I'm Very Into You
I’ve been thinking about emails lately. Jeff Jackson and I recently completed an epistolary review of I’m Very Into You, which is a collection of emails between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark from 1995. (The book and the review are both forthcoming, and I’ll share the link when the review is up.) As Jeff and I traded emails about this book of collected emails, it got me to thinking a lot about both emails and letters...any form of private correspondence. What it is to connect to someone in that way. This interests me in general—the ways that people connect, the ways we reach out to each other—but it holds particular interest because my next novel is semi-epistolary, with a major storyline playing out over email. (And tweets. There. I said it. Part of the novel takes place on Twitter. I know...I know... But I SWEAR I make it work.)
When we talk about emails and letters, we’re talking about connection, but also about memory. The written artifacts of communication we leave behind after the conversation has moved on are the solid evidence of what happened, right? The “truth” of the past is there in what we said about it as it was happening, as opposed to the versions dependent on our biased, unreliable memories. Except even as the letters and emails are being written there are choices made about what to say and what to conceal. There’s a degree of performance, what bits of ourselves and our stories we’re choosing to show. And then there are the things that go without saying because all involved already know. And so aspects that were so central and assumed that they didn’t even need to be directly stated are what get lost over time.
Which is all to say that the other day I dragged out the several boxes of old letters I’ve accumulated over the years. I went looking through them chasing after a memory of a letter from a boy. See, “So Alive” by Love and Rockets came on the radio, and I remembered a letter I got in 1989 or so from a boy named Nando, how in the letter he said it was two a.m. and he was listening to “So Alive” as he wrote, and how when it got to the line “I feel I’m on top again, baby/that’s got everything to do with you” he turned it way up, blasting it through the house. At the time I read that as it just being an awesome part of the song (as it is) and not as being about me in any way. So I wanted to find the letter and see if I was remembering correctly. I’d had a huge crush on Nando at the time, and had always assumed it was unrequited.
Well, I couldn’t find the letter. And most likely the crush was unrequited, though I’ll never know now. (Unless one of you knows Fernando Batista from Newark, NJ, and wants to ask him?) But what I did find as I looked through those boxes were stacks and stacks of letters and postcards from friends and old boyfriends. I’d saved the letters for years—they range from 1989 to 1996 or so—but had never reread them. And so even though I had held on to these letters, my memories of the relationships were separate. For two guys in particular, when I finally reread the letters the other day, I found that the stories I’d been telling myself about those relationships barely resembled what I found on the page.
One was a guy from high school. He was a few years older than me. We met at the end of his senior year, when I was a sophomore. I don’t have very good recall of our time together, or even if we hung out more than the two times I can clearly remember. Even so, the idea of him loomed pretty large in my memory because the last time we saw each other it went spectacularly badly. Except I can’t remember all of the details of how it went badly. I remember it ending with him fuming on his bed and ignoring me and me sitting on the floor of his bedroom, leaning against the wall and waiting for him to speak. Eventually I left. I don't think he spoke. And that was it. I think maybe I was crying. I remember that we'd fooled around before the disagreement, but I don’t think we had sex that day or ever, and I don’t think whatever the fight was about was about us having or not having sex. I can’t remember at all what it was about... I was seventeen at the time of the argument, and I didn’t hear from him again until he sent me an apology via facebook last year, when I was forty. (That apology was remarkable. I hadn’t realized I’d needed an apology from him at all, because I couldn’t—and still can’t--clearly remember what passed between us, but when I read his apology I had the physical sensation of a weight lifting from my chest, and I felt freed from something I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying.) In my memories, he was an older guy who’d had a passing interest in hanging out with me when he was home from college, but there’d never been any real feeling behind it from his side, and I don’t recall having especially strong feelings for him either.
But then look at this:
His many letters are full of declarations like that. As I read them I remembered how I felt each time I got a letter or postcard from him—and looking at the accumulated stack, that was often. I remembered the excitement of hearing from him, and knowing that he was thinking of me. I must have written back to him—I was a big letter writer—but I have no recollection of that now. So...were we in some sort of love? Was it a serious relationship at the time, in whatever disjointed form it had taken? Did I sit all hunched up on his bedroom floor because I was an overly dramatic teenager (I really, really was), or because I was devastated by whatever had happened on his bed that I now can’t remember? And the biggest question: why is the love and the interest that’s so evident in the letters not even remotely a part of my memories of him? The letters don’t give me any answers. I can’t find any evidence to reconcile the two versions of the past.
And then there’s the considerable collection of letters and postcards from my most serious ex who I never married. He and I were together from the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-one. He was seven years older than me. I remember a relationship that was defined almost entirely by that age difference. It created a huge power imbalance and, regardless of his intentions, which were good, it was a very unhealthy relationship for me. Over time I’ve held on to only the memories that highlight that imbalance. I remember him teasing me. I remember feeling I wasn’t enough for him: not old enough, not smart enough, not experienced enough. I remember feeling scared and out of my element and alone. I remember how I cried all the time when I was with him, how he thought I was just one of those people who cried easily, but how that wasn’t true when I was away from him, and has never been true in the many years since. And yet...I know that I loved him deeply. And I know that there were many moments of real happiness. I read through some of the letters he sent to me when I was away in Madrid for my junior year of college, and there’s such tenderness in them, and such evident love for me and concern for my well being. Such excitement for me and what I was doing. I was surprised when I read his letters. I remembered my love for him, but I’d forgotten that I’d been loved in return.
Ultimately, both of these relationships had to end, and they did. But what is it in me that holds on to only the bad parts? And what else am I not remembering? The harm I did to them? My own thoughtlessness? My own mistakes? I only have their side of the conversations to look back on. I wonder if they still have mine.
PS:
There were some real gems in those boxes of letters of a lighter nature:
From a mowhawked beauty of a goofball named Ben who I met at a hardcore show at City Gardens in 1990. We talked on the phone and exchanged a few letters, but I never saw him again. (No, I wasn't celibate. It amuses the hell out of me to see evidence that I apparently told him I was.):
From my brilliant and hilarious college friend Megan, still a dear friend. "I have quit my job as manager at the Falafel King. Folly? I'm not certain":
From my friend Rich. You can't do this with an email:
