June 12th, 2023 - Thursday
Dear TNY,
Another Monday. Another story. “Thursday” is it.
My life is speeding up as I get older. And recently I’ve noticed that, within myself, time is being tracked by my stupid, self-imposed mission of writing these letters. The weeks feel like they are whipping by as I copy and paste each story into its own Word doc and save it within my meticulous filing system. There is a sense of order here. Like this is some kind of lifelong marathon in which no matter what happens between the waypoints, the waypoints show up and demand attention. And really, what is this project, at this point, other than therapy for me? It’s a weekly reminder to drag my brain through some words, try to say something meaningful, but really just vent. And not always vent negatively. But to talk to someone that cannot interrupt me. Talk to a person that won’t take a pause in conversation as an opportunity to evaluate and parry back (we all do these things, I’m no better and am not trying to say I am). Talk to a person who is the definition of nice. You see, being nice, to me, is listening. Intently. To all the thoughts. Even the wrong ones. And not focusing so much on how all of those words affect the listener. But just to watch this person in front of you almost like a piece of art. Look. Look at him go. Look at how he turns tacos and beer into electricity that powers a fat computer inside his skull (that grew inside another fucking person, my God!) and that computer occasionally, either through luck or a practiced hand, sometimes can manufacture a string of sounds so beautiful that others are moved to tears.
Being nice. God, what a concept. I got asked by my significant other yesterday what she could do to try to make Us better. I’m fully onboard with how hard a “try” that is; it’s not lost on me. And I said, “Be nice to me.” And she said, “But what does that mean; how do I do that?” Now, you can take that however you please. You can see it the way I’m sure she does, which is that I don’t have the words or knowledge or emotional depth to describe, in detail, what being nice to me looks like. That because I can’t explain it, it’s an empty request. I can see that. I can see how that looks and understand how one could arrive at that opinion. And I do not fault her for it. I’m absolutely certain that I’ve done the same a hyperbolic number of times. But the way I currently see it is this: If the subject was covered in kindergarten, it doesn’t need describing. I could ask ten five-year-olds what being nice to someone is and they would know. They would know how to try (for instance, I was crying when I wrote this letter and my oldest son didn’t say anything, he just got up and hugged me).
But I’m just one fella. I have a host of opinions up in my head which are worth as much as anyone else’s. I want to feel love and be loved like anyone else. And I also want to love. I want to love hard and make beautiful things and can carry so much water, TNY. I can carry your fucking water for years. But, most importantly, remember that I fall down. I get mad. I lose patience. I fuck up. I don’t get everything right.
Guys, I took an 11-year marriage and fucked it up by cheating. That’s not to say that it would not have died on its own for other reasons. One will never know because what happened happened. What I’m saying is that there was another human with an experience as visceral as mine, a beating heart pumping blood constantly being oxygenated and then not, and a fat computer of her very own filled, not unlike this story (I’m sure I’ll write something about this story at some point), with a lifetime of textural memories that interconnect in ways that none of us will ever know, I looked over the bed of that pickup, right into her fucking eyes, man, a memory she may or may not remember the way I do, snow all around and the kids inside, by her request to protect them from our emotions as she thought I was going to ask for a divorce (because she had no idea, as I had no idea, that I could do the other thing), and I said, “I cheated.” I’m telling you this because I fuck up. And I continue to feel guilty about that to this day. And I have processed it, sure. I’ve held it up to the light and looked at the angles. I’ve seen it, y’all. And I can tell you that no matter how you look at it, validate it, justify it, forgive yourself for it, you still feel guilty. That is, as my mother would tell me, because you’re a good person. Because I feel guilty, I’m a good person.
Yuck.
Which is strange to me because people who say they are a good person, I always think they are kind of saying it to convince themselves that they are a good person. Like a mantra that, if it goes unrepeated, will pull the curtain back on the charade. The dichotomous truth about “goodness” is that good people do shitty things and good things and feel guilty and fall down and try and fuck up and get up and make nice and keep trying and lift others up and cut them down. People are an arena hosting a god fighting a monster, day in and day out, for an entire life. If you don’t think that the monster wins some days, then keep telling yourself you’re a good person.
