Chapter Text
I almost drowned once, in a river in Alaska. I swam too close to a waterfall and got sucked under. A friend’s father dragged me out by my shirt. I did not have much of a reaction to not dying. I sat on the bank with my friend and her mother and laughed, and then I was fine.
I don’t remember it anymore, the not dying. I remember the force of the water that pulled me under, the force of the person who pulled me out.
I remember laughing.
***
I have been thinking about the responsibility of a storyteller. What is my responsibility, as a storyteller? I used to think it was simple. If I am a storyteller, then I am a person who tells stories. But there is a difference between an occupation and a responsibility. If you have an occupation, it is your responsibility to do your work and to do it well. Simple work: Tell stories. Simple responsibility: Tell good stories. But, why? Why tell stories, and why bother to make them good?
After a few years of not dying, I went to college for writing. I couldn’t think of a reason not to. Part of creating my senior portfolio was writing an artist statement. My artist statement lays out the reasons I love stories, and writing, and the reasons I want to be good at writing stories. My artist statement is about me, and what I want, and what I need, and says nothing of any audience imagined or real. But, I wrote that specific story for a specific audience. I would not have been able to write that story without that audience. I end my artist statement with a question: “Is this enough of a reason?”
I know, in the deepest part of myself where it is possible to know a thing and still be capable of articulating it, that God gave me Story. Through learning to understand stories I have learned to understand people. Girl learns to be a person by choosing Story. Except I have not decided if you can truly chose something that was gifted to you. I have only mostly decided that this choice or lack thereof does not matter.
I want to be dead. I have wanted to be dead since I was eighteen. Maybe before then too, I don’t remember. But, when I was eighteen I stopped reading books.
Our name, Poet, comes from the old Greek word for “Maker.” I never understood that until I started to think of words as a material. Maybe time is a material, too.
I stopped reading books. I wanted to be dead, but I needed to live. So, I started reading fanfiction.
What do you owe to the forces that create you? What do you owe to the forces that save your life?
I wrote my almost-first story in Alaska. I don’t remember if it was before or after the not dying. It did not start out as fanfiction, but by the third draft it was.
***
I write fanfiction. I am proud of my fanfiction. Typing that statement feels like a confession. I want to be a serious writer and fic is not to be written seriously. At least not without disgust and dismissal from the wider writing world. Still, I take all of my writing seriously. Especially the fanfiction.
Currently, I have eighty-two stories available to be read on AO3. Eighty-two stories represent 598,897 words. 598,897 words does not account for my hundred-odd documents of cut scenes, notes, canon analysis, and works in progress. Three of my completed stories are novel-length. One of my earliest stories is rated in the top hundred of the hundreds of thousands published in its fandom. I have originated character tags and started fanon trends. I am not popular, but I am not obscure.
My favorite thing to do is take a nothing character and write their story. Take a face and a name and three scattered lines of dialogue and write them into a person. As I write the character and their story, I discover something about me, and my story.
Three years ago I wrote a story about a planet and a man who moves there in an aftermath. As I wrote my outline the planet became Alaska, and when I wrote the man a trip to the river, I discovered he was terrified of drowning.
***
We love the biographies of the great and the forgotten, the wise and the foolish; we want to know about their parents and siblings and childhood friends, what books they read and what speakers they looked up to and what art they collected, what history coincided with their education. Through understanding the forces that shape a person we understand the space they fill in the world. We need a structure to hold our lives, if we want to hold on to our lives.
“I tell you this story to save your life.” This is from Shape-Changer, the first fanfic in the series Double Agent Vader by Fialleril. This series is about the role mythology plays in enduring and ending oppression. The ritual response is, “I will remember.”
I am trying to write my way out of the chaos of incomplete comprehension. It is my opinion that the only forms that cater directly to this endeavor are nonfiction and fanfiction.
And so, I am trying to write a novel.
***
I want to write a novel. I do not want to write a novel.
I have a BFA in Creative Writing. I spent three and a half or six years laboring over that degree, depending on how you count it. So many people helped me survive college. Family, friends, teachers. So many people supported me, were patient with me, believed in me. I want to prove I am not wasting my degree; not wasting the time and money that went into my degree. I want to prove their effort on my behalf was not in vain.
My family have started asking questions. Don’t you think it’s time to focus on writing you can actually publish? What do you mean you don’t want to publish? How are you going to make money?
My understanding of adulthood—of personhood—is not based on age, but in belonging, and in the responsibilities of belonging. A child is welcomed into a society when they prove they are capable of contributing to the well-being of that society. An adult is someone with an occupation. An adult is someone who fulfills their responsibilities to their occupation, and to their family, and to their community. An adult—a person—is someone who has something to give.
