Hello.
It's been a while since I've even thought of you. Which shows that I've healed some. But the fact that I'm lying in bed now, in tears over the mess you left behind, well perhaps that shows that some things never heal. We simply find a way to store our worst memories in the darkest corners of our brain. And we hope that they'll somehow waste away into nothingness so that we won't have to deal with them any more.
Anger is only proof that feelings still exist, they say, and so I must still
have feelings for you. And really after all, you are the reason for
half my insecurities about marriage, so how could I forget you?
But see, the truth is that I can't even hate you. I tried - hating you would be much easier than this. But no, I have too many memories, too much invested in your children, too much pain and heartache and love and memory for that. Sometimes I wish I could run away from myself. Maybe then I wouldn't remember how you betrayed my father, how you lied to your wife, how you blasphemed our God.
And then, equal to or worse than these sins, you did the thing that you should never have done. It would be better for you to have had a millstone tied around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea than what you did. You hurt your children - no, you tortured them. You used them as pawns in your childish game of hate, you twisted the words of our healing Savior into lies to make them soul-sick, you made them cry again and again, and yet they chose to spend time with you. Because they craved the father they hoped you would be - the father you stopped being a long time before you left them.
And yet, after all this I cannot bring myself to hate you.
In the end, I can only feel an exhausted sorrow for you. Exhausted because every time I try to justify anything you've done, I cannot. And sorrowful because I know that you understood Jesus Christ.
Whether or not you surrendered (or will surrender) to Him, I doubt I will ever know in this life. But I know for sure that you understood and believed in Him at one point. And knowing that you had a glimpse of his glory and peace and you are now living without Him - that is the worst of this tragedy.
And though I hate the filth that you created and the brokenness that you left behind, I hope that someday you look up from the pit you've fallen into, and you that see His face again. Because you must miss Him.
Well, you probably do not want to hear this, but here, if you have the fortitude, is the skeleton of a Christian no-mance (just made that up.) Or a tragedy, which is more apt, I guess.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, this stuff you dance around with in nonfiction has so much juice, mystery, and emotion, just the stuff to power fiction--the trick is that it has to be transformed so that it can be dealt with not as 'true life' but as narrative. The writer has to use it and use her own emotion--but without simply recording events and without letting her emotion carry her away. It has to be broken apart and then reassembled in the workshop of the imagination. (Sorry, no more workshop metaphors from me today....)
How do you do that? IMO, by approaching obliquely--maybe with a narrator who doesn't at first seem involved in events, maybe by casting the material against genre--as mystery or comedy--and letting it slowly turn into what it really is. Something unexpected so you can ambush yourself, surprise even you--yeah, less planning, more surprise!
In effect, you are tricking yourself into distancing yourself and finding the Writer while ignoring the person who exists away from the keyboard. It is indeed a transformation when that happens, a secular born-again experience, or so I imagine it anyway, not having had the religious one. You look up from the keyboard, you look at what you've written--and you say, 'Who the heck just wrote this!' You feel like you've burst out of the water into the clear fresh air! A new baptism, if you like!
Sorry to be such an advice-giver this morning, but reading something like this fires me right up and makes me want to push, press, shape, demand.
Putting it very simply: you only find yourself by losing yourself in something greater.
ReplyDeleteThat is, you find the writer by losing the daily self (temporarily, of course.) That's the transformation I'm trying to describe and this kind of material may be a way into that state of secular grace.
If all that sounds religious...well, you may have guessed by now that writing IS my religion.