Life is just a fantasy
It was for wish fulfillment, the opportunity to recreate reality in a rosier hue.
Who can resist a life of fantasy, the ability to live in one's head? Unfortunately, it’s my head. The stories I come up with, the reworked scenes from the past, the present-day complaints, are all about me. My brain is no fiction factory. It’s a self-obsessed dreamworks with me as the witty, darkly sensitive main character.
I am slowing down my obsessive mind, discouraging it from wanting things it can’t have or from believing that want equals need equals reality, that desire and obsession have predictive qualities, that old hurts need to be palpitated until the sting fades. Still, the desire to fantasize reappears on occasion and I have to tamp down the story that forms. This morning, my mind lingered over a gesture. The gesture could have been two weeks ago, it could have been years ago. Maybe I still know the person, maybe we parted ways. We certainly aren’t confidants, but my mind holds this gesture, this last touch, tenderly.
It was a friendly, light punch to the arm, almost lingering, the warmth of what wasn’t. We were slightly out of context, separated by a foot or two, and there was the reach and recede. His aura, his energy, was palpable, a force field of comfort and heat, something to sink into. I was receptive, though it no longer mattered.
This was a moment to slow down and savor. To interpret endlessly. It was about possibility and hope, about what could have been. I could write paragraphs about it, sensual things on unfulfilled hunger and hidden intent. But I’ve gone on enough about it, have captured it. Away it goes, stored up for the really lonely times.
We kissed in the dark on the hood of a car. We fumbled against the wall. Your now-or-never lunge across the couch sealed the deal. All these memories, these ruminations and relivings, are part of a comforting fantasy that nothing ever really ends, that I am connected to everyone I’ve ever loved forever, that what happened between us gives me continued possession. I even entertain the notion that we could recouple, like those older people whose weddings are sometimes in the New York Times, the old flames who love anew, entire happy lives behind them and more happiness waiting.
On my new march towards realism, towards a life not lost in fantasy (still, the heat of the gesture lingers; I don't want it to go away), I remind myself how wrong most of these people were for me. Non-thinkers. Homophobes. A Republican? A hunter? A stoner? Our politics clashed. Our ways of being in the world did not match up. Long-term love was never an option.
Give it up, fantasy maker, I told my mind. Live in the now. Remember? Kid, husband, house, animals? Your good, lucky life?
It seems to be working. For the most part.
For those who now have the Aldo Nova song going through your head, I apologize. And offer this link.
Image by Biscotte.
The love object
It’s brutal, this game. I’ve dressed as if we are at war, at odds, and who is to say we aren’t?
My heels click click on the steps. The drink leaves a muddied circle on the concrete. I press the glass against my cheek before taking a sip.
Your car pulls up without a sound. I hear your skateboard hit the sidewalk in a sudden stop. I could tell your step and whistle anywhere. You are clean and fresh. You are musky with a day’s work. Your hair is curly. It is dark. No. Gray and straight. You have no hair. Your white shirt is still crisp at the cuffs. Your t-shirt is deep red, the color of passion. We kiss until I have to take a breath. I greet you with a stinging slap. You push me back. I see you and can’t stop crying. You never arrive.
(In the black and white movie, the woman waits all afternoon. She stubs cigarette after cigarette out on the steps as the shadows lengthen. She refills her drink until the mint runs out and her thoughts run together. No one is coming home. The house is an apartment, the skirt is borrowed. Her legs are nicked, her hair unwashed. A decoy without a mark, a lie within the fantasy.
He was tall with strong ankles. Small with thin wrists. His eyes were hazel. Brown. Blue. Brown again. She didn’t know how to characterize his eyes. His gestures swept the room. They swept her off her feet. He followed her for weeks until she finally turned around and said “So.” They had been friends since grade school. He had a British accent. His family was from Puerto Rico and he trilled his r's to make her laugh. He told lies that were more delicious than the truth. He prided himself on his directness. He led her down too many paths, all of them wrong.)
I created you in my mind, all of you, fantasies that I still return to. I conjure us up, how we would be now (the simple life in a small town, the one with fights that underwrite the passion, the lap of luxury, the comfort of small things, the sudden pull of little old me into the big wide world). But surely you did the same? I was the bad girl, the good girl, the available girl, the damsel in distress, the buddy, the relief pitcher. We create the love object in the hopes that it will stay unsullied, that our image is clear and shining and true. We are wrong.
