February 14th & 21st, 2022 - Annunciation
Dear TNY,
Thank you for “Annunciation”.
For this read, I have been listening to Khalid’s “Better”, on loop. And for the entirety of this story I have been on the verge of crying. I cannot explain why. Certainly my life has been an eruption of late. I get a lot of texts that say, “Are you okay?” or, “Are you going to hurt yourself?” People have reason to believe I am not okay and I would hurt myself. Because I am not okay. I don’t think I would hurt myself, if that matters to you, TNY. But one can never be sure until the moment arrives (and what a spectacular dichotomy that moment is, because one tries so hard to be alive, to feel things, anything, and at that moment of choice, weapon in hand, TNY, you are never more alive, having the real, meaningful conversation about yourself with yourself, one that no one but you can touch; oof, it’s heady stuff). What I’m trying to say is that I likely have reasons to be so tear-ready. But I don’t think that is the driver of how I felt for this story.
Anyway, now that the story is over, I’m full crying. This story made me full cry, goddamn it. And it’s not like there was this transformation in the MC, per se. The MC didn’t become a better person or a worse person. More like…a full person. The author did such a good goddamn job of capturing the uncapturable here. That sense from our youth when our “freedom overwhelmed” us. It hurts to watch this young woman. It hurts to watch all these people. Not because they are good or bad, well-off or not. It’s because they…are. They fucking are. They all exist and are so fucking beautiful.
I don’t even know what to say. You didn’t write about writers. You didn’t write about New York. You didn’t write about rich people with fucking rich problems. You wrote about real people. Scarred people. Whole people. There wasn’t a single person in this story who was a victim. Were there acts that could have created victims? Yep. But these people rose up. They didn’t fucking sit by and let shit happen to them. They fucking came up, goddamn it. Everyone was powerful and slight and tender and so so so strong.
I mean, it feels like you pried open my mind and took a feeling I can’t even write about, and you put it down in a way that I can take it back inside, leaving me overwhelmed with the knowledge that I’m not alone.
I’m not alone. Guys, I’m not alone right now. I’m all of us, all at once, forever and ever, amen.
This shit is the golden ticket. I know it will pass. This feeling. But for now, I get to be a little bit closer to perfect.
God, I just can’t. I just fucking can’t with this story. It’s too much to even talk about. The fucking scar on the neck, the little buttons, the puke breath, the bees in the tree, the fucking tree itself, the bee guy with the three layers of pantyhose on his face, the dusty pasta and the dog that doesn’t bark and the random German phrases bursting out from a broken brain and the rolling hills and the fog and the mom whose shoulders slumped back again, going to a home where she is slowly dying, and the West and the freedom. Freedom and potential so bright and warm that there isn’t a hint of loneliness in this piece even though the main character is mostly alone. It’s like…I don’t think I believe in God anymore, not the way that stupid fucking religions want me to, but it’s like this story is watching from God’s eye, seeing a painting of people’s lives, colors that aren’t meant to make things saccharin or bright, but dark fucking colors, deadly colors, because only God can know how it turns out and uses these colors to make a real life with that knowledge. A fucking life. Goddamn it, he says, and pounds his fist on this kitchen table. A FUCKING LIFE.
And the fucking Vanagon. Guys, I was ready to eviscerate you over the usage of this rig if you fucked it up. Of your readership, I would wager that I am in the top 20 with regard to Vanagon expertise (if not number one, because let’s be honest, anyone that reads your shit and owns a Vanagon does not do their own work). I was fully prepared to gut you. And even though you made 1.5 mistakes, I’ll let you be. I will inform you, but I’m not going to rage.
Mistake number one is that the doors are not aluminum. I wish they were. Because I wouldn’t have so many rust issues. And mistake number .5 is roughly a mistake. The early Vanagons had an air-cooled engine and were carbureted. They wouldn’t have any hoses, per se, because they lacked coolant (air-cooled, you see). And after they became fuel-injected in 1983½, they ditched the carburetor (for the Digifant fuel injection system) and added liquid cooling. So when she was taking it in to get the carburetor and hoses fixed, this would not be possible because it would be one or the other. I suppose one could argue that the carbureted engine would require fuel lines and/or heater channels and/or intake plumbing, but no one would call those hoses, no one that I know anyway.
But I’m not here to be mad about that. I will be writing a letter to the author praising this piece and will pass along my Vanagon expertise. These foibles do not ruin the story.
But the vehicle itself. Fuck. Like, guys, I have been driving one since 2010. I have been living in it since 2018. I’ve driven my kids all over the US in my guy (his name is Chuck). And…I’m running from something for sure. I don’t even know what. I felt so in this, so deep in that van, cooking for my kids, crying myself to sleep while they are happy and warm and snoring below me, because what the shit am I fucking doing to these guys dragging them all over in a van, breaking down, getting ate up by bugs, doing driveway repairs, pushing helpful people out of my life to get more miles down the road. People talk about #vanlife like it’s some kind of final destination of nirvana. It isn’t. It’s where you go when you know you need to learn a lesson. When you have nowhere else to go to learn that lesson. When you are tired of happiness and you want a visceral beatdown. It’s choosing the wrench, in the Good Will Hunting sense. I guess, unless you are rich and you can fucking do whatever you want.
The Vanagon is a life choice that is intentionally about the journey and not the destination. And I know this woman’s pain, throwing money after God and VW, hoping, fucking praying, begging for shit to just go your way just for a minute so you can take a break and be happy with your kids.
Fuck my face, guys. I would wager this story is up there with the best I have read from you. Not the same as them, for sure. But this one, it fucking aches it’s so beautiful. It’s masterful, to me.
I’m noticing that I want to couch my words. Like, I don’t care if people think I’m wrong when I say the stories suck. But I seem to care if they think the story sucks and I think otherwise. What a fucking cuck I am.
Also, this story is over 9k words. And I wanted it to keep going. Whoa.
Oh, I wanted to pull out some phrases that I thought were fucking perfect:
There are moments in our lives when our sense of our own goodness is so shaky that we build elaborate defenses against the possibility that we may be far worse than we fear. I have come to think that I had a secret intention, held at the very center of my actions, so small and dark that I pretended not to see it then; I could not see it even a decade later. It is only now, when I know myself to be good and bad in equal measure, that I can glimpse it, if barely.
She said we have art so as not to die of the truth. (I have not heard this before, but goddamn is it exactly right. 99% of the stories you publish do not meet this criteria of art, but this one does)
I created my own family, and it has become my true north, which turns me in its direction no matter where I find myself, no matter all the changes that draw with astonishing swiftness over the face of the earth.
She said that in every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death.
I also wanted to say that this story makes me want to be beautiful. Like, it makes me feel bad for every letter I so carelessly wrote to your shitty magazine, in which I said terrible things that I thought were funny but probably hurt people’s feelings. It makes me want to stop doing all this shit I’m doing, wasting my fucking life away, and write, goddamn it. Write like I know I can, because I know it’s in there, just so that more people might feel like this more often. This is the kind of story that makes you look at yourself. Like, really look. Reminisce about the power of your youth. And hold up your yuck, your shit self, and not look away. Fuck.
Anyway, I have to keep crying now and let this settle in my bones (especially over this fucking sense of being both good and evil, and how I do always turn back to my true north). I think I will reread it tomorrow. To get access to its beauty again. And maybe I can be beautiful too. Just for a few more minutes.
Thank you.
Nick
