Chapter Text
It's been five years now, of wanting to be dead. It's been five years of writing.
Most of my writer friends know I write fic. Most of them write fic, too. Even with ambitions of leaving AO3, we respect our origins. This was our space, our testing ground, where we discovered how to say, “I love you.”
My grandmother talked me into letting her read my fic. (You let strangers on the internet read your stories, but not your own dearly beloved grandmother?) I downloaded some and emailed them to her, and she printed them out and had them spiral-bound. She made space on the shelf next to her cookbooks and her Greek New Testament. She talks to me about my stories, and she tells other people about my stories. At first I was mortified, now I am relieved.
The story I wrote, about the planet that is Alaska and the man who is me? A year ago a reader took that text and made it into a novel. Formatted files into pages and printed them and hand-bound them with blue cloth and gold etching. They sent the novel to me. I cannot name what I felt when I held it in my hands.
My audience is small, and specific, but they take my stories seriously.
I wrote a character for that story, a planetary local, a storyteller. After I wrote her I realized I was writing about my grandmother, and my mother, and my sister, and me.
After her big city career falls apart, she moves home to her father’s mountains. She becomes friends with the man who is terrified of drowning. He is still in the middle of his aftermath. He says, “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I was supposed to die. We were all supposed to die. And then we didn’t. And it feels… Odd. Like nothing matters anymore. […] I don’t know what to do with all this time. Living isn’t something I ever let myself think about.”
She says, “I think all that matters about living is that you enjoy it.”
“What happened to wanting your work to matter?”
“If you enjoy it, then it matters to you, doesn’t it?”
He does not answer. The question remains a question. And yet the question has been printed and bound into the most beautiful book I own.
***
The Church I attend now has a picture next to the front door of Jesus with a rainbow flag draped over his shoulders. The pastor calls him R. J.. It is incredibly tacky. Somewhere deep inside of me, I am afraid that this is all a lie, and that queer people are going to burn in hell. Drowning did not save me, and I am going to burn in hell. Still. This is the first time in fifteen years I have wanted to be a part of a Church.
A common Christian belief is that as you grow closer to God, you become more like God. I can see the logic in that. I know the verses that was taken from. But, I think it is equally theologically sound to believe that as you grow closer to God, you become more yourself. You become who God wanted you to be, in a world without fear.
Ephesians 2:10 reads: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” ‘Workmanship’ is one of the possible translations of poiéma. Another is ‘creation.’ Another is ‘poem.’
As I have grown closer to God I have begun to understand myself. I have stopped hating myself. Why would I want to stop being myself now, after all that effort? If God is not going to change me, then I might as well love me.
Love is the point of no return. God is love. God said, “I am with you always, even to the end of time.”
***
At the very end of all 216,671 words and 99 chapters of QED, relationshipcrimes signs off with this note:
In some ways, I was particularly doubtful that this fic would ever matter to anyone because I thought there was simply nothing special to it. Half the time I was fucking around; half the time I was despairing over my inability to compose a sentence in the English language; but always, generally, I was just writing what I knew to be true. I thought that this fic was no more special than simply showing up on the sidewalk wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
So more than four years after this fic has concluded, seven years after the fic was begun, I was surprised to find that sometimes existing in the world in T-shirt and jeans is enough. Accidentally, it seems that you can just be here in this world in some way, doing whatever it is that you do, and this will wind up impacting someone somewhere, mattering in some way to someone. Meaningful existence can be plain and unvarnished. I know this is true because of the people I talked to through the course of writing this fic, the comments that I still read and reread, and the number of people who tell me that they still come back to this fic to similarly read and reread. Reader and writer, commenter and author, you and me: sitting in the freak echo chamber online, making each other matter. Thank you for reading.
When I tell stories, I make people.
This is a truth many storytellers hide from. It is terrifying to face how much we do not know about our own creating, our influence, our own power. It is terrifying to face the fact that we hold any kind of power at all. But it is true whether we want it to be or not, whether we understand it or not.
Another truth: If creating is power, then it is not a remarkable kind of power. Not in the sense of dull, but in the sense of common. Living is creating. We are all living in this world together. You make me as I make you.
***
There is nothing wrong with me. Someday I will stop being angry about this.
***
I wrote a story inspired by and incorporating much of Fialleril’s worldbuilding. I was feverish, writing those first two chapters. Bad reaction to my covid shot. The story is about a man who follows a red bird into the desert. I tell you this story to save your life.
On Christmas day, an anonymous reader wrote this comment:
It has been a hard year for me. I feel . . . lost in all ways that matter. My memory, amongst other things, has deteriorated. I have been looking deeply in the avenues of things I remember at all, fandoms and authors and stories that have left a mark on me. One such story is this. It may not be very old, but it's familiar.
There are some stories that you read and they make you see the world differently, and there are also those that call to your flesh and bones and make you feel as you have always felt, thinking what you have thought for ages and serve as a sort of reminder. […]
What I'm trying to say, I mean, is thank you. I remember.
This is enough of a reason.
***
People often ask me, what is my favorite book? I have no way to answer this question. Every book I have read has changed me. Asking after my favorite book is asking after my favorite draft of myself.
The book I return to no matter what, the book that defined my childhood and my coming of age, the book I have memorized and resented and studied and revered and loved and hated, the book I come back to in the night and in the day, is the Christian Bible. I do not understand it. I am going to keep reading until I do.
People occasionally ask me if I believe my Bible is right. As a child I would argue that it was. As an adult it seems a petty, contrived concern. This story is true. I know this in my heart, and soul, and mind. This story made me. This story saved me. What else matters?
***
My options were tell stories, or die. I chose stories. Once you choose not to die it becomes your responsibility to learn how to live. The choice is easy. The learning is hard.
I think, maybe, I have not been asking the right questions.
Our responsibility is not to save the world, but to participate in our own existence here and now, in this space we call “The World.” Personhood is not something that can be earned or escaped from. It simply is, the same way we simply are. “Everything is meaningless!” Yes. And, “Remember your Creator/ in the days of your youth.”
This is our responsibility: Love one another. Save one another. Create one another.
Love. Save. Create. Three ways to say the same thing. Do for others what God has done for you.
I believe that things do get better, eventually, but I am coming to terms with the fact that eventually might mean decades, might mean a lifetime, might mean an afterlife. I might want to die every minute of my earthly life. But, even in my agony, I will love and be loved.
This is the human riddle: We are dying, always. We are learning how to save our lives. There is no rescue mission, because the artist is the rescue mission.
They say learning is lifelong. I am getting better at holding my breath.
***
I love to swim.