Chapter Text
I grew up swimming in mountain rivers. My father loves me and I love my father, and so all of my childhood my father showed me the beauty of what he loves. My father loves mountains, and so I love mountains.
If you have never swum in a mountain river, do not be deceived by the sunlight glinting off the ripples. That water is cold. That water is so cold it will burn you. There are two schools of thought when it comes to how best to actually get into the horrible, wonderful water. Either find a deep place and dive, or find a shallow place and inch.
Diving means subjecting your body to an intense temperature shock I can only describe as agonizing.
The inching process can take a full half-hour, if you are doing it correctly. There is a method, like the boa constrictor poem. Start with your feet. Shiver when it gets to your thighs. Scream when it reaches your stomach. My mother and I squeal every time we take a half-step deeper, for dramatic effect. The rocks are slippery, and the chances of falling in are never zero. Sometimes I lose patience with letting my body adjust and dive when I reach waist-height.
Two schools of thought. Either you are brave, or you are steady.
***
I do not want to write this essay.
***
I made my choice. I have been saved. I have been baptized, I have been drowned and born again. But, I am terrified that someday I will have to choose between my God and my stories.
I am terrified that God will tell me to stop writing fanfiction and start writing novels. Tell me to delete all eighty-two of my stories and abandon the friends I made through them and write something worthy of Him, worthy of this gift He gave me. I am terrified that God will change me so that I want to delete my stories. I am terrified that everything I am, everything I love, will be erased in the holy transformation of salvation. I don't hate my self enough anymore to want this kind of salvation, this death that begets new life.
I cannot bring myself to believe that God would create a person whose responsibility is to write fanfiction, of all things. I cannot bring myself to believe that this is what God wants from me. But I cannot bring myself to want anything else.
This is the space between dying and not: I want to pretend, for just a little longer, that it is good that I am who I am. It is good that I love the way I love. I want this to be a truth I am reminding myself of and not a lie I am convincing myself of. I do not want to have to change to be saved.
***
The final lines of “The Prestige” are: “The poem begins with a chain/ of well-meaning liars walking one by one/ off the earth’s edge. That’s who died/ and made me king. Who died and made you.”
We cannot die to save ourselves. Someone chooses to die for us, and then we have to live with the violence of our salvation.
My death will not save me. My death will not save anybody.
***
I do not make a habit of this, but sometimes when I am searching through a specific tag on AO3, I find an intriguing fic from a fandom I am not familiar with. Sometimes I read the intriguing fic because of the tag, and despite my lack of familiarity. One such fic is QED, by relationshipcrimes. It is embarrassing to admit what tag I found this story through, but there are only so many tags, so I think you can guess.
In the opening author’s note, relationshipcrimes writes, “if, for the odd reason, you’re here because you want to read ED literature that isn’t a smoking piece of bullshit, please enjoy this fanfic of a halo fanfic featuring orange guildenstern and maroon rosencrantz in a sci-fi war-story existential romantic comedy.” This is a more accurate summary than I could ever formulate.
According to Merriam-Webster, QED is the abbreviation of the Latin phrase “quod erat demonstrandum,” which means “which was to be shown” and is used at the end of a logical or mathematical proof to indicate completion. Whatever there is to see, can now be seen.
Simmons makes a disgusted noise. “English class is bullshit. Math is superior. What’s the point of writing a stupid essay? Talking about things? Saying words?”
“Yeah, tell ‘em, Simmons. Who needs words, anyway,” says Grif. “Now help me wake up Sarge and pick up all this luggage, we gotta go before Wash gets pissed.”
Simmons rips up his piece of paper into the tiniest pieces he can manage and dumps them in the trash.
If he ever has to tell Grif that he still thinks about the moment Grif slipped out of his hands on Sidewinder, the moment he thought Grif was dead […] he resolves to tell Grif in a series of equations, somehow.
Identify. Prove. Simplify. Solve for unknown value of the funny lurch Simmons’s heart makes when he sees Grif makes it out of every firefight alive. For an unknown value along a standard bell curve, rescale the standard deviation of how much Simmons appreciates Grif being alive at all.
QED: Math is better than writing. In writing, you can’t be right. You can only tell the truth.
This story is miserable. It is about two people who hate themselves, and sort of hate each other, but also can’t help loving themselves, and each other. They are alive, despite all the reasons they should not be. Being alive does not make them happy. But, being alive means they have the opportunity to be happy. Time is the independent variable, according to my 9th grade Algebra teacher.
I read QED because I needed a story that was as miserable as I was. A story that told me it was possible to be both miserable and alive—and not simply a possibility, but a necessity.
There are hundreds of James Baldwin quotes floating context-less around the internet. Here is one: “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
I wrote the first draft of this essay feverish. I had covid, though I did not know that at the time. The draft was incoherent. The first and only reader described it as “agonized.” I had not been able to identify what I felt until they named it.
Here is another: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.”
Every time I read James Baldwin I think, that’s it. There is nothing left that needs to be said. He said it all. What is the point of writing, since he has written everything? Except, as far as I know, James Baldwin never wrote fanfiction.
***
A friend of my uncle told me that God gives us gifts simply because He enjoys giving His children gifts. He isn’t going to take our gifts back if we don’t use them the way He wants us to.
Maybe this is what I am afraid of: My uncle’s friend told me the truth, and a gift is just a gift. It is a lot harder to believe something you want to be true than it is to believe something you do not want to be true.
