the words inside

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.