mixed metaphors
Last August, I drove up to Berkeley and stayed in an AirBnB tucked into a narrow, winding hillside. I spent a few days in town: drank a flight of vermouth with my friend K, had dinner with A and some of his friends in their perfect Craftsman. We ate late-summer produce— tomatoes, peaches— and they filled me in on the neighborhood gossip. This was technically research for my next book, SQUARE WAVES, which takes place in the Bay.
That was the fun part. The scene-setting, the vibe-curating. The emotional arc of the book was something I did not need to research. That I had to pull, slowly and carefully, out of my own guts.
I am not Cassidy— not hardly— but I once had a relationship that was like hers in an important respect. In 2016, I wrote an essay for The Awl (RIP) that summed up how it left me: “I want to allow people to love me without being terrorized by the sense that I will hurt them, or that they will hurt me. That when you get down to the deepest parts of me, all you find is a monster standing guard over an old, open wound.”
—
After I wrote the essay, I vowed that I was done writing about that relationship. I had said a lot about it, on the page and in person and in therapy, and I was tired of holding onto it so tightly. Letting it hold onto me.
That decision has served me well. It’s allowed me to let the pain it caused to fallow. To start to turn itself slowly— inevitably— into something else.
Something else has been many things. One of them, it turns out, is this book.
Writing it I worried that I was betraying myself. Telling a story I’m tired of repeating. I resisted emotional insight so hard that the first draft was all sunny, charming surface. I had to spend the following ones digging in, and down. Allowing that I had not intended to write this book— technically, I was assigned it, and also the one it grew from— and that also, I had accepted both assignments. I had painted myself into this corner, stroke by stroke.
The metaphor is messy and inexact but I guess it works to say also that, as it turned out, I had waited long enough. The paint was dry. I could walk across it without marking the soles of my feet. I could give Cassidy these bits of myself— crucial honesty, real danger and pain, the things that make a book more than just a story, or at least I hope, anyway. I could give all of that to her without ripping myself apart in the process.
I am not old, but I am so much older than Cassidy is, than I used to be. I used a different metaphor earlier, said I had let my pain fallow. Maybe what I meant was compost: break down. Lose itself, and become fertile territory all over again.