***
I am not a poet. I write prose, and I am enamored with the complexities of prose. But, I have always loved poetry. For my eighth birthday my parents gave me a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends, and I memorized the poems to recite to friends, and to myself. I spent a significant portion of my childhood committing to memory everything that I read that I wanted to share or remind myself of. I couldn’t trust letters, then. I needed the words to be in my body.
Annie Finch’s definition: “A poem is language structured through the repetition of any language element.”
What drew me to poetry was the structure. Memorization is accomplished through repetition and understanding, and poems are made to be repeated until suddenly you understand.
Most of what I memorized as a child were passages of the Christian Bible. My teachers told me to pay attention to the repetition. That was our poem, the words that God and the God-sent repeated over thousands of years, to each new generation.
Over and over and over: Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.
Over and over and over—
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
***
Sometimes I look at my self in the mirror and I say: “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
***
Writing is a good hobby. More people should write as a hobby.
Writing, for me, is an act of desperation.
I wrote my first novel from behind the deli counter at Hannafords, on a mid-sized lined yellow notepad. I would come home from work and empty my pockets of little yellow papers folded to the width of my finger and unfurl them. I would parse out the dialogue from the deli orders and type it up with cramping, chapped, bleach burned hands. On my good days I wrote five hundred words over an eight hour shift. I don't know if that is a lot, but it felt like so little. The story was so big and my hands were too stiff and my shifts were too long but I wanted, I wanted, I wanted.
It took me eleven months to write that story. Eleven months from a single note of an idea to posting the final chapter. I had never written anything that fast, or that long. For the entire eleven months I was in agony.
Art is a byproduct of living. Storytelling is a form of human communication. Telling stories is something all of us do, all of the time. I think the only thing that separates storytellers from the rest of the world is a consciousness of Story; an awareness of the do or die. Tell stories, or die.
I never wanted to be a writer. Or, writing was not something I allowed myself to want. For the first eighteen years of my life writing was as physically impossible as breathing underwater. I suppose that is why this ability feels like a divine gift. It came upon me in a dream that summer in Alaska, the summer I was baptized, the summer I drowned. I started writing that summer and I don’t know how to stop.
My first novel is about a thing who discovers he is a person. It is about the horror of that, and the joy of that. It starts with a murder and ends with a funeral. I did not want to write a novel. I needed to write that story.
***
I do not have to be saved to love. I was made to love the Word and the Word is God and I do not have to be changed to love. I do not know if I am who God made me or if I am who I made myself, and I know this distinction matters but maybe not as much as I have been told. David, the Poet, sinned against the God who made him.
***
Sometimes a want can be a need. But sometimes a want is simply a want, and you can live without it.
***
“boy learns to swim by choosing not to die” is a line from the poem “apotheosis blues” by Tumblr user doghart. I read the poem, wrote down the line, and then lost my link to the post. I looked for that poem for three years. The first time I read a draft of this essay aloud, an audience member sent me a link to it.
Stories saved me. Stories cannot save the world, but stories save people. People save the world. Is this the gift? The chance to be the hand that plunges into the water? “I think ultimately you become whoever would have saved you that time that no one did.” That’s a blog quote. There is something very profound about being moved to tears by Tumblr user roach-works.
Are we created, or do we choose to become? “Perhaps it is impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.” This is from Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. This is something Valentine thinks to herself, as she thinks about her global influence—her power, a teen girl’s power, created and centered online, under a pseudonym. She does save the world. And then she leaves it.
Are we created, or do we choose to become? “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” That’s George Bernard Shaw. I don’t know from what, exactly. I don’t know who he is or what he’s done, but I like this quote. I write a lot of stories where characters name themselves, and naming is a kind of ownership but naming is also a kind of creating. You cannot pretend, with a name. You can name yourself as the person you are—the person you think you are, or feel you are, or fear you are—or name yourself as the person you want to become.
“This is how you go on: you make a space for yourself in the future, where you ought to be, instead of where you are. You don't put the moving force behind you and shove; you just break your back, that way.” This is from False Dichotomy by nsmorig; a story described in the notes as “marxist estrangement theory as applied to fictional clones from starred wars.” I copied this quote onto a notecard and glued it too my wall as soon as I read it. False Dichotomy is the only fic I have downloaded from AO3.
A space for myself in the future, where I ought to be.
AO3 is the abbreviation of Archive Of Our Own. The name is in reference to Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One's Own, published in 1929, an essay on women in fiction. The founders of AO3 were mostly women, and mostly queer, and knew that their work would never be fully welcome in the existing online archives. So they made one of our own. A space for ourselves, for everything we are and everything we want.
Read what you want to write. Read widely, and you will write widely. I would not have written this essay if I had not been reading essays.
I named myself, when I started publishing stories online. I have named myself many times over.
***
I do not know how to tell the difference between the parts of me that God made and the parts of me that I made. I used to think I knew. I used to try and separate myself into holy and forsaken. All I ended up doing was tearing myself to pieces. There must be a difference. There must be a way to tell the difference. There must be a way to unmake myself into the image of God. Maybe this will take another fifteen years, or thirty years, or sixty years of praying.
The prophet. The old woman, no husband and no children, praying at the temple, waiting for the Word that would save her life.
Until I can tell the difference I will have to live with all of my self. At some point you have to stop thinking in terms of evil and good, and start thinking in terms of condemnation and salvation.
***
I do not remember who taught me to swim. I think I just figured it out.