Make Me An Angel (That Flies From Montgomery)

For Jenny, whose radiant courage I want stuffed inside me for a day, a week, a year, and who makes me not want to kill myself. 

Reading this post by Jenny Z. made me cry alone last night and again this morning.  Her writing is of course beautiful, and she is too, more than I could ever hope to express in writing, so I won’t even really try, which is why I’m a most certainly a bad essayist.  I have known for a long, long time that there are only a few people in the world I find so mysterious and beautiful that I couldn’t ever appropriate any aspect of them in my fiction, and I’ve convinced myself that these people are like magical talismen whose life-mysteries makes me appreciate why writing is wonderful but why it will never really mean anything compared to real life, and why I don’t even want it to, and why sometimes I can’t write anything at all, but I can only be alive and live and cry and love people.

Reading her post made me mindful of many things, the main one being that for some reason I started talking this summer and couldn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t stop feeling, and in that talking and feeling I felt a crack split my heart and soul open and out leaked a miasmic black ugliness, and suddenly I experienced a freedom I have not ever, ever felt in my life.  And that freedom-terror is about being alone, being hurt, being in love with everyone — Jenny Z came up to my dorm room one night while my room was smelling like a skunk because the AC was not working, and we talked about falling in love with everyone, just everyone, and then about how that love can suddenly just evaporate, and then one feels like a sociopath or a lunatic for not caring, because just days or weeks before the love was so much a present and real part of one’s existence that even breathing contained that love and where does it go?   Which means maybe love is the wrong word for it, but it doesn’t feel wrong to me.  It feels like the only word I could ever use for that feeling.  

But talking about that love — about love and loss of love and rebirth of love and confusion and obfuscation of love and about how to love oneself, myself, while being so deeply mired in self-hatred that for the longest time the only true thing I knew in my life was that I hated myself, that if I ever told you one true thing it would’ve been I hate myself and everything else I said to you was probably a lie, because the truth is I lie all the time, that my whole life is built out of carefully chosen lies that I put together like a Jenga tower.  Which is why in my stories, the women never speak and the men are scary and tall and ready to beat the shit out of everyone because in my life that’s what I want to be and do: I want to beat up everyone, all the time, and there was a time last year when I tried to beat up Kenny and instead he wouldn’t fight me and threw me on the floor and he got into bed angry with a ripped shirt and then we got on a plane and were so tired we slept against each other and when we got home we went straight to bed and slept again, and for four days afterward I had bruises all over my arms, so I pretended we had been in a fight, a real fight, and that I had lost or won, I can’t remember what I wanted and I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway.  For awhile I was really ashamed of this story and I didn’t tell anyone, and I was ashamed of how much I really tried to hurt him, but then in January I decided that fighting is as natural as every other impulse people have, and we didn’t really hurt each other and sometimes you just need to beat the shit out of the one you love, which is why I always defend Chris Brown, although this makes me unpopular with many people.

This summer, in ways that were surely true-and-half-true-and-not true, in ways that often felt brutally unkind and uncharitable and also more loving and horrible and sweet and tender and passionate that I’ve ever let myself feel or be with anyone, I started being truthful.  So I let myself make the decision out loud that I’d made in my secret heart before I’d even left Minnesota, and that was that I would not go back, at least for awhile or maybe forever, that I could not/cannot go back while I’m actively working on not hating myself, that for me to not hate myself I have to unchain my heart from all the things I have chained it to, and those things include being a good wife and cooking dinner for anyone, including myself, they include working a job I think is worthless, or not working at all and being “supported,” they include the majority of my clothes and my jewelry and my make-up and all the things I use to externalize what I perceive to be my insides, which are fragile and I-wish-beautiful but probably ugly and slutty and ridiculous and full of shame and pride and untruthful vanity. I want so much to be beautiful to myself more than I want to be beautiful to anyone else.  In the picture below, from one year ago, I thought I was happy and I thought I was healthy but I am so thin here and there is no way I was healthy, and I was painfully aware of every moment of my existence, good and bad, and I was always comparing myself to other people, and most of the time I wanted to crawl inside the people I perceived to be better adjusted than I was.  Even though I wasn’t healthy, I still thought last year at camp I had the best time, that nothing could be better, but last year was nothing compared to this year, when I opened up and started truth-talking.  Camp was still strangely sad and lonely and full of people having nervous breakdowns and sad breakups and counselors sneaking out of the dorms to go to the bar and covertly smoking cigarettes just out of view of the kids, after getting into arguments with other counselors about stupid things like whether the curtains should be open or closed during the dance, and I felt like at every moment I was saying to someone, Are you sad?  I understand if you’re sad.  And I felt like I was always putting my hand on someone’s shoulder and saying It’s all right, because I wanted them to say to me Be all right.   And mostly they did, and I felt love.  Yesterday I got a text message from a sad person that said everything I fear is sad and that made me cry too, but not because everything is sad, even though it is, but because it felt so truthful and the only reply I could think of didn’t feel half-good enough to say, but that thing was Be all right.     

