Preface
FIT INTO ME[1]
Because I am an orphan.[2]
Because once there was a child wandering the earth who was an orphan. She had neither father nor mother, and she was very sad. No one paid any attention to her, and no one asked why she was sad.
Because even though she was sad, she did not know how to weep. There were no tears yet in the world.[3]
Because children’s literature features orphans, and children intuitively comprehend that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.[4]
Because: When the moon saw the orphan child going about, she felt compassion. She came down from heaven, lay on the earth in front of the child and said, Weep, orphan child.… Let your tears fall on me. I shall take them with me back to the sky.[5]
Because I found comfort in these stories and stayed inside them as long as I could. I never wanted to leave. (Did you?)
Because we were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children…. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid.[6]
Because I try to not feel bad when I’m not writing. I tell myself that I’m always writing, even when I’m not writing. Waiting is writing, too. And when the real writing comes, if it comes, my own experience has taught me to force a draft within a season.
Because, like Stephen King, I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.[7]
Because in my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon…. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.[8]
Because, for years, I had this quotation taped to the wall beside my bed.
Because you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.[9]
Because Marguerite Duras was sixty-five when Yann Andréa Steiner entered her life, and he was thirty years her junior.
Because she wrote: In the American Hospital, while I was in a coma, I had lucid intervals in which I saw he was with me. These moments were very rare and very brief, but I could see he desired me…. I couldn’t speak anymore, or write. I couldn’t even hold a spoon—I dribbled and spilt things everywhere. I’d forgotten how to walk. I got mixed up. I fell down.
Because that was the woman Y.A. desired and loved.[10]
Because I used to sleep fourteen hours a day, fifteen, sixteen, sometimes more. During the third and final year of my MFA, I walked to the Aquatic Center every morning and swam laps until I was exhausted. Peaceful. Then I walked home and went back to bed.
Because I set alarms for every other hour on the hour—8:00, 10:00, 12:00, 2:00, 4:00, 6:00—so I could eat small meals the size of my fist.
Because after I ate, I slept.
Because I had vision therapy on Thursdays.
Because Fridays and Saturdays, I recovered.
Because Sundays, I rested in preparation for a three-hour workshop every Monday. And every Tuesday, recovery. Every Wednesday, rest, in preparation for vision therapy on Thursdays. Recover. Rest. Repeat.
Because I needed to be the old me again who could read, process, write. Faster.
Because every day I had to accept some lasting effect related to my brain and was reminded, over and over again: Damaged.
Because I hated feeling sorry for myself.
Because at vision therapy, I had to learn to walk again.
Because optically, hallways were difficult. Long hallways with patterned carpet were worse. Even worse: long hallways with patterned carpet and patterned wallpaper. Worst of all? Long patterned hallways with people moving around, getting bigger (coming nearer), or growing smaller (going away), while I just tried to stay upright, to take steps in a straight line, without leaning toward the walls.
Because I had to learn how to take stairs without misjudging, without any reliable sense of depth perception. Without clinging to the handrail or looking at my feet.
Because I got mixed up and fell down, a lot.
Because all I could think about was D. H. Lawrence’s small dead bird dropping frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.[11]
Because I suppose you know you love something when you’re willing to suffer for it and go into more student loan debt to be able to afford vision therapy and vestibular and sensorimotor rehabilitation and occupational therapy and pain management.
Because when my grandfather died, no one told stories in my family anymore. And my grandmother would mourn him silently for the rest of her life, would also mourn her middle-aged son who would die in the nursing home he’d lived in since he was eighteen years old and his football helmet cracked on impact, leaving him with the use of two fingers: one to say yes, two to say no.
Because in my news feed this morning, a five-year-old story about the discovery of a rare species of solitary bee, Osmia avosetta, which makes a three-tiered arrangement of flower petals, mud, more flower petals—a petal sandwich, inside of which the parent deposits nectar and pollen before laying one egg and sealing the nest.[12]
Because when I was nine years old my parents adopted another little girl from Korea, six years old.
Because my father was an only child and the last of the Gaudrys, and my mother’s brother would never have a family of his own and was the last of the Pashkewiches.
Because my parents don’t want to leave me all alone.
Because they will. I do not have children. I will not give them the family we never had. The family they wanted for me. A sister. Her family getting together with mine every Christmas. There were supposed to be children. Cousins. Nieces. Nephews. And my parents were supposed to become grandparents. Grandchildren! My sister and I would have in-laws. Our husbands were supposed to have siblings and all their husbands and wives and all their siblings were supposed to have siblings. There were supposed to be a lot more people for me to love.
Because every year on New Year’s Eve, it’s just the three of us for dinner on the beach down in Florida.
Because every year at the stroke of midnight, people all over the world toast to the possibility of reinventing themselves.
Because it’s magical, our mind’s capacity to create new narratives for ourselves, and to look for events as an opportunity to change the narrative.[13]
Because one summer at Andover, when I was fifteen and showed up for acting class, I got to reinvent myself, got to be, over and over again, with every new script, every new character, someone who wasn’t me.
Because I was slipping away.
Because my father knocked on my bathroom door one morning and said, You okay in there?
Because by then, there were deadbolts on all our doors.
Because when I unlocked the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway, I had forgotten everything.
I couldn’t tell him what happened.
I was slipping away. I had forgotten years.
My parents didn’t know what to do, so they sent me away for the summer.
When I came back, they had taken down family pictures, removed any trace of there ever having been another little girl in that house.