I am not living up to my potential.
***
I would like to clarify: I do not want to kill myself.
There is a fundamental difference between wanting to kill yourself and wanting to be dead. I do not fantasize about dying. I want to be dead because I do not want to be alive; because I do not want to be occupied with living.
If I were dead, I would not have to buy food, or cook it, or eat it, or clean up the mess, or keep the food down. I would not have to sleep. I would not have to shower. I would not have to speak to people. I would not have to sweep my floor. I would not have to wash my laundry. I would not have to be on time for work. I would not have to work at all. I would not have to be a good employee, or a good student, or a good friend, or a good sister, or a good daughter.
Living exhausts me. Every day, as I go about the work, a constant refrain: I would not have to do this if I were dead.
I find this rather pathetic. Living is as simple as breathing, right? Life is a gift.
If I were dead, I would not have to be aware of my self as an individual entity, with individual wants and needs. I would not have to reconcile my wants and needs. I would not be haunted by my younger self, or consumed by questions of my future. I would not have to be here, right now, thinking about my responsibility as a storyteller. I want to be dead because I do not want to be a person.
***
I want to write a novel because I want people to read my story and think it is intelligent, so they will think I am intelligent, so they will not know that I am young and ignorant and afraid. I want to write a novel because I want my writing to be respected, valued, celebrated. I want to write a novel because I want to be a person.
***
Was I saved? Did I save myself? Or was I gifted the ability to save myself, and if so, does that still count as saving? What do I owe in return for a gift?
As an artist, what do I owe to my art? To my audience?
As a person, what do I owe to people? To God?
***
I am drowning.
Fingers tangling in the neck of my shirt, fingernails scrapping my shoulder, the water dragging me down and the hand dragging me up.
I am going to laugh about this, in a few minutes, in a few years. In another lifetime, maybe, when I can no longer remember the feeling of not dying. There is a laugh building already, sharp in my chest. I can’t open my mouth yet, though.
This is the hardest part: Holding your breath until you’ve stopped sinking and started swimming. Drowning is so easy. But you don’t get to laugh, if you die.
Chapter 2: Agony
Chapter Text
I was baptized on a sunny day, in a backyard swimming pool. The water was warm. There was grass in the bottom of the pool. I was not baptized into a Church, I did not become a member of a denomination, and in fact I have not been in contact with anyone from that community for five years.
There is a poem I have been trying to memorize for a year now. “The Prestige” by Hanif Abdurraqib. “the poem begins not where the knife enters/ but where the blade twists.”
Where the blade twists: A mortal wound. The poem begins at the point of no return.
Baptism is a kind of drowning.
I have not memorized a poem in five years. That was how I first knew something was wrong.
***
The division of art into highbrow and lowbrow is fascinating to me. Forget quality, forget craft, it is all about barriers of entry. How much about stories do you have to know before you find a given story compelling? How long do you have to listen before you can join the conversation?
Fanficion is a direct response to an existing work of fiction, what is referred to as “canon” by the fans. The form is like if a review and an analysis and an extrapolation had a plot. When I explained some of this to my grandmother she was confused by my use of “canon,” as she had only heard the term in reference to the Christian Bible.
We all exist in this world, together. All of our stories are, in some way, about existing in this world, together. Why do we value stories that create their own context more than we value stories that exist within the context of other stories? Does not all art exist within the context of other art? Does not everything people do exist in the context of everything people have ever done? There is a history, a legacy, to every artform we are bold enough to name an artform.
It does feel a little sacrilegious, what I do.
***
The first story I remember writing was a re-telling of the first marathon. It was a script for a home-made movie. I do not remember how old I was. Nine, maybe ten?
The movie was what my siblings and I decided to do for our final project in our history class. I adapted the script from our textbook, cast my siblings in their roles, and together we made costumes out of our mother’s sheets and props from of our father’s woodpile. We filmed two takes. I think that movie survives to this day on my mother’s FaceBook page. Nine, maybe eight years after I wrote that story I finally admitted to myself that I had the capacity to write anything at all.
The story of the first marathon is the story of a man who accepts the responsibility of warning his people of an advancing enemy, so they can ready themselves to fight. The man pushes himself to run so fast and so hard over such a distance that he drops dead as soon as he has fulfilled this responsibility.
Maybe, even at nine, I knew some things about myself.
***
The thing that happens when you want to die is that you can no longer be bothered by the work of living. I could not be bothered to shower. I could not be bothered to sleep. I could not be bothered to eat. And, I could not be bothered to read. I think, for me, these things are the same.
