a long weekend

On Thursday you sit in a therapy office next to a gas station, trying to ignore alternating buzzes from green paddles you grip tight in your hand. You are told this could make you better, though you are often skeptical of authority. You’ve been listening to the Execution of All Things, repeating the lyric “Someone, come quickly. This place was built for moving out” over in your head till you cannot sleep. You are trying to ascertain its meaning or maybe you’re trying to ascertain your own meaning—surely the two can be conflated.

On Friday, in the afternoon lull at work, you watch videos of tidal waves and tsunamis for research. You are writing a short story. Or rather, you are rewriting a short story about your fatalistic last trip to Big Bend.

The story’s plot is simple: a couple is breaking up, or a couple has already broken up, and you used to find that profound for some reason you can’t remember. Together they trek up a mountain trail, climbing red-orange switchbacks, pausing only to stare into a vast and open canyon.

In your new story, the main character suffers from fatal visions of the future. He closes his eyes at night and dreams of tiny apocalypses: rivers of fire, fields of tornadoes, giant waves of water that crush bones into nothingness.

The execution of all things. The closing of eyes. The similarity isn’t lost on you.

You are rehashing the wreck, or the wave, or the tidal wave, or the pool. You always keep it vague: the metaphor of the thing you did to yourself, not the thing itself.

Now, halfway through a short story, you confuse confession for revelation, certain that each thing you write is meaningful only because it’s true. You are trying hard to be something different than you are right now. You are trying to change or grow or mend—whichever one happens first. You are trying to write things that are not true. Real fiction, or at least the closest approximation of it you can muster.

You tell your therapist, “I write stories about people falling in and out of love.”You tell your therapist, “I write stories about loneliness or gay loneliness.”You tell your therapist, “I write stories about people, who through vulnerability can change.”

When you close your eyes, your therapist asks you to identify the emotion: tell him what it feels like in your body. Sometimes, you think, it feels like pressure building. Like I am the dam and what I’m feeling is the flood and if I’m not careful, the water could seep through the crack—blow the whole thing apart.

Sometimes, you think, you feel like a rapidly unspooling thread. A loom gone wild, spun too far out to reel back in. And that, if you’re not careful, this could be your new amalgamation: knotted thread, loose and untamed.

But you tell him something else instead.

On Saturday, you listen to Silver by Waxahatchee and run down a list of literary magazines, blindly submitting your story. You are hoping someone will read what you write. You are hoping someone will like what they read.

You are planning for a housewarming party. You are planning for your parents to visit.You are planning for the end of summer by writing about the summer.

You do the dishes and take out the trash. You sweep the floors and water the plants. You don’t think too hard about the lyrics. You think way too hard about the lyrics. You repeat the lyric, “I’ll portray the old shag carpet, you can walk all over me” like a sinister mantra. You imagine your flesh, rotted and stony silver and free.

At times you think that people walk all over you too. But, it’s hard to tell.

You divide up the day, apportioning your anxieties into equal parts. Together, you consume the things consuming you. Together you tackle the metaphor of the thing, not just the thing itself.

After Thursday’s session, your therapist warns that people who do this type of therapy can often have post-traumatic responses. Sometimes, he says, they reimagine themselves in the scene or have vivid dreams unlike they’ve had before. The act of rehashing and refocusing can re-trigger the mind and divert our focus.

You don’t have any flashbacks. You think only of the future: vast and long, stretching endlessly into the horizon.

On Sunday you get drunk and listen to Drunk. You somehow missed that Maggie Rogers released a new album. You clean the apartment. You get a covid booster shot. You count the weeks left until the next election.

Something has been stirring inside of you and whether it’s courage or regret you’re not certain. You cook sausages and onions, peeling off layer after layer of onion with delicate precision. You cut, you dice. You can find some comfort in the monotony of it all or the ritual of the thing.

You wonder when things diverged? When exactly did you stop writing about the thing and start writing about the metaphor of the thing? You hope it’s sly enough to go unnoticed. You pepper it in with real facts: trips to Big Bend, therapy sessions, and housewarming parties. But still, you keep it foreign.

Your therapist laughs when he mentions your earlier resistance. You were pushing back, he says, especially when you cry. Anytime you feel something, he continues, you try and contain it.

On Monday, Labor Day, Louis calls you and you two decide to meet up for coffee. He takes his black, never patient enough to wait the extra minute it takes to add cream or sugar. You take yours mixed with cream, sugar, and vanilla syrup, wanting to hide the acidic taste the best you can. He tells you about his upcoming move, and how he plans to sell all of his things and make his way up north to the safety of Chicago. You tell him about your plans to buy a house, settle down, and buy an aging German shepherd.

Your therapist asks you if what you’re remembering ever feels fake. Like it never actually happened. You tell him that you spent so long ignoring it that now you wonder if, in your depression, you simply remembered it differently. The childish play turned into trauma.

You are, after all a fiction writer.