and barren to the slumped hills. Ahead of me, a mountain of grading I do not want to do, the sullen end to a long and bitter week. It hadn't occurred to me that it is possible to lose what you never had. A new category of loss, to go with things like keys, dignity, youth, innocence, friends and love. And I do not excel at letting go, think of Elizabeth Bishop on the question of, and try not to think, which I suppose I also do not excel at.

Last week I finished a first draft of an essay called "Naming the Unspeakable," that sought understanding of my innate narrative tendency to seek to understand what is difficult to admit, whether that is failure or transgression, betrayal or shame, fear or culpability or complicity. That inclination has yielded my best fiction and nonfiction, but comes with its own limitation: people have only so much stomach for what is serious and at times discomforting, narrative that is unresolvable in nature. We prefer happy endings and safe answers. I include myself because I often find myself making glib and self-serving choices even when I think I am not-- I wrote the essay itself after sitting on a panel with a number of other Teach For America alumni, and listening to myself tell them how great of an impact I have today in the classroom, how the Delta changed me for the better. They believed me, but I did not believe myself-- the truth is that I couldn't bear to stay there and fail, and that years later, having fled responsibility, I lucked into a position that is relatively easy and comfortable, teaching young adults who may not be privileged but who are easy to teach. After all these years, and even knowing better, I lied in the public arena, pitched myself as I would like to be, as being better than I am. And the lie was bitter as I considered it, and worse still in the unpacking, for there is a cowardice in asserting character you lack.

There is only so long that one can recur into the past; I hope to place my novel soon, and let go of that history having understood it as best I can. I am afraid, however, that my narrative tendencies are now afflicting my personal life as much as my professional life. I need to stop living my own life as if I am a character bound for some inevitably sorrowful end.

~

I did my grading, finally, the strength of my student's efforts drawing through the long stacks as the afternoon wound through and the sun set out the windows the cafe, and I left at dusk, headed across town to do laundry at my parent's house and get a small dose of their beagle-shepherd mix, Aya, who is a bit of princess but fortunately is cute enough to make up for her self-regard. The sky was almost blue-black and the clouds hid whatever moon or stars might have been, and the lights of the cars in front and behind flashed off the wet asphalt in red and yellow flickers as if lit by the passage of the vehicles themselves. As I came over the Ferry Street Bridge in the left lane, the Willamette a black, milky shadow below, a piece of plastic hovered in the air three feet off the ground, borne by some steady twister or some accident of opposing winds, the piece turning and shimmering in my headlights like some quick, live thing, and I did not want to strike it and end its flight and so glanced over my shoulder and cut quickly into the other lane. It still hovered there in my rearview mirror as I motored away, sure to be gone soon when the next car reached it, but still magic for the moment, no victim of my own hand, and I felt my throat seize a little. Surely this is no way to feel, to live, imagining so much unintended harm from one's own hand? I've meant no such harm; I've done no more than the next fellow. Still, this piece of plastic hovers before me tonight, as I watch the laundry turn in the drier, and upstairs in the kitchen of my childhood home, I hear the clatter of my mother about the pots and pans, talking to herself out loud about this ingredient and that step, humming sometimes songs from "The King and I," as she has since I was a child. There was magic, I find myself saying, though what I mean is that there was beauty and small mystery that I witnessed and did not sully, that somehow on a day like today that felt like a victory, like reprieve from every other disappointment. Like a reason for hope.