alastaloved.org

i write as my heart is pounding.  with anger, and frustration, and fear.  and i think of the conversation l.m. and i had this afternoon.  about writing and regret.  about holding onto things.  or being able to take them back.  like erasing the words–from the internet, from your hard drive–could even come close to meaning that they do not exist.

i have thought about these things a lot lately.

the words are back.  i am writing again.  and i write, always, about myself.  fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction.  there is me, always me.  i document.  i tweak.  i revise.  but it is always my existence.  i am woven in every word, and not just because i am the one who wrote them.

so in writing again, i am there again.  on the page.  and so are my friends, and perhaps more importantly, so is my family.

c and i tell these stories about our family.  they are not funny, but they are funny.  we make them funny.  because with a big family like ours, you have to laugh at it.  otherwise you’ll resent it.  and when we tell them–the blood soaked basketball games, the ‘puff daddy is a criminal’ dinner conversations, the uncles who cannot be in the same room together–people always say “you should write a book.”

and i am.  writing a book, that is.  or many.  i’m not sure yet.

my senior year of college i figured it out.  my first book of poetry would be about family.  about my family.  i was struggling with what to write, forced to produce poem after poem for class, more than one a week.  and then suddenly, there they were, poem after poem about family.  it started with one about greece and my cousins there, and how i hated everything.  and it just snowballed.  my grandmother.  my great grandmother.  my uncles.  anger.  hatred.  the things we give each other.  the things we do to each other.  those poems are on a hard drive, waiting for their compilation.

and today, again, there it is.  the family.  in the poetry, in the fiction.  in everything.

and again, there is the struggle.  how can you be honest?  how can you even come tangentially close to honesty in your writing, without hurting the people around you?  and what is your responsibility…where does it lie?  with the people?  or with the words?  and are you willing, then, to risk either one?  because finishing that book of poetry, or publishing it, will mean risk.  will mean choice.

but then.  if you are true to yourself as a writer.  the words are there.  and erasing them, or putting them in a box in the back of your closet, or removing them from your blog…does that make them go away?  does that change anything?  because you have already thought them, and written them, and lived with them in you and around you.  haven’t they already done their damage?

*

i am upset.  and i want to write about it.  because this will help me understand it.  and feel better about it.  and file it in my past where it belongs.  but the internet is more permanent than it seems.  more risky.  it is as bad as hardcover, bound, on a shelf.

sure, with the internet you can erase.  you can delete the post later.  but once its been read, it is out there.  like the terrible epilogue to a series of books you loved, you cannot eradicate what you already know.  or what other people already know.

and so i will wait.  will hold the nebulous feeling of apprehension in my stomach.  the hurt and the fear and the regret and the simmering anger.  i will keep them all inside me.  save them for a day when they are safe to say.  when i can package them properly.

or for a day when i’ve decided what i choose.  the words.  or the family.  or myself.

the house is precisely the same shade of blue as the sky, so that the white porches look as though they are floating precariously in the air over the bluff.  at first i believe it is floating, magicked up there like a scene from a harry potter film.  like the burrow.  as i run steadily closer i begin to realize that my eyes are just fooling me.  that the house and the sky are distinct.  and i am disappointed somehow.  when the porches were floating and the sky was the only thing below them, everything seemed so much more romantic, like i could have been approaching a scene from wuthering heights.

it is just after six am and i am alone on route twelve.  mornings make me miserable.  but humidity makes life unbearable at any other time of day.  and takes about 20 seconds off my mile time.  so i run as the sun is rising.  trying to clear my head of all the noise back in the house.

we are in north carolina.  and by we, i mean my father’s entire family.  all six of his siblings and their spouses and ten of their children and r’s fiance, k.  only z is missing.  there are twenty-five of us, total, if my math is correct.  and we are all under one roof.  we have never tried this before as a family and this trip will determine if we ever try this again.  i have learned not to hold out hope.

there is love here, to be sure.  lots of it.  and loyalty in extreme measure.  and yet, there is anger.  so much of it bubbling, just barely contained by the surface of the viscous liquid, always ready to burst out.  these are people who…you could not harm any one of us without all twenty-four others flying wildly to our defense.  but we do plenty of harm to each other.  constantly.  we love each other.  and many of us hate each other in equal measure.  there is too much damage from the nuclear fallout of childhood.  mismatched memories, bitterness, resentment.

