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This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all.” “Some,” yes. “Most” if we’re lucky. “All,” no.
This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too—the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?
The book you’re holding in your hands was many books before it was this one. Nested inside this version are the others: the version I began deep inside my sadness, thumbed into my phone in bed on sleepless nights; the one I scribbled out with sparks in my hair. You’ll see pieces of those books inside this one. Why? Because I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see. Maybe especially those parts. I’ve had to move into—and through—the darkness to find the beauty.
How did I not see the heft? How did I not hear it? The question I keep asking myself is the same question we ask about someone who’s good at sleight of hand: How did he do that?
My husband and I became friends in an advanced creative writing workshop in college. You might want to dog-ear this detail in your mind so you can come back to it later.
The play was about infidelity, secrets, and betrayal. (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)
Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future.
The play is about a woman who loses her husband, and in losing her husband loses her knowledge about the future. She isn’t sent the script ahead of time, and no one gives her any notes. It’s improv work. On the bright side, she has no lines to memorize, but she never knows what’s going to happen next, or what scenes she’s even supposed to be in.
The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life.
And the sentence could pick up again anywhere. Or it could dissolve into silence for some time.
It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story? Or, rather, making sense of what is happening. When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.
Plot is what happened, and what happened is one thing. What the book—the life—is about is another thing entirely.
How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.
I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.
She thinks she needs to send a stronger version of herself into the future, a version that can somehow leap over the chasm.
What does it mean to start writing prose when you’ve lost your narrative?
What does it mean to write about trauma in real time? Instead of going to work to avoid processing the loss, The Finder makes the processing her work. She’s lost her narrative, but she’s writing her story. She lets the loss touch everything, as if she has a choice.
This is what it is to be rooted in a place, or to have a place rooted inside you: Every bit means something to someone you know, and therefore, every bit means something to you.
I’d read a little, then work on poems. He’d read or work on a play. I thought of our life together as a life in words. I thought it was a beautiful life.
Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.
Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.
I asked my husband to come home for lunch, because I couldn’t wait to give him his present. We were standing together in the dining room when he opened the box and saw the positive pregnancy test inside. His reaction: “Here we go again.”
From the very beginning, I expected the end. That sort of thing changes you.
This book is powered by questions, many of them unanswerable, so their fuel burns forever.
“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.
Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.
“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.” Next question.
Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.
Maybe it’s only possible to travel very far away if one is already used to rowing.
How do I distill the silence, the knowing that I don’t know?
I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.
When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross.
What I didn’t say: I thought about dying all the time. Or, not dying, but disappearing. Poof. I didn’t want to die, not really, but I wanted relief. I wanted to stop feeling what I was feeling. I carried all of that with me to the coast, and I didn’t know what to do with it there.
What I didn’t say: I wrote poems at the beach because I needed to make something more than sadness. What I didn’t say: I’m adding my sadness to the list of things we’ll never get the sand out of. Like anything you take to the beach, it’ll be gritty forever.
How I picture it: For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.
The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage.
For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. —Maggie Nelson
Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.
My husband’s shampoo was in the shower, his razor and shaving cream by the sink. His toothbrush and pillow were still upstairs; he didn’t begin sleeping on the couch until two summers later, and that version of our house will never be online—the version where we live together but not together.
The man I’d befriended in a writing workshop tried to delete my grief on the page. Redacting tears?
If not here, then where? If who I would have been is not who I am, then where is she?
When I get to the most painful part of the telling, I laugh. I break that part into bits. I laugh through the words I have to say, have to hear myself say, have to let hang in the air.
The other story, the less flattering one, is the one you have to reckon with when you’re suddenly single for the first time since you could drive a car: You’re obviously scared to be alone. You’re insecure. You’d rather be half of something than whole on your own.
For the first time in my life, there is an opening on the time line, an opening not labeled with a man’s name, like the white space between stanzas in a poem. There are blessings inside every curse.
I crave the answer to when will it end even more than the answer to how. We can endure anything if we know when it will end.
“I bless everything there is to bless.”
There is so much I would wish to undo, if I could go back, go back, go back. But back to where? Where was it safe?
It was a full-circle moment, and there would be many of them. Because time is recursive, because we repeat ourselves again and again, because all the things I’d done married I would now do unmarried. Because I was the same and completely different.
I felt quieted, calmed, like when you whisper to a spooked horse to settle it: whoa now, easy now. I was remembering how to be. Not a mother, not a teacher, not even a writer. Just me.
Betrayal is neat because it is absolving. I couldn’t save my marriage, I thought, because I didn’t have the whole truth. There were variables I didn’t understand. Still, I tried. I thought, if we both did the work, we could make it. I believed that.
