You tell yourself you’re ready to rewrite Big Bend. It’s been enough time and your attachment to it is gone. You think, to do it accurately, you must return. This time alone: rewriting the lines, highlighting each path you take on some thick paper map, and charting the courses of your life you could have taken had you been someone different.
In the original draft you write about the fall and collapse. But lately you’ve been wanting to write about nurturing the quiet moments it takes to build a life with someone. You have been wanting to write about bright burst of yellow flowers and green plants with wide leafs that shoot straight into the sky.
You have this idea of how the stories can fit together. Something like:
Fire - Wildfire
Water - Please, Hurry Leave Me
Air (or ice) - Matryoshka
Earth - Big Bend
Or perhaps the alternative version:
Summer - Wildfire
Fall - Please, Hurry Leave Me
Winter - Matryoshka
Spring - Big Bend
Sometimes you think, if you just had a week of uniterrupted discovery you could write them all; stitch together something that lasts. You would still need more to build the final thing, the germinating seed (or in the words of Japanese Breakfast a festered thought. An emerald want. a single slow desire fermenting) of a collection: the lives of ordinary men I have loved. But you haven’t written the title story yet.
No, that’s not entirely accurate. You haven’t written all of the story yet. Just a few core parts. It would be, in essence a story of stories; a collection of small stories following one man and all the people he has loved throughout his life. Not from his perspective, but from some omniscient eye scouting them as they continue on post-relationship.
You’ve written the middle story:
J
I fell in love in the summer and we broke up in the fall; and anything else I told you would be a lie.
And part of the end:
Z
For years we rode out south east, towards the Texas bay to camp for the summer in a ghost town where my parents owned a summer house. In the waning years the tides would rise, the seas would churn up great big waves that smashed hard against the building collapsing the shoddy siding and destroying the above ground pool.
There is no poetry there. No symbolism. This is just a fact a true story of something that happened when I loved you.
and part of acknowledgement:
For Zach, again and again and again and again and again.
And a side story:
Lucas
Once, I asked him out for coffee but never followed through.
He moved to a small university and taught freshman-level classes between bouts of research where he would travel to the heart of rain forests to catalog the dying bugs. They fashioned themselves as a rag-tag group of rebel scientists and called themselves the Brigade of Dying Bugs. They wore cute yellow patches on their work shirts of the Megadyes ducalis, a species of water beetle that Lucas had once told me were very rare. Only one specimen had ever been collected–in the 1800s. When someone found more of them in Brazil it set off a surge of collectors rushing to claim their own beetle. This ignited a rare bug trade that ultimately led to the beetle’s extinction.
To Lucas, the story symbolized the harm of reckless discovery. To me, consumption and extinction were the consequences of being known.
Once his group was covered in the New York Times Magazine. Meet the Brigade of Dying Bugs: the Scientists Cataloging our Dying Earth. He was front in center: bushy beard and broad chest, shirt half open, equipment all around him, doused in sweat and grief and joy.
They wrote about his time in Austin, studying bugs in a still-blooming world. About a man he met, years ago, who was terrified of bugs. “They had too many legs,” he joked to the reporter. “And as we all know, too much of anything can be terrifying.”
You have been thinking about saving up some money or trying for a true writer’s workshop or fellowship. You’ve been thinking about disappearing for a week or more to give yourself the space you need to break it all down and put it all back together. You think you could do it. You’re so certain you could. You just need the space and the time to let things grow.