I needed food. I needed stories. I would reach the point where my body would rebel and demand. After days of nothing I would order enough takeout for three people and binge all of it, make myself sick with it. After weeks of nothing I would pick a TV show at random and binge all of it, make myself sick with it.
In the aftermath, my uncle told me I should stop reading because it was doing me more harm than good. I wanted to point to his full cupboards and scream at the hypocrisy. I wanted to demand: “Does man live on bread alone?”
***
When I was a child a teacher asked my class if we would value an item more if it was a gift or if we bought it ourselves. Most students said they would value it more if they bought it themselves; if they put in time to earn money and select the specific item they wanted. I said I would value it more if it was a gift, if I knew someone else had put in time to earn money and select the specific item they knew I wanted.
Everybody in that class hated me.
***
When I was a child I loved stories of children who saved their worlds. Fiction or nonfiction, didn’t matter. It comforted me to know children were capable of fulfilling this kind of responsibility; that I was capable of fulfilling my responsibilities.
When I turned eighteen I was no longer responsible for anything or anyone but myself. I felt relief so profound I almost drowned in it. And I felt, somehow, I had failed.
***
Novels have wider reach than fanfiction. More discerning readership. I could do so much more if I would get over myself and write novels.
But, I am not excited for my novels the way I am excited for my fic. I do not know why. I love my novels. I love spending time with them, outlining their stories, building their worlds, establishing their characters. But, I am not compelled to write my novels from deep within my soul.
When I want to die I re-read the comments on my fic. Sometimes that only makes me want to die more. What kind of inconsiderate person spends good government money to get a degree in writing, only to spend all their time writing fanfiction? For free, and for so few?
My stories exist in a bubble. I want it to stay that way. I want to stay where I am, content with my community. Is this a sin? Is not English language publishing simply a different, larger bubble? If I love writing, shouldn’t I want to be good at it?
I want to write. That is all I want to do. I want to write, but I do not want to be a writer. I want to write whatever I want whenever I want, and be free from the responsibility of finishing, and sharing, and improving. I want to write horrible, horrible things only I am allowed to read. I want to write one beautiful story and hide it in the ground.
I wanted to die before I wanted to write, I think. I don’t remember. Maybe those desires originated at the same time, from the same point of no return.
I want to believe I am alive for some great mission, some great call, some great purpose. I need a responsibility to justify my continued existence. But—I will survive without writing novels. And—I may not survive without writing fanfiction. I do not know how to reconcile these wants and needs. There is something wrong with me, and I do not know how to fix it.
The best writing advice I ever received was to read the kind of stories I wanted to write. Read what you want to write. Sounds simple. It is not simple. Am I allowed to save myself?
It is inconceivable that God would give me a gift solely for my own benefit. I refuse to believe that I am enough of a reason.
***
I am not a strong swimmer. I never practice. Is this a sin? If I love swimming, shouldn’t I want to be good at it?
If I become a stronger swimmer, I am less likely to drown.
***
I read that essay, “On Fear,” by Mary Ruefle. I read the first line and almost couldn’t read the rest. “I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean—what I think I mean—by “imbecility” is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel.”
I do not know if she was referring to poetry specifically or to storytelling more broadly. I think it does not matter. Better sacrilegious than imbecilic.
“I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” This is from Station Eleven. I don’t remember if it was in the book, but it is in the TV show. An actor says this, and an artist writes it down.
I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.
***
My parents named me for a prophet. I don’t think about that often. It is a common name, and it is my name, and so I think of it in terms of its commonness and myself. But, my parents named me for a prophet.
I hate the word “potential.” May God strike me down with fire if I ever tell a child they have potential.
***
I no longer believe that God is going to change me, after fifteen years of terror and hope. God is not going to change me. I do not know how to reconcile this realization with the promise that God is going to save me. God would have to change me to save me, and He is not going to change me.
I want to be a part of this world and I want to be totally separate from it. I did not ask for Story. I cannot live without Story. I want God to be clear about His expectations and my responsibilities, regarding this gift. I want to know why He won’t change me. I want my God to give me permission to waste my time, or reassure me that nothing I do is a waste of time. Time is a gift, too.
God made me. I think about that sometimes; how we were made in His image, how David, the Poet, was said to be a man after God’s own heart.
He made me. He gave me Story. Most of what I have wanted for the last five years is to go back to that moment when fingers tangled in the neck of my shirt and bite the hand that saved me.
***
At the very end of Station Eleven, in a hotel beside the sea, the artist is dying. She is on the phone with a man across the world, who is also dying. She tells him, “There is no rescue mission.”