the fighting begins on the first night.  four of the brothers shouting about affirmative action into the middle of the night.  always formulating their next tragically insightful comment instead of listing to the conversation they are supposedly responding to, participating in.  it continues, of course, through every moment of the next two days, bits and pieces of it returning to be paired with other (entirely unrelated) barbs.  we fight over who remembers what correctly, who is wrong, who is right, who has been the most abused over the past 59 odd years of this family’s existence.  we compete about who has been in the most pain, and who has been the most successful and we disparage each other’s accomplishments at every possible juncture.  we must always have the last word.  all of us.  it never ends.

it is stressful.  i want the anger to end.  and even though i know it won’t–it is too ingrained in us now, too much a part of how we relate to each other–i cannot stop myself from always trying to stop it.  i worry all the time.  attempt to diffuse.  most women in this family do.  the wives and the daughters and the lone sister.  this is our burden.  even those of us with the genetic predisposition to join right into arguments.  to try and win them.  what is it about women?  that allows us to stop ourselves?

i wonder, often, if we will survive this week.  which sounds silly.  but what i know of family…it can fall apart.  permanently.  even over something small, insignificant, silly.

we stand, like that house, a romantic vision of family.  beautiful from the outside, all of us here together.  patched together haphazardly by a past we all share.  we are balconies hanging over bluffs, supported by sheer will, nothing but sky between us and the sand.  always on the precipice of a terribly unromantic collapse.

those jonas brothers.  or hanson 2.0, as i liked to call them.  hanson with, you know, less integrity and less talent and much more business acumen.  they will, of course, be much more popularly successful.

they are everywhere.  and they are disturbingly fascinating to me.  watching them, watching the girls who flock to them…it is like watching my life a decade ago, played back to me in slow motion.  like i know where this ends.

it’s all gotten me thinking.

i listened again.  to a song to sing.  and with you in your dreams.  the demo version of dying to be alive.  and i cried again.  like was 14, or 17, back when i first heard them.  like i was this awkward, round, misunderstood creature, who found in them something that no one in my real life could offer. i looped with you in your dreams and a song to sing until i could cry no more.  until the tears were gone.

i doubt that i will ever be able to explain it to someone who wasn’t there themselves.  who never felt that way about such a silly thing.  but it was never, never silly to me.  it was one of the most real things i had ever felt.  i loved them.  i loved HIM.  real, genuine love.  something i’d never felt for anyone before…not that way.  parents, siblings, grandparents: they do not count.  it is another love.  a capacity for emotion, for feeling, for connection with another human being that i was only just discovering in myself.  and they were safe, so safe, to explore that with.  taylor hanson would never break my heart.  never bark at me in the hallway, or deny that we were flirting because i wasn’t popular enough and then go date my ex-best-friend.   and he felt things, expressed things, that i had bottled up inside me.  that i couldn’t imagine anyone else feeling.  things that hurt me.  he got me.  i was not alone.

i played those songs at my best moments.  skipping carelessly around a beach at summer camp at fourteen.  driving around with the windows down in my little red jetta with my best friend at seventeen.  perhaps more importantly, i played those songs at my worst moments.  the night my grandmother slipped into her final coma i listened to with you in your dreams, in the dark, on repeat until i could sleep.

i’ve often thought that i have cried every tear possible for that band.  that i am too old, now, to cry for them.  but i have cried for them a lot lately.  but mostly, i think, i have cried for me.  for the girl i lost then, the girl i left behind in the halls of obj or chs.  the girl i let go of in the instant i let go of them.

i am too old, now, to ever feel that way again.  to ever put my faith, my trust, my love that blindly into ANYTHING.  and there was something beautiful about that.  about that kind of love.  that kind of blind faith in another human being.  that was pure.  it is a version of myself that i will never possess again.

i suppose it is meant to be this way.  taylor hanson couldn’t have broken my heart.  but blindly leaping into people in real life…that can break your heart.  i suppose we are meant to learn to trust carefully, to ask people to earn things.  this is growing up.  hanson was a link in the chain my life.  luckily for me, i will always have the music to remind me of who they were to me, and who i was then.

i am ready for something new.  there is a new apartment.  and a new job.  and these are the beginnings of a new phase in my life.  i am not sure what it is.  but i am sure that i am ready for it.

maybe someday i will find someone to(o)

i installed wordpress.org without breaking/crashing, anything, which is a feat in and of itself.  and yet, here i am, with nothing prepared to say.

it felt like time, again, to have a place.  a home on the web where i expressed myself in my writing.

i fear, like always, that the writing which has just reemerged will suddenly go into hiding again.  that the voice in my head, the narrative that i am always chasing, will fall silent.

but while it is here, i will write.