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March 29 - May 24, 2019
All of these possible causes are causes in fact. The causes in fact are endless. The idea of proximate cause is a solution. The job of the law is to figure out the source of the story, to assign responsibility. The proximate cause is the one the law says truly matters. The one that makes the story what it is.
It is night, the time for dreams and big decisions, and the velvet sky above is pinpricked with light.
A lifetime of being thought strange could make a man strange. But something didn’t sit right.
I’m holding my breath from the inside, trying to keep what’s there from igniting.
The air is thick with unspoken words already, I am all full up with my own secret.
“Imagine…” she instructs the students, and begins to describe a set of circumstances. I don’t know yet to call what comes out of her mouth a hypothetical, the quick situations sketched by law professors to teach students to analyze how a principle applies to different circumstances. I recognize it for what it is: a story.
Both my parents I come to know better and differently through their books. In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.
This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.
It’s how I can disappear now: by giving people something else to look at, the clothing I wear instead of me.
If we acknowledge only the happy things, maybe that’s all there will be.
Who knows how those in a family find their roles, whether a role is assigned or chosen, whether it’s a function of the way that even siblings—even twins—grow up in different families? Have different pasts.
Are we already who we will always be?
My family had always been silent about the abuse. But no one had ever implied that it hadn’t happened. My father kept talking. This moment that had changed everything inside me had changed nothing for him.
A person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud. A person can feel overwhelmed by all he wants to be and see no way to get there.
The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be.
Give me normalcy, that’s what I want. Anything else can burn.
What you see in Ricky may depend more on who you are than on who he is.
But we are kids, me eighteen and him nineteen, and we are slow to realize what a threat looks like.
We have sex only once or twice across the months, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Neither of us knows yet that we are both gay. Neither of us knows yet how much we are a refuge for each other.
That repulsion is comforting. I don’t feel attractive, but I do feel safe.
I am sick, I realize, and if I do not find a way to make myself better, I am going to end up married younger than I want to be and living somewhere I do not want to because the truth is right now I do need someone to take care of me. How would Ben or anyone else know that this isn’t my real life, that I’m still waiting for that to begin? How would he or anyone else know that in my real life, I don’t need anyone to save me?
everyone can’t stop telling me how good I look. But I can’t stand it. I can’t stand how visible I feel. How unsafe.
I didn’t know I was too young for him. I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love, could be loved, and that I wasn’t broken. When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on.
She must wonder about his life for a minute, about the life that has brought him to those clothes. What does she write in her head for him? What, in this instant, does she imagine and forgive?
Sometimes we tape sheets of white paper end to end and draw maps of our belief systems, trying to plot out our ideals as if they were logic trees. Consistency is what we prize, and coherency, and reason, and to be true to our ideals so that they fit together into the neat puzzle of us.
But reading it, I soon realized that what I needed was everything that hadn’t made it into the words of the record I’d read. The emotions. The memories. The story. The past.
The first time I slept with a woman, my chest opened up. I hadn’t known until that moment how closed it was. I’m gay because I love women, it’s as simple as that.
When I came out as gay, my eating disorder faded, as though my body had been waiting for me to accept who I am.
I had in mind that I would sleep somewhere safe and distant and would dip my toe into the past each day as comfortably as testing bathwater from the solid stance of a tiled floor.
I am pulled to this story by absences. Strange blacknesses, strange forgettings, that overtake me at times. They reveal what is still unresolved inside me. They plunge me toward what I most want to avoid.
The feeling is like chasing a memory that slips from your mind just as soon as you start to grasp it. Sure, it’s dangerous to read metaphor into life; sure, it smacks of a desire to read meaning into cold fact, but doesn’t all of this? All the facts in this case slip away from me the minute I try to grasp them.
I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.
It was good to see her—I had missed her—and I could tell she was happy to see me. Still, we were being careful with each other, the ties between us always sinew-strong, but always, too, in danger of snapping.
What I once loved about the law is that it doesn’t let questions go unanswered. It finds answers for them.
Proximate cause, as a formal named concept, doesn’t exist in criminal law. Criminal law doesn’t care where the story began. But how you tell the story has everything to do with how you judge.
What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.
What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.
No one story is simple. No one story complete.
But I see the picture differently now than I did as a child. Now I look at them and I see how young they were. I see love, and I see fear, and everything the years will take. They have so much ahead. They have no idea what is ahead. They were young, then they were old, now they are dead. The feeling strikes me unmistakably. The feeling strikes me as a surprise. Now they are dead. They are dead. I am alive.
“I’m going to go finish telling this story.” There. Now they know. I am telling this story. I mean those words to be my last to them. That where there was silence, there will be speech. That where there were secrets, I will make way for the complicated truth.
The problem of this day, the problem of this meeting, the problem that starts this story inside me and the only way it can end it is this: The man who sits down across from me is a man. He’ll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person. So I try something new. Not turning my back to the past, not fleeing it, but extending a hand. I say to the past: Come with me, then, as I live.