Because for over a decade, I wouldn’t remember.
Until one day, during the second year of my MFA, I hit my head.
The flashbacks started. I remembered animal parts.
I remembered a puppy, how she dragged him down the road until the pads of his paws were torn off, until his dewclaws were ripped off, until she brought him home and my mother ran outside, screaming.
I remembered finding a squirrel in the garage. Stiff. Eyes open.
Ribcage splayed. Empty, inside.
I never wanted to live in that house again, so they didn’t make me. They sent me away, let me go, to a high school far away.
Then one day, over a decade later, I hit my head.
I remembered the birds. So many birds.
The flashbacks started.
Ten years old? Eleven? I crawled into bed and pulled down my covers. Lay down.
Got back up. Pulled the corners of the fitted sheet off the mattress. Gathered everything into a bundle. Went outside. Into the yard. Gently dumped their headless bodies down our hill. Went back inside. Put the sheets in the washing machine. Started the cycle. Walked down the hall. Locked myself in the bathroom.
The next morning, my father knocked on my bathroom door. You okay in there?
I had forgotten everything.
Empty, inside.
I hit my head. I couldn’t walk in a straight line anymore, couldn’t take stairs, couldn’t concentrate or focus, couldn’t read, couldn’t write.
The flashbacks started. I remembered the birds’ hard bodies, their headless bodies, in my bed. Some fresh. Others not. I remembered the feel of their hard bodies under my soft body in my bed. I remembered the feel of the grass beneath my feet. I remembered the moon that night. The moon through the skylight above the bathtub. The bathroom door, dead-bolted.
All these years later, I still can’t turn out the lights and go to bed.
How long had she been collecting them? How many months? A year? It wouldn’t have been difficult. Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired glass house overlooking a hill on a golf course. Great views.
Their necks were broken before they even hit the deck.
But where are their heads? I never found their heads.
I remembered the feel of their hard bodies under my soft body, the grass and dirt beneath my feet.
I remembered bloody legs, paw pads ripped away, dewclaws torn off. I remembered open eyes. Headless birds. Empty, inside.
I didn’t want to be touched. (I still don’t want to be touched.)
I hit my head. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write. I began going to the Aquatic Center every morning.
The only place I wasn’t touching anything was in the water.
The only place I didn’t feel their bodies under my body was in water.
Because many traumatized individuals were quite isolated from supportive others during their childhoods. They typically endured the aftermath of abuse alone. On the one hand, this likely generated terrible loneliness, but on the other hand, isolation was also a signal that it’s over now, that is, the abuse has ended. Thus, some people, or parts of themselves, automatically retreat to isolation to gain a sense of safety and relief. They may develop a habit of isolating when they are stressed in the present, often without even realizing what they are doing or why.[14]
Because forgetting has its uses.[15]
Because memory is lying in wait, and then out of nowhere, something blisters.[16]
Because the desire to write is the desire to evolve, to resolve something we seek to understand.[17]
Because writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.[18]
Because words, imagined in the greatest yearning, as a means of finding love, defining it; as a means of shaping it (This is how it feels, this is where it hurts) and sharing with others its permutations, astonishments, exaltations, and erosions. In that regard and others, an act of faith, then, to write; to employ words in pursuit of the belief that one does indeed actually believe in something—in love, in the frequent surprising possibilities of other people—as one moves toward the redemptive power inherent in the communal act of revelation: toward the daring, vulnerability, of I have written this, will you read it?[19]
NOTES
[1] Margaret Atwood, “You Fit Into Me,” Tools of the Writer’s Craft by Sands Hall (San Francisco: Moving Finger Press, 2011), 42.
[2] Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 2006), 26.
[3] The First Tears (Algerian Orphan Tale), quoted in Melanie A. Kimball, “From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature,” Library Trends 47.3 (Winter 1999), 558.
[4] Bruno Bettelheim, “Transformations: The Fantasy of the Wicked Stepmother,” The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 73.
[5] The First Tears, 558.
[6] Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 30.
[7] Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 154.
[8] Barbara Kingsolver, “High Tide in Tucson,” High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 15.
[9] James Baldwin, quoted in Jan Howard, “Telling Talk from a Negro Writer,” Life, May 24, 1963, 89.
[10] Marguerite Duras, “Alan Veinstein,” Practicalities, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 69–70.
[11] D. H. Lawrence, “Self-Pity,” The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 382.
[12] Charles Q. Choi, “Bees Make Nests of Colorful Flower Petals,” Live Science (2010), https://www.livescience.com/8239-bees-nests-colorful-flower-petals.html.
[13] Charles Duhigg, quoted in Susan Shain, “How to Crush Your Habits in the New Year With the Help of Science,” The New York Times, December 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/12/31/smarter-living/better-habits-tips-new-year-resolutions-science.html.
[14] Suzette Boon, Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, “Coping with Isolation and Loneliness,” Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Their Therapists (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 43.
[15] Sara Ahmed, introduction to On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke UP, 2012), 2.
[16] Durga Chew-Bose, “Heart Museum,” Too Much and Not the Mood (New York: FSG, 2017), 78.
[17] Alan Watt, The 90 Day Novel: Unlock the Story Within (Los Angeles: The 90 Day Novel Press, 2017).
[18] Rebecca Solnit, “Flight,” The Faraway Nearby (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 60-61.
[19] Thomas Glave, “Panic, Despair: When the Words Do Not Come (But Then an Unexpected Journey),” Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 132.