Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

It followed its fakery so far that it ended up being radically honest. Even if it was trying too hard, it wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t. Sure, it was lowbrow and absurd. Sure, it was tasteless. But fuck the snobs of taste. Why disdain Vegas for openly admitting what was already true everywhere? The whole world was making promises it couldn’t keep. The whole world was out to scam you. Vegas was just upfront about it. It put marquee lights around it. To me, Vegas felt like the urban-planning equivalent of the homeless man we passed whose sign said: WHY LIE? I WANT BEER.

I recoiled from the image—not so much the image itself as the threshold crossing that it seemed to signify. We were no longer awestruck strangers watching a dancing fountain, or new lovers perched fifteen stories above Boston. Now we were talking about our bug infestations. His notes made me itch. It was as if his little bugs were powerful enough to reach my brick row house across the country. I was no longer sure I wanted him that close.

For years I’d been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining. But from those early years with Charles I learned that marriage was something else. It was composed of the pleasures of dwelling, which were harder and thicker than the pleasures of conjuring. Marriage wasn’t the bliss of possibility. It was the more complicated satisfaction of actually living and actually having.

These ordinary objects understood that a breakup is powerful because it saturates the banality of daily life, just as the relationship itself did: every errand, every annoying alarm-clock chirp, every late-night Netflix binge. Once love is gone, it’s gone everywhere. It’s a ghost suffusing daily life just as powerfully in its absence. A man leaves his shopping lists scattered across your days, cluttered with personality tics and gratuitous periods, poignant in their specificity: lg. black trash bags summoning that time the trash bags were too small, or g. onion, the type necessary for a particular fish stew prepared on a particular humid summer evening. The exhibits were all vocabulary words drawn from private shared languages that I would never entirely understand—the beaten-up pot, the plastic bin—or relics from two-person civilizations that no longer existed.

Objects make private histories public, but they also grant the past a certain integrity. Whenever memory conjures the past, it ends up papering over it: replacing the lost partner with memories and reconstructions, myths and justifications. But an object can’t be distorted in these ways. It’s still just a box of popcorn or a toaster, a hoodie that got drenched with sudden rain one night in 1997.

I grew up with the sense that a broken relationship always amounted to more than its breakage. Everything that happened before it ended was not invalidated by the fact of its ending. Those memories of the relationship—the particular joys and frictions it held, the particular incarnation of self it permitted—didn’t disappear, though the world didn’t always make room for them. To speak of an ex too much was seen as a sign of some kind of pathology. The gospel of serial monogamy could have you believe that every relationship was an imperfect trial run, useful only as preparation for the relationship that finally stuck. In this model, a family full of divorces was a family full of failure. But I grew up seeing them as something else, grew up seeing every self as an accumulation of its loves, like a Russian nesting doll that held all of those relationships inside.

For fifteen years of my life, between my first breakup and my last one, I was committed to a nearly opposite belief in sadness as a rarefied state: an affective distillery that could summon the strongest and purest version of me. But walking through Zagreb that week, two and a half years married and two months pregnant, I was not looking for places to smoke and feel lonely, scraping out my insides with unfiltered European cigarettes. I was looking for fresh fruit that might satisfy my sudden and overwhelming cravings: a paper bag of cherries from the outdoor market, or doughnut peaches so ripe their juice spilled onto my dress the moment my teeth punctured their skin.