June 26th, 2023 - Status in Flux

Dear TNY,

Another Monday and another absolute dogshit story in “Status in Flux”.

About one quarter of the way through it I started skimming.  Unoriginal.  Zero tension.  Nothing at risk.  Two-dimensional characters.  Uninteresting subject matter.  No chance for emotive transportation.  Not fresh, clever, or new in the use of language.  Basically, an embarrassment to the artform.  And you, likely the preeminent publisher of short fiction in the world, published it.

Embarrassing.

You know what’s really embarrassing, though?  Beauty, as Wayne White would say. 

I watched the final Ted Lasso last night.  I had seen it before, by myself.  This time I was watching it with my kids, who had not seen it.  Now, to put in you my position, I had another successful phonecall with my former significant other.  And by successful, I mean terrible.  For the both of us.  So the entire day, because said phonecall happened in the morning, I was dragging ass.  Feeling worthless.  Like, I thought I was going home, you know?  When I came here.  I thought that my time out in the cold, trudging through my own fucking garbage, was going to come to an end.  That I’d step across the threshold and the fire would be lit and she’d say, “Where have you been?  I’ve been waiting an awfully long time for you to get here.”  Well, I’ll be the first to tell you, TNY, that isn’t what happened.  Anyway, I was having a hard day.  The sadness.  The self-pity.  The “when is this going to stop” and “maybe I’m better off dead” and “I just want to go home”.  It’s not a good look.  I know that.  And it’s not healthy.  I know that too.  But I think it’s perfectly natural to get fucking sad when a relationship dies.  Like, no matter who’s fault it was, seems like there was some good in there.  And this one had some good.  Some fucking spectacular, if I’m honest.  In the ways that I love love.  The tiny little conversations in the bed in the morning.  The stupid jokes made while driving around looking for a place to eat.  The way her feet would find my feet in bed, even when she was asleep.  The names we made up for all the background characters in the little life I’ve built in Upper Palolo. Turtle Tankdriver. Line-dancing at the only country bar on Oahu. The way she spoke the language of Jason Isbell.  The time at the Filipino Festival where she was squatted down in her white romper with her hair in a loose bun eating takeout and laughing. And as cliche as it is, waking up before her and just watching her sleep.

There was more than a little good, guys.

So I was feeling really fucking sad, okay.  And I watched Ted Lasso. It’s just the most wholesome show, man.  And “Father and Son” comes on by Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens and I’m crying really hard to myself, trying to hide it from the boys.  And I’m struck by the line: 

From the moment I could talk
I was ordered to listen, now there's a way
And I know that I have to go away
I know I have to go

By the time the show is over and the boys are up and pissing, I’m still curled up in the corner of the couch crying.  And they come back in the room and I ask them if they are crying and they say no.  Like, they weren’t close to crying. We laugh about how I’m crying though, what a sap.  But I tell them I hope it happens for them one day.  That my father gave me this terrible gift.  Like, an empathy factor.  I ache from how beautiful this place can be sometimes.  This life.  And I saw that in him.  This grizzled old fucker whose father broke his nose seven times.  A man who got in more fistfights than he could remember.  A man missing his left ring finger.  A man whose son was run over by a car.  A man whose wife berated him every day for more than a decade after all of his remaining children moved out.  A man who didn’t leave her, instead working really fucking hard almost every day of his life as a welder.  He was not perfect.  But he was full of love.  His beauty was so embarrassing that he hid it all inside, never telling any of us about it.  But it always leaked out.  Like sunlight through holes in the curtain.  And I was trying to tell my kids all of this, but how can you, you know?  You can’t.  I tried to tell them I think I have it too.  That the whole world is inside for some of us.  That it’s too big all the time.  That I can’t hold it.  I can’t speak it.  I can’t even look at it for too long or I’ll die or go crazy or, I don’t know, fucking explode.  That it’s like Cat says:

All the times that I've cried
Keeping all the things I knew inside
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.

And there it is, TNY.  Maybe I don’t get to go home. 

Let me sit with that sentence for a second.

Maybe I don’t get to go home. Whoa.

Maybe I have to go away.  Maybe this is what I’m supposed to do here, with this life.  If there is such a thing as “supposed to”.  To keep trying.  To keep trying to speak the thing.  To keep trying to open it up.  To let it out.  To let it go.  To face the embarrassment.  To try to be perfect, once, however briefly.  And to capture it right here.  So I know.  I know I have to go.  Away from home this time.  I know I’ll be alone.  I’ll always be alone.  Won’t we all?  But maybe I can be beautiful too.  And that’s okay.  That’s okay.

So, yeah.  As I was trying to tell the boys I just ended up crying and my voice went up high and broke. So I stopped trying to explain it. 

What I hope for them is that my dad gave them this too.  And I also hope he didn’t.  Because this is hard. Everything is hard.  Goddamn is this all so fucking hard.

So I went to bed and listened to music and stayed on the cry train.  I got snot everywhere and I was making some savagely ugly faces and I was texting everyone that I loved them and how much they mattered.  And the world continued to spin on its axis and it followed the arc of its gravitational pull around the sun in our little corner of The Milky Way, which is nothing in this universe of infiniteness.  And yet, as tiny as we are in all of that magnitude, we contain everything inside of us.  It’s all in here, guys.  So come over. Come in close. Let’s dance a little bit.  I’ll share it with you.  You can share it with me.  And maybe it will be perfect.  It won’t need anything else other than us, than what we have right here. It won’t last forever. But it will be all we’ll ever need.

Whew.  My mind is a place.  #facts.

I’ll see you next week. With Love.

Nick