Anyway, I’m not a good person. And I’m not good. I could enumerate for you, in detail (also, the details in this story are fucking phenomenal; Saunders uses the opportunity of this McGuffin, the technology, to explore how crisp and vivid our own memories are with exceptionally chosen details throughout this piece; it’s really something to behold), all the teeny tiny ways throughout the day that I am a piece of shit. I’m not going to detail them, though, because that is both pathetic and egotistical (I’m shittier than you are, look at my shit!).
But guys, I’m fucking trying. Some days are good. Some days are bad. But I keep doing the days, trying all the same.
WHOA BREAKING FUCKING NEWS HERE
I just called said ex wife because we are scheduling a dermatologist telehealth appointment for tomorrow for my youngest, and I was my normal self on the call, and started asking her about our relationship as it was and as it is now and do the boys have a strong relationship to emulate in the future with relationships of their very own, etc. We were talking about all those relationships and then she brought up my dead brother (let’s be honest, I did) and that she knew that I was broken from the very beginning, when I told her that, in lieu of my brother, as he was very early removed of his burden in front of my eyes, that I wished I had a cardboard cutout of him to carry around in my pocket for special occasions. Can you imagine? Can you imagine an 18-year-old young man that you are interested in telling you, in not so many words, that he’s so broken and desperate to have his brother back (that he only lost 3 years prior at that point!) that he thinks about having a fucking cardboard cutout of him around? She’s a fucking angel, my ex. Not in all ways, for sure. She’s also human. But in the ways with regard to who I was and who I became, she carried my water for years and I never said thank you.
Hold on, I’m going to go say thank you.
There, said it (offline).
Guys, what I’m saying here is I’m not okay. That a lot of us are not okay. We walk around carrying these huge weights everywhere we go. And, I’m only speaking for me here, I don’t want someone to take it away. Don’t fix me. Don’t take my weights away. I fucking love these weights. It’s just that…maybe we all need someone to hold it for a little bit so we can feel better. Maybe that’s being nice. Maybe being nice is that in the middle of the argument (which is never about what we are talking about, anyway), you look at that person who’s obviously hurt and trying to understand why, even to themselves, and say, man, you watched your brother die and you don’t understand how love works the way I do because the person you loved most in the world was run over by a fucking car and your heart is still broken and will likely always be broken, your broken heart just beating to beat, looking a lot like how your Uncle John hobbles around these days, his knee twisted up from a horse injury he collected at a later age, so I’ll stop the argument right here and touch your face and say, holy fuck, man, you’re so fucking beautiful, do you know that? can you see it? and then give you a fucking hug and try, for even the briefest moment, to take some of that pain away, just to help hold it, not lessen it, and then say, “Want to get a beer and read Trivial Pursuit cards to each other?”
In some ways being nice is the hardest thing there is because the hard part is that you have to want to be nice to the degree that you’ll sacrifice your own shit to make someone else feel better. And in other ways, being nice is the easiest thing. Because all you have to do is uncurl your fist into a hand and reach out to hold someone’s heart. What’s more beautiful than that?
The story is well written. The details are fantastic. The pacing is grand. The whole thing moves in a way that makes me want to read it. I was not emotionally involved though, and by the time the note appeared in the end, I knew that he was going to find Clara so it was a little predictable. But I do like the idea of this new guy, David, living inside Gerard and how the two were so different, but now making one whole person. As per usual with Saunders, he turns a nifty trick with his magic technology, making a story about something completely different into a story about human connection.
Well, that’s all I have for today on the subject of my own insanity. I hope your day is fantastic.
Nick
P.S. I traced my hand for this drawing, my oldest’s idea, and it looks fucked up and I thought about turning it into a turkey, or a Batman turkey, as my youngest did for a Thanksgiving project in grade school, but the whole reason I wanted to draw a hand was because I was thinking about how you can hold someone’s whole fucking life in your open hand, if you can just open it, and then as I was tracing my hand I was reminded of the kindergarten reference I made about being nice, so no matter how bad my fucking traced hand is, rather, no matter how bad our traced hands are, they are exactly what is necessary to be nice.