The truth is that I don’t know if it’s possible to be all right, or to unchain myself from all the things that kept me in constant fear and also kept other fears at bay — the fears that seemed terrible but now don’t feel that terrible, the fear of being alone, of not hiding my anger and insecurity and abject terror by standing behind another person or people, of encountering the world as an unchained and dizzy and loving person.  And sometimes when I’m cowering in fear I think I’m trading one set of fears for this other one, and which is better, which is more suited to my personality and do I have to choose just one?  But then I think, what use is there in contemplating a choice when you knows in your heart that there is no choice, that the choice has been made, that sometimes the heart just stops and digs in its heels and that’s the end of that?  Or maybe that metaphor is stupid and what I mean to say is that the heart flies away; it’s like you left a window open but you didn’t realize it for several days and for awhile you think everything is fine but when you stop to look you see that your heart is already gone and it’s been gone for an indeterminate period of time, and there is no way to find it again because who knows how long it’s been gone?  

At the first session of camp, a girl sang Angel From Montgomery, which is a beautiful song, and everyone was so moved and her voice was just like Bonnie Raitt’s and for a full moment afterward, everyone was fucking speechless with hope and possibility and grace and pain.  I have thought about this song a lot since then, and it makes me wonder why I tend to move through my own life like a wrecking ball every three years, why everyone in my fucking life treats me like a crazy person when I am not one, about why I wreck my own home and my own domestic sphere with a regularity that seems nearly calculated but isn’t, I swear, and what does that mean, anyway?  And will I always be this way, or am I only this way now because in my personal dealings I have always and furiously dishonestly presented myself as ordinary, because I had a nice boyfriend and then I got married and my husband is a doctor and together and I am pretty and sweet and I never say no to anyone, and yes, I would make more if it runs out and I will do it for free even if I have to go out of my way, I’m just happy you thought of me and I can’t believe you even invited me because I am nothing, I can’t believe you noticed me!  I am nothing, nothing, a nothing.  I do not refuse anyone anything, except perhaps I have refused to be public about what a shitty horrible person I am inside, and inside that inside I have secrets and secrets and tender secrets and what I want is to love and love and love instead of hating myself and thinking everyone else is a million times happier and luckier and calmer than me, and I want to not be afraid of myself and I want everyone to know I am no longer afraid of myself or them.  I want to think about how it isn’t true that love can save you, about how sometimes I think that’s the stupidest thing anyone could ever believe and why did I ever believe that? But also how that’s also a lie because the only thing that has ever mattered to me is love, and what love means to me is humane mutual expression and non-judgement, what it means is not forcing anyone to do anything they don’t want to do and growing inside because of that choice, what it means is non-possession and kindness and freedom, so yes, love can save you, me, us and we can all be all right.  

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5. delightsandshadows said: You are beautiful and human and real
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7. daphnejolielaide said: Kisses on you. I wish I could write my feelings like this. I am very honest, and great at arguing my beliefs but was never able to talk about my insides. Which is why I write them into other people who are nothing like me. I understand though. Love.
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10. italicsmine said: Oh darling I love you.
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