I had forgotten about my ankles and feet.
When I was nineteen in Madden Girl pleather stompers and tights with holes I listened to Kanye West on the bus for hours at a go and my roommate hated me and cried and told our across the hall neighbor with blonde hair and a boy’s name that I was the most selfish person she’d ever met and probably had crabs. We had been a paper mâché sort of friends—tenuously bound by mutual acquaintances, geographic preferences, Grey’s Anatomy—and the piggy bank got punched that fall before even heavy jackets had come out from bins under loft beds. My pointy ends repeatedly hit the grand cement wall of her and we were both offended by the sparks. But there was peace and shared towels before some indiscretions and a lost key plus a morning when the tallest boy we both knew who said he loved Hemingway but didn’t read very well drank a can of her Sprite when really, I guess, he shouldn’t have stayed over at all. Soon a tree fell outside the building and crushed our neighbor’s leg. I was smoking on the steps and everyone slumped or jumped whiskey-boned and shouting about nothing before the crash came, sort of lovely, and that buttery hair all fanned on the dusk dark grass. She was all right really and came home on crutches in the silver of tomorrow cracking open. It was Halloween.
I reread Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in a couple workday binges this week and found myself first unnerved and out of breath and then at last very happy to note that Selin is to me suddenly now and always and obviously, clearly, a child. In 2017, I guess, I should have felt that already. Certainly, some peers would have and did. I was twenty-five then and enough years removed from being a college freshman in the grip of first infatuation that actually involvement with one would more or less rightly probably have gotten me canceled on Twitter. I was older but not a lot wiser and not a lot happier and the stings Selin weathered—psychosexually, ideologically, esoterically, and in relation to big ugly t-shirts— were then so primal and tactile to me. It took a long time to get out of my years of focused becoming. The urge to restart—which can’t be done—still dominated. It was hard for me to stop wanting to try it again, try better, to make two or three left turns for old rights and be then someone else entirely and someone now whole. Taylor Swift has all these songs still about being nineteen and only lately did I notice all at once that I don’t want to relitigate those particular pains anymore. Casting myself in the part of aggrieved little girl, however earned or not, is no longer fruitful. I don’t care. I’m alive out here. I don’t think this is why I’ve gone cold on her exactly. That’s separate and has more to do with distasteful corporate gluttony and narcissism and people who like football and dream about weddings plus bad songs but I think I scaled a cliffside finally somewhere and didn’t notice. Don’t you think I was too young? No more! When first I read The Idiot I was obsessed in word and deed and in fucking and life with forcibly correcting the injuries of my smaller self and in this way remained small and remained hurt. Maybe. Maybe I just needed Wellbutrin. I climbed up out from my hole to see the sun. I didn’t note the strain of pulling in the dirt as I was in love. And how funny, how very silly and right and predictable even if you walk backwards and look at the pieces where they laid before that Batuman, too, had to find herself all at once a partnered lesbian after years of men to get her own trains running on time. How dull and really great. Thrilling, dumb. It is both not that simple and entirely so. There is a falling away of artifice and then a freedom thereafter in gay and true loving and in fucking and releasing old rituals and this has made me smarter and punched the teeth out of my brain and felt good. I reread The Idiot and I’m thirty-two and I’m not perfect or perfectly formed and I don’t know that much more than Selin about how language works and how to be in a world with others in a way which allows them to know you and to be known by you but I know a little, little more, and that little is a lot and a light and we may begin in darkness but I am seeing now.
In a vision I am in the wet backyard of a barn red duplex with a young man in cargo shorts and we’re moving chairs and a deck breathes the wind above us on stained wood legs. Fevered, naked morning has molted into a jumpy simmer, a sweat lodge, something coming again. There is the sound of him but no words anymore and my back against the pole now and after my neck ringed a red towards purple but I won’t cancel the party nor raise a defense later when I’ve become knees-bent-backwards drunk and started to scream my laughs and spill things and his friends say who would put up with this. Poor guy. In a vision I am in the library. I watch myself in the library. I spent a lot of time in the library. Short skirts in the library. Overnight in the library. That one boy who always had a joint to share in the covered walkway in the shadow of the library. I accepted. I despised being high. I remember reading, when I should have been studying, working, self-bettering, popular schlock classic and work of searing genius Sharp Objects in the library and going tight everywhere and peaky when Amma, awful, fantastic Amma, says that sometimes when you let someone do something to you you’re really doing it to them. And I don’t mean to victim blame those who feel they could be victim blamed. It’s not about exonerating evil doers so much as saying, asking, knowing, maybe, saying it is the monstrous in oneself which looks and sniffs and finds it in others and goes to them for this. I mean to say that this can at least feel true. I take it so now you’ve done it and well there look at you! Marked forever. I would hate for anyone to say that I do not have the power to be bad. Amma, of course, was murdering little children. I was spotting cruel boys and crawling around near to them or kissing girls in their line of sight until they sprung at me to get open my rib cage and pull out the batteries. So it’s a bit different. And all that was a long time ago. But I reread The Idiot this week and Selin, though mostly sturdier and less reckless (even in the more libidinal, experimental Either/Or, which I’m rereading now), was so like that girl climbing hills crying on the other side of Massachusetts and then I, remarkably, thrillingly, after many years and without knowing, so apart from them both, so much something else. What an honor to leave those girls behind in their ectoplasm to find the way. I love them and goodbye.