March 20th, 2023 - False Star
Dear TNY,
Well, here we are again, and today you have brought “False Star”.
And I dig it.
The craft in the long sentences is spot-on. And I like the dirt and grit of the lives of these people. The hopelessness in them. This is the opposite of your rich, white stories about REI couples shopping for their new couch. “False Star” is about people who aren’t going ANYWHERE in this life. They have next to nothing and that’s the most they’ll ever get. And the author manages, inside that cul-de-sac, to portray stunning beauty and characters who, despite their fate, radiate a particular nobility (in the rich, white stories you do, there is no beauty; actually, because there is no beauty, no appreciation for anything by those MCs, the reader is left with contempt for the characters because of said lack of appreciation, contempt for the story because of its characters, and contempt for your magazine for ruining an artform with dozens of stories and characters that all feel the same).
But hats off for this story. We have a rich world teeming with texture and glimmers of pointless hope in a sea of despair. That shit rings true to life (maybe that’s just because I was one of the poor white kids this story mentions). The dialog was good. The jerkoff scene was fucking fantastic. Specifically the line, “…it was the June who was nice to me…” For anyone who has ever been young and stupidly in love with a person who was too beautiful for you to even hope to touch and too dark and dangerous to invest your heart in, and who was mean to you most of the time, but every once in a while would let the light shine through that he or she knew that you were the one for them, but they also knew they were bad inside and were trying to spare you from them because they saw you as perfect compared to their ugliness, you fucking know, what this phrase means.
My only beef with this story is that it doesn’t link up in the transcendence department. I was vibing with it as it progressed, building the feels, but I didn’t quite get off the launchpad to feelstown with the ending. So no crying. No big swell. Only that slight melancholy that comes from knowing you wanted to come inside her that first time she came over to your house but your parents came home early and you had to scramble to put your clothes back on and hope the blood drained from your faces before your parents could get to your room, even though they knew exactly what you were doing anyway (not me, though, because I was grotesque with acne in highschool, sorry to say; but the moment still stands for many).
I would read this story again.
And stories. Stories! I was watching the Oscars speeches this morning and crying. Because, well, two reasons. One: basic, lizard-brain emotional mimicry. And two: triumph. To watch these people who, for better or worse, in an industry obese with corruption and greed, who dedicate their lives to telling stories…win. And Everything Everywhere All at Once is such a good story, because when we strip away all of its uniqueness, it’s about love. A mother’s love for her daughter. And all these stories we tell, they can seem so unimportant sometimes. So irrelevant. Such a huge waste of time. But if they are, then how come we keep telling the same stories over and over again, changing all the major plot points, mediums, artforms, etc, but sticking to the same core: The Complexity of Love. That’s what makes us beautiful.
To those of us who chose to keep doing this, to tell stories, keep trying to do the unimaginable. Capture your expansive hearts into tiny, consumable packages in hopes that maybe, for just a second, we can all feel a little less alone in this terribly beautiful existence.
I was talking last night with my girlfriend. Yes, you read it here first TNY: Girl. Friend. And we were talking about this project I did years ago on becoming a superhero, and she wanted to know how it changed my life. And it did, for sure. We don’t need to get into how that happened in the beginning. But I can say, confidently, now, that I’m no prouder of anything I’ve ever made than the stories I’ve told that made people feel less alone. Seen. That even when they were lost in the fucking woods, well after the sun had gone down, that they were not alone. That we are all part of a bigger cloth that’s being blown about in some cosmic wind and sometimes we are smashed against each other on this cloth and it feels like we are all together, all at once, and bursting with love, and then the cloth blows again and we separate, so far away from what we’ve known, and struggle to understand why we are alone in a tiny apartment, our family’s only presence being plastered on a coffee mug they made for us and insisted we take with us to said new apartment we’ve been relegated to against our will, this family, physically nowhere to be seen and desperately missed, but here we are without them (mug withstanding), our only comfort being a plastic pizza cutter we can’t kill ourselves with (this one’s for you, buddy, you know who you are), and then, just when we think we can’t take it anymore, she, who has no earthly reason for being in our lives, brings us a piece of Basque cheesecake because it’s our dead brother’s birthday, a would-be 43 year old if only someone had run out of gas in 1996, and everything is bright again.
For you, for us, we make these stories. We believe. Because this life is, unquestionably, the most beautiful thing we’ll ever know, if we can just pause it, or slow it down for a fucking microsecond, just to let it all in and let go of ourselves and all of our bullshit and fear. To watch the dust swirl in a pillar of sunlight above our lover’s sleeping face before they wake. To be Schrödinger’s cat, at once a combined, whole piece yet perpetually coming from together, simultaneously, forever and ever. Amen.
To be…love.
So, cheers to stories. To Everything Everywhere All at Once. To “False Star”. To this cosmic fucking fabric atop a flagpole affixed to the ragged shell of this turtle, and the turtle he’s ambling across, and to all the turtles below, turtles all the motherfucking way down.
With love,
Nick
