Finding the heart.
I don’t know how to do this. I am trying to write a book, which is such a ridiculous thing to say that I feel embarrassed to admit it. I’m trying to write a book about the loss of my father, about what it felt like to be a teenager who loses everything she believes in very quickly and has to adjust to adulthood faster than seems reasonable. It’s not an unusual story, but it’s certainly a relatable human one and I believe it could be beautiful if done right.
I see the memories like flashes of light, like paintings or photographs stuck in time. Writing in so much like a photograph to me. Some are blurry but some are so clear, and they are so precious to me. I want to write them artfully, I want to preserve them in time, I want to make him real on the page, and I want to honor the suffering and beauty of my mother and sister, and the devastation of cancer. I want to honor the girl I was who suffered so harshly, who could not forgive herself for her mistakes or face her own spiraling terror, who buried herself in boys to try to find something normal and teenage to worry about because she just wasn’t strong enough to take it.
I wrote a piece for my writing class and it got slammed, but for all the right reasons. It doesn’t have enough adult reflection. The focus is meandering - why focus so much on the boy, when the problem was the terror of the loss of the father?
The focus meanders in the story because it meandered in real life. In real life I threw myself into a boy so hard, so deep, because it was the only place i was capable of finding beauty or of feeling like I could breath. I didn’t know i was doing this at the time, although i bet if I dug deep enough I actually did know it at least a little bit.
So: my story has no heart. I took this terribly, of course, and immediately sat down at my computer to write about the very worst night, the night i forgot to buy my father his orange ice pops, when his very last request went unfulfilled because of my forgetfulness. This was the part I was avoiding writing, because I knew it would hurt. I nearly sobbed the whole time I did it. I’m not sure if it’s actually any better writing, I’ll have to give it a few days to rest and then take another look, but at least I got through it.
How do people find the courage to face up to their demons, to the worst parts of themselves, to their saddest moments? How do you make art out of terror and sorrow? How do you survive the process of reliving it?
I’m not sure I can do this. I’m not sure why I want to. It started in a flash of inspiration, a gift from an old ghost who made me remember what it was to want something, what it was to be inspired by something. But now it is shifting, shifting, into what it has always needed to be, a story about family and loss and what it feels like to be a girl who has no choice but to be brave even though she is fundamentally a coward. A girl who is holding onto a boy so hard she cannot stand on her own, and then he leaves her too and she fears she will die from the loss of all that she loves.
But obviously, she did survive. She’s 31 and and sitting a kitchen table with a glass of cranberry juice, looking at a bouquet of yellow birthday roses, listening to an ambulance drive by. She survived.
I fear for the teenagers who suffer, for the people who cannot find the light. They do not realize how beautiful their pain is, that even in terrible pain there is a sort of harsh beauty lighting them up. Maybe only those of us who have felt this way can see it, but I can see it. Maybe I will just think of them, and keep going.
true true
