When I love something, I go deep. I burrow my head all the way in and lie there until I drown in the thing that consumes me.
After hundreds of hours of true crime episodes, after dozens of books towering high in a closet, I’ve learned that in the end, the proof of us, our life, is reduced to the physical. We are nothing if not dual strands of DNA, a smattering of crooked teeth. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many books we’ve published, love we’ve made, lives we’ve changed, if we’ve become closed casket candidates we’re identified by our blood and teeth.
No one else has a lease on our biology, no one else has the shape and structure of our teeth.
It’s only after crime scene technicians and investigators identify us do they embark on the work of reconstruction. Let’s add a layer of skin over this body, a set of eyes that once put a lover’s heart on pause. Let’s see that mouth open wide and now the teeth are part of a face that’s rearranged itself into a smile, a full-on beam of light, and there she goes, the girl we know. The woman we’ve loved. There she is unique and real and human again.
But what if you itch and writhe in the skin you’re in? You’ve been reassembled and made whole and detectives and attorneys talk about justice. They evoke your name and sing it aloud like sermon, like song, but what if you never loved your name? What if you’ve always felt this blood didn’t belong in this body? Or those teeth never learned how to truly smile?
When I was moving to Bakersfield, I text’d my friend Arestia the details of the guy who was taking me. So, in the off-chance my body parts are found, etc., etc., I joked. And then I laugh and tell my friend that if I was hacked up by a guy I found on the internet to please tell 20/20 the truth. Tell them while everyone loved my chubby tabby cat Felix, I was tolerated. Tell them I was a difficult woman.
What I don’t say is tell them I feel I’ve made too many mistakes, the kind you can’t comeback from. Tell them I’ve veered so far off the road that a GPS, maps, and compasses no longer apply. I don’t text this, of course, because I wanted the joke to come off light. I didn’t want to wallow. I refuse to add even a feather’s weight of sorrow on my friends’ shoulders.
But I do end up in Bakersfield undead (spoiler alert) and I text my friend as much. I’m alive! Felix is alive! We’re all alive.
I have this fantasy. I change my name to Kate and I move to a town that doesn’t have a Starbucks. My hair is the first of many cuts. I delete the social media, the LinkedIns where I watch everyone preen and posture and practice their low-key ageism, the Instagrams where I keep track of pitbulls getting a new lease on life, the Mediums where no one reads my writing because I don’t offer the secrets of living a good life for the low, low price of $499. I slip my phone into the water and burn the rest until I can blow away the ashes.
Maybe I’d work in a diner or mucking stalls or become a cashier at Walmart because it seems every single killer in the country is stupid enough to buy their life-ending wares while on surveillance. There goes Mike buying the shovel and gloves and battery acid before he buries the body. Perhaps my singular claim to fame would be to tell Mike that the police almost always find the bodies and acid doesn’t work as swiftly or clean as you think.
In time, I would be unrecognizable save for a double-helix and x-rays of my wisdom teeth.
Over the weekend I watch a documentary on Netflix produced by a man I used to know. A man I went to Columbia with. A man I used to crush on. His fiction wasn’t anything special but he was (and is) an exceptional journalist. I see his face on my television screen and he looks the same albeit with a few inches around the waist and streaks of grey in his hair. But he’s still the guy at 25 who turned me onto a remix of Jay Z’s Black Album, the very brilliant Grey Album. He’s still the guy who once looked at me for a long time and said, I think you feel things too much. It’s not a bad thing—just an observation.
In response, I laugh and say that’s why I drink and do coke—to feel nothing at all.
And I have to pause the documentary (it’s great) and walk upstairs and sit in the room that reminds me of a childhood I longed for and never had and I have to tell myself I won’t wallow. I won’t sit here and catalog my failures on the level of Sotheby’s.
But I do anyway.
We live in a culture that desperately wants you to know you have all the chances. You have unlimited comeback tours, revivals, makeovers and transformations. You have an Odyssean level of acts. But what many fail to see is how we cherry pick the shiny examples, the stories that make for great type, the lined faces garnering millions of fans on TikTok. We love to make the outliers the reality. And sometimes I want to say show me the data on comeback tours. Show me the data on unlimited chances after you’ve tried it all and nothing seems to work.
Often, you’ve played your last hand. Escorted out of the casino, you make the long, winding drive through the desert wondering if heat and chances are what you really wanted. We whisper about the poor guy sitting on the stool far past closing time. We talk about a woman’s expiration or best-by dates. She will never be as good as she once was.
But we don’t like to talk about reality because it’s often sad and we’ve become allergic to sad. We can’t occupy the same space as sorrow. We have to flee to our platitudes and positive thinking and you can do it even though we’ve tried and really can’t. It’s possible, of course, to fail and rebuild, but it’s also equally possible to fail and abandon. It is possible to realize you have no more hands left to play.
Though that doesn’t make for good television, or caption, or type.
Part of me wants this new and final work project (I’m forever waiting on its status) because it’ll afford me the torching to start anew. Remove the burden that is my name and not be tethered to comparison and attention. To set aside your skin as if it was luggage bearing on your back, buckling your knees, and say I’m no longer that person with all that history. I’m the woman who’s retired herself from that former life, who set down the cars and drove into the desert realizing it was freedom she wanted not chances.
To be a woman who said, well, I fucking tried.
Some Notes:
“I had generally attributed those female experiences to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the creation of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity.” —Rachel Cusk’s new fiction is glorious.
“Instead of looking around my living space with gratitude for the soft comfort I’ve built for myself, inflected with my peculiar tastes and preferences, I see lack. And that dissatisfaction becomes a sort of lingering fog, dampening my experience of the world.” —The great Anne Helen Petersen on the Optimization Sinkhole.
Speaking of best-by dates, “Internet platforms for rentals like Airbnb have led to a sterile, recognizably similar aesthetic across living spaces.” Instagram’s doing that for faces.”
Oh, hey. I sell clothing online. Hundreds and hundreds of it. You can shop my Poshmark or eBay stores. Or, if you have clothes you’d like to donate (see this post for details), drop me a line.
PAID PEEPS: Let me know if you’re interested in a “vivisection.” I learn by taking apart someone else’s work (usually an author I like and admire) and I break the sentences down to show how they’re achieving what they set out to do.
The Teeth Glow Under Black Lights
Absolutely vivisection! After I read what you wrote, I had to slow down and reread your question again. I wasn’t sure how graphic you were going to get. LOL!
"where no one reads my writing because I don’t offer the secrets of living a good life for the low, low price of $499. "
Every time I read one of your stories there's always one phrase above all else that makes my toes curl in delight. Brilliant as always. Thanks for making my Sunday!