It’s a late May evening and it’s 87 degrees and I’m sweating in the too-tight dress pants I wore to work today, typing this on my phone over the spine of the book I’m not really reading, the dreamy notes of a new song swaying in my head, the same rhythm as the heavy air brushing across my cheeks and hair as the ceiling fan does its best to push the heat away.
When I was 12, I wrote 151 pages of a novel, and up ‘til now it’s been a joke, a funny joke, how bad it is, how young I was, how huge my dreams were, how they have since flitted away, insubstantial as a feather, and so ten years have gone by and I blush and giggle at the existence of these 151 pages, these 10 year old pages no one would ever read or care about or love, no one but the 12-year-old who wrote them.
Way back, way back.
And today, age 22, I read the book, the whole book, and somehow I was able to disconnect from the 12-year-old’s dreamy heart and say This was good practice. She wrote good scenes. You can tell she read a lot. It’s still terrible, though – heartlessly aware that this would never have been enough for the fragile kid, the anxious kid, the one who was desperate to be different, but still wanted to belong, the one who’d raise her hand in Sunday school to repeat (with some variation) a story another child had already told, just so the teacher would notice her, think she was special, think she was brilliant, think she was there.
And today, age 22, I read the book and wondered What happened to you?
But of course I have intimate knowledge of what happened to you, little kid, typing feverishly on an ancient laptop, sweating under your blankets so the computer light doesn’t disturb your sleeping sisters in the bunk bed beside you. People say “life happened,” but really, it’s people that will happen to you.
I don’t remember writing it, but everything you said, kid, is so sharply familiar. I know exactly what you mean, every word, though your writing isn’t meaningful. It’s laden with too much unnecessary detail. It’s boring, unfocused, and too excited about itself to make any sense — but there’s a moment where the main character is outside on a rainy day in the city, looking for a place to be safe and dry, and she sees people in the street, just existing. She sees teens talking loudly with each other as they carelessly walk through puddles; she sees a woman on the phone, laughing, under an awning; she sees a mother, a father, a child huddled together, the father holding the umbrella.
Alone in the unfamiliar city, our hero sees these people and feels afraid. She feels looked at. She feels hated, judged, and somehow, ignored, all at once. And I read this and thought, I know what you mean.
And today, I read the book and felt confused, a dull tug yanking me back to those days, those days I think of as being before anything really happened to me. At age 22, I think of the version of me that wrote this book as me in my raw material. Still homeschooled, it would be over a year until I attended high school for the first time, my first foray into mainstream society. It would be over five years until I attended college, for the first time allowing my long-held, concrete belief system to be eroded by some probing questions, sweeping against the intractable hardness, seeping into the pores. And it would be ten years until today, when I read my book for the first time.
In my raw material, I wrote dialogue like a Victorian author. I maintained that my main character was not like “other girls,” never really having met any. I wrote with authority on places, people, and stories that I had never seen or experienced except in books. And I felt like a grownup. I felt finished, ten years ago –a flower in full bloom.
And now I’m sweating in the heavy evening heat, the book I’m not reading splayed open on my chest as I write this, still in my too-tight work pants, and there’s some kind of ache in me, the strange ache that comes when I reread my old journal entries of events and dates that are important to me and find that the story I remember is so different from the event as it happened, as I wrote it down. I remember this novel, this 12-year-old, differently, with 10 years of distance between us. It’s not really a joke anymore. My fresh, fervent, unfinished 12-year-old self isn’t really a joke.
I’ll still laugh at her, the silly thing, not sure how people act but bravely trying to put it on paper anyway. But I won’t laugh at her like before, with the apologetic half shrug that replies to the question You wrote this? with a sheepish Yes, I wrote it, but don’t look at me. I’ll laugh at her quietly, mournfully, uncomfortably, the way you might laugh at a joke when you know that its author is dead.
Now I can’t find you
Oh, where have you been?
The opened closet
The terror begins
Way back, way back.
_-_-_
Note: I’ve blogged about this novel before. Click here for a blog post containing my previous derisive treatment of it. I also referenced it in my admission essay for graduate school as a mistake I didn’t learn from. I probably should’ve read it before being so confident about what it was. You can read the novel here (it’s also linked in the post above). I won’t deny it’s very bad.
Lyrics taken from “Way Back” by Manchester Orchestra from their new album, “The Million Masks of God.”
Moments of Levity 