I used to write them for you. Long letters like stories,
with beginnings, middles and neatly tied up endings. Then, a few weeks later,
I'd do it all over again like composing a symphony about my life's current
events, with a chorus, with harmonies and discord too, and always a cascade of
cadences that made sense the way words do in my head, the way words conjure up
all my feelings.
I did it like poetry, I composed it – for you. So you'd like
me. So you'd feel like I was good enough to be your daughter. I wrote all those
things down. Before you got sober, you'd - hazily and slow-motion-like the way
all good drunks do -read my poetry, my letters, my stories, my lyrical,
luscious, so pretentious musings within words. You'd read them all aloud to so
many other people, at dinner parties by candlelight among close friends, and
latest girlfriends, in your studio. There were so many nights like that. With
so many eyes all glistening, some smiling, in the flickering light, and everyone
hush-hush not necessarily because of my honest words spoken so dramatically by
you, but simply because of you, because of your magical, captivating presence,
your studied actor's authority, and also because, of course, there was I, your
daughter, sitting beside you, the artist, the King in his grand domain.
Still, years later, as good as it felt to have you read my
words out loud, as shy as I felt, I wonder: was I any good? Even now, I ask
myself: am I any good? I write for pay, like a sell out. Sure, this is a good
thing and yes, I am proud of it. But I am no award-winning novelist, not a
poet, not a playwright. I am not the writer I thought I might be.
There was always too much self-consciousness in it all. I
hated the writer's workshops, the studied, anal nature of it. The flares, the
foreshadowing, the dissection, the over intention, the craving for attention. I
wrote because I had to. That's what all artists say. And they say it because it
is the truth. I wrote for an audience of one: you. But when I began, I wrote
for an audience of one: me. It was that simple, that plain, that true.
My first boyfriend was a tremendous writer. But he was also
the sort who over-studied, and over-thought, and ultimately thought me out of
his life. I couldn't stand it any longer. We were competitive in school, two
writers taking the same classes. He would glance over at my paper and if I had
an A and he didn’t, there was a rageful fury in his eye. It never went away.
He destroyed several of my journals in fits of crazed
jealousy – over other boys – over what else I'm not sure. But he destroyed
years of my writing, years of my sophomoric, adolescent angst and pain and joy.
I hated and resented – and even still to this day – never forgave him for that.
I wondered, as people do, as years go by, whatever happened to him. I had, in a
strange turn of events (too long a story for now) been a bridesmaid in his
wedding. I had become quite close with his fiancée. They lived in Tennessee,
then Texas, had several children, and pets. He reached out to me – and to my
mother – via email some years ago. Strangely. Mysteriously. Incomprehensibly.
Like someone in the midst of a mental breakdown.
No one will tell what occurred. No matter how many times
I've asked. Not his ex wife, his mother, his sister. No one. And so I went
searching on the Internet. And I came across a blog post about him and his
'literary fall from grace,' his advance given by Alfred Knopf for a book and
how he coudln't make the deadlines, about his admirers and fans, and his
apparent wanderings though cities, his disappearances and strange dalliances,
various bizarre mental episodes, and something clearly resembling a bi-polar
disorder or just a totally unhinged human being.
And I then began to think differently back on the way we had
been when we were young, 19 and 20, in the cold winters of Chicago. Perhaps,
after all, his inward longings, his strange behavior was not for show. Perhaps,
indeed, he had been rather mentally unwell all those years ago, with the first
stirrings of a disturbed man-child, one with thoughts to share, with pain to
explore, not merely to exhibit as a means for attention and weirdness, but, as
I see it now, perhaps exhibition was his only means of sanity.
My father was so much like him.
It's sad to me to think of you, Dad, all the letters and
stories and poetry I wrote because you were my number one fan, it's sad to me
that we no longer speak. And here it is Christmas, another year passing us by,
and you are old now, and sometimes I see a man about your age crossing the
street or sitting in a coffee shop reading and my heart beats faster and I know
that we don't have all the time in the world. It's so short, this maddening
life. I want no regrets. I want to feel that I did the right things, that I
opened my heart for the right reasons and, at the same time, that I honored
myself, too.
You were cruel, too. You have been cruel. Cold. Your words
cut like razor blades. I had to shut you out. It has made me sad but I had no
choice.
Words were once our one thing, as two artists who met
somewhere in a world lacking in poetry. I don’t know what to do with my words
now. I hold them in tight. They are mine but they miss you – they miss the idea
of you - all the while.
