Memoir-in-progress
a scattered essay because this chapter is eluding me
So far, the second draft of this memoir has me spending those hours-upon-hours days actually getting writing that I stand behind done in ways I haven’t come close to since college. Yesterday, I was triumphantly piecing together that the liberating thing about making a story of a stretch of your life is that you don’t have to frantically wonder what happens next. You know what happens next, you were there! This is a relatively easy book to write in terms of getting everything down, because throughout the stretch-of-life in question, I kept thinking about what kind of book it would make. Which is pathological, maybe. But then I’d sit down with friends trying to be a normal person not concieving of existence in future-book-terms and all these unrelated people were like, “This would make a really good book.”
“Indeed!” I proclaimed to all of them, though not after a whole lot of “Really?” and “Are you sure?” and “You’d read it?” They would, so they say. There are few things I’ve felt more strongly about in my adult life than my determination to test this claim. Which feels a little narcissistic and strange: I’m painfully aware that there are many, many people who wake up in the morning with far nobler goals than tell my own damn story right. But there are also people who wake up with far seedier and horribler goals! Like Elon Musk! So I’m not burning anyone alive in an electric vehicle that’s hidden mountains of paperwork detailing safety violations, or wrecking social media in favor of undermining democracy. I’m just being a bit cocky about how much my erotic adventures can teach the world at large about gender conditioning and body image! Nothing…wrong with that?
Or maybe there is. I can’t do a whole lot about that, if so, because there’s a whole lot wrong with everything. Except, of course, the moon, which was giving her all last night at 4:30 in the morning, turning what would’ve been in immensely frustrating experience of waking up suddenly at 4:30 in the morning into a meditatative hour to be grateful for. O, life.
One thing I love in books is descriptions of clothes, thanks in no small part to formative outfit descriptions in Anne M. Martin + legions of talented ghostwriters’
Babysitter’s Club series, wherein Claudia Kishi’s homemade earings and self-dyed oversized shirts and wild color cordinations were, not only a manifestation of her talent as an artist, but a large part of the books’ appeal. I can concoct memorable outfits in prose with little struggle and have a lot of fun doing it. But describing my own outfits, even if, in the most pathological reaches of my head, I was narrating them at the time like one of the aforementioned passages, turns out to be really really hard. Why?!
Perhaps they make me miss the person I’ll no longer deny I was dressing for, which is so laughably undignified I don’t even want to write it. But So Laughably Undignified I Don’t Even Want to Write It is more or less an alternate title for this book. Of course, moving stress does nothing for creative output. Stress of every kind is the bane of creative output. It might be a question of, simply, that: How can you think about giddy attempts at pretty clothes at a time like this.
A time like this.
When I was staring out at the moon last night, from bed, through our massive window, I thought, This. is a truly beautiful sight. And I’ve seen a lot of beautiful sights outside this window, and I’ll miss them all. I’ll miss the moon on this kind of night, and I’ll miss the Pacific, and I’ll miss Lake Merced, and I’ll miss the sailboats and the elegant ships and I’ll miss Angel Island on a clear day and I’ll miss the way I can see the hawks’ majestic underbellies as they soar right over us and I’ll miss. And I’ll miss.
Somewhere, in the same pathological place that records everything that happens to me as though the most important thing is to find the prose for it, I’m not sure I really believed we were leaving. It appears that we are, though, that I really did put together a bunch of MFA applications in one dizzying 3-day period back in December of ‘22 and I got into a few of them including a Very Prestigious One and I made my choice and we’re leaving. Like, actually leaving.
Shit why didn’t any of you tell me! I’ve gotta pack!