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.
Chapter Text
When I was eight years old I decided to become an actor. I did competitive theater, and my junior year of high school I did a monologue from White People, by J. T. Rogers. I played Mara Lynn.
I hated Mara Lynn, because Mara Lynn hated everyone. She hated Indians and Mexicans and the Chinese and she especially hated her son, and her husband, and herself. I performed that monologue for eleven months. I was with Mara Lynn, inside her, I was her, for eleven months.
From James Baldwin’s essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare:”
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. […] And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. (Maker) And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
I started to win competitions when I started to love Mara Lynn as much as I hated her.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” This is also from Ender’s Game. Orson Scott Card is one of the most infamous homophobic writers in modern science fiction. I think about that sometimes, about how the person who defined empathy for me in my childhood would spit on me if he knew who I am, what I am.
The reason I am able to believe that God loves me is that I know, even if I do not understand, that He made me. I understand how impossible it is to truly and completely hate something you make.
***
I read a lot of Isaiah, and a lot of the Epistles. Mostly I read Ecclesiastes over and over and over.
Chapter 2, verses 24-25: “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”
Chapter 3, verses 12-13: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
Chapter 5, verse 18: “This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.”
Chapter 8, verse 15: “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
Chapter 9, verse 7: “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do.”
Something that amuses me: This particular book has a reputation for being depressing.
I have been reading Ecclesiastes for five years, and I am not ready to move on.
***
I love editing. I have been writing this essay for a year now, and it is horrible, but it is also a joy. I re-read every month or so and tinker, swap out words and re-organize sentences and re-order paragraphs. I love words. All I have ever wanted are words, words, words.
Someone asked me once how I know when a story is done. I know it is done when I have nothing more to say. That does not mean I am done working on it, only done writing it. There is a difference.
One more draft. Always one more draft. I want my stories to be perfect.
I am not afraid to re-make and re-make and re-make but I am afraid that I will never be able to re-make away the shape of the first draft, the rough draft, the agony; I am afraid people will tell me that my stories have potential.
***
Potential. As if a child is an incomplete human being, not worth anything in their own right but valuable for what they will someday become. As if there is ever a point when a human being could be considered “complete.”
***
When I realized that what was different about me was not simply different, but queer, it was after I had been baptized. I have not asked God about it directly. He has not brought it to my attention. It rests between us, this unasked and unanswered question.
Every day God asks me, “Is my love sufficient?”
Every day I answer, “I don't know.”
It should be. I want it to be. It does not feel sufficient. I do not feel sufficient. But my feelings are not the whole of the matter. The truth has already been written down.
In Alaska, I dreamed of dancing in the palm of His hand. Visions of a cornfield and gathering storm clouds. A stone city, empty and sterile and dark.
And God said, “Let there be light.”
And God said, “You will tell stories.”
***
There is a very silly thing we Makers say to each other. We say—Trust the process. It turns out this is a thing Christians say to each other too.
***
The artist, from Station Eleven. Her name is Miranda. She should have drowned as a child, but she didn’t. As an adult she drew a book about a world’s slow death: An inevitable sinking into the sea. I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die. I do not know how her book ends, but I know she finished it before her world ended.
The world ends, and there is no rescue mission. But, there is a little girl—a little girl who decided to become an actor when she was eight years old—who carries this book, this story, into the new world. She carries this story with her until she stops acting and starts directing. Until she has the resolve to pull the knife out of the wound and let it bleed. When she no longer needs this story, she passes it on to another little girl.
This is the point of no return. I can taste it, cold and sweet like glacier melt, like the clear mountain river forcing its way between my teeth and into my throat and into my lungs. I no longer believe there is a difference between living and dying.
***
Knowing how to swim did not save me from drowning. A person saved me.
***
Saint John wrote, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
James Baldwin wrote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
God the Poet, God the Maker, God the Creator. Three ways to say the same thing. The reason I am able to believe that God loves me is that every day He makes me conscious of things I don’t see.
Storytelling is about conversation, communication, communion. These words sound similar, but they are not the same. History and context are crucial. I love words. There are infinite ways to say the same thing while also saying something new.
Why tell stories? I think, for me, telling a story has come to mean, “I love you.”
Why bother to make them good? That is an even easier question, with an even easier answer. I want everybody to understand that I mean them, I mean you, when I say, “I love you.”
***
What do you owe to the forces that create you? What do you owe to the forces that save your life? That drag you kicking and screaming out of the water and take your face in their hands and lift it to the sky and say, look! Look!
That say, gently but firmly, you are not telling this story.
Chapter 5: This is how you go on:
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.