I don’t know how to think of it anymore. Love. It exists and I have to give it credit, the eternal optimism, the quick attachment of the heart, the lack of logic, the call and response of bodies. But it does me no good. So I stop feeding it, I let it languish in a room with the shades drawn, knowing that resurrection in another time and place is possible.
My poor foolish heart.
Image: Me playing dress-up.
For those keeping track -- I have a driving lesson tomorrow morning. Gulp.
Melancholic, baby?
If you are a regular reader, you might have surmised that I am a sad sack, always focusing on events and people long gone but still present in my emotions. If you followed me around for a few days, you might be sure of it, as I break into tears here, punch at the air there, as I growl and curse. But I also dance and laugh so hard that I have to catch my breath, feel the thrill of being alive.
Life is sweet even when it feels like it isn't.
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I were doing our usual evening routine, discussing the day's events before saying goodnight. "I love you so much, I'll love you even when I'm dead," he told me. Perhaps stupidly, I responded in kind, which led to a longer discussion about death and love. It ended, of course, in tears. He wanted me to stay like I was, didn't want me to change. Maybe the pictures we've shown him of his grandparents when they were young have been sobering. They look unfamiliar with their shining hair and the tight, unlined skin of youth. He doesn't recognize them as the people they are today and he imagines what will happen to his father and me, the sagging and bulging, our faces turning into topographic maps, our bodies weakened. But I also think he's mourning the moment, who we are right now, and feels the desire to hold on. He's confronting the painful inevitability of change.
When I was eleven, I felt adulthood looming. Growing up meant a loss of self. I mourned who I was before I was gone. I had already lost so much -- would I forget the perspective of the dependent child, helpless, attached to capricious and sometimes unstable adults? Here's where I start to cry again, with surprising emotion, and I think -- what the fuck? Can't you get over it already, Jennifer? Plenty of people had it worse than you. But the emotions are still here, waiting for permission to leave.
My son has a childhood. He has his father and he has me and we will let him be a child, will protect him when he needs it and will prepare him for adulthood. These temporary moments, the joy he has in playing and being with us, the way the imaginary is real and present for him, all of this will change or disappear. This is what is supposed to happen. But we will do our best to make sure that nothing changes prematurely, that he doesn't worry about us or feel unsafe or take on larger worries. I hope that he will be able to look back at his childhood with happiness, that the preordained loss won't sting too much.
I cry, but the tears are mixed in with joy and sweetness and everything in between. This is life. I am alive.
Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.
The low spark of a high-heeled boy
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my stillbirth story, I was hemmed in by fact. I’d show it to my mother and she would offer corrections to misplaced fictions, give me her version of events. Some facts are important. It is not acceptable to totally make things up, to frame the innocent, or create character flaws or strengths where none exist. I wanted to be fair to my parents, which is a strange impulse when documenting an unfair situation, but why give fuel to the threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist Mark Doty’s piece on memoir, in which he describes his sister’s wedding dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she choose beige as a rebellious stand against traditional white? Was the choice a result of parental pressure, the (barely) pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive, impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong. Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether these facts always matter in the telling of one's life story. Aren’t the impressions real in their own sense, the memoir a murky middle ground, a product of the "juncture of memory and imagination"? In the end, imagination wins out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal condition and couldn't wear high heels − one of her legs was shorter than the other − I had to rewrite a scene (since totally excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of her heels clicking against the linoleum floor, keeping time with my infant mother's screams was almost irresistible to me, a summing up of institutional efficiency and a baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it, especially once I discovered that my mother was a generally silent baby, calm, and apparently tearless. The soundtrack of nothing, no tears, no outward display of emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as she exited the building with my stony-faced mother, was much more compelling than a newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps. Here was an infant who was already accustomed to being ignored, a child who grew up under a heavy coat of suppressed and private pain. This presentation of the silent child − from my mother's memory of stories her adoptive mother told her − deepened my understanding, explained the emotion underlying her explosive temper, the avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of course, this is all my interpretation informed by imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but can remember the feel of it. Does it matter if the house was truly cavernous, whether the bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not, but the story doesn’t develop without description, without a sense of the reality of place and time. Many facts don’t change, of course, and those facts are the bones of our life stories, fleshed out with language, given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my fictional pieces, and even then the lines are blurred) happened. When I can't remember something, I take my impression and create a reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating fact out of fiction, please check out this post from Scottish writer Jim Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth About Lies.***