We Become Each Other's Stories

In December I finished my undergraduate degree in Fiction Writing – an ironic degree because I was always more interested in the truth.  In February I moved to France, where I spent my last semester of college studying the French language and – as all good travelers do – studying life.  From the second my flight from Chicago to Paris left the ground, I began a practice that had been both encouraged and required of me as a fiction writing student, but that I had never been particularly drawn to while in school.  I began keeping a journal.  Not the typical journal that details the day’s activities, but a writer’s compulsive collection of thoughts and moments and symbolic facts.  Facts like how I brought with me to France -- along with pictures of my friends, my brothers, and my favorite Chicago landmarks – the hospital bracelet from the day I had fainted on the train and been brought into the emergency room and been prepped for immediate surgery (just in case) and had found myself in a hospital gown and a Tiffany’s bracelet, alone at the bottom of every mistake I hadn’t known I was making.

 

            I also brought with me to France a copy of the nonfiction essay (memoir-in-training?) that I had written as an assignment for my very last writing class.  This particular copy had on it the notes made by one of my classmates.  One of his notes had struck me as especially relevant: The way you, the narrator, write about other people gives the reader a sense of who you are.

           

In France I suddenly found myself writing about everything and everyone.  The compulsion to make note of a thought, feeling, or memory would overtake me nearly every day – sometimes several times a day.  One day in Paris, at the Musée Rodin, I looked at Rodin’s sculptures and saw half-remembered flashes of them as they had appeared to me long ago in a book in my mother’s dining room.  And then I saw my mother as I had forgotten ever having had seen her at all.  I saw her as tall, blonde, and beautiful; speckled in clay, making sculptures in the otherwise deserted art studio while a four year old version of myself ran around spinning the pottery wheels and playing with scraps of clay that I had found on the floor.  Sitting by the fountain in the museum garden, I made a note of this while my travel companions photographed the sculptures.

            In France I found myself not just making notes about people, but telling them as stories too.  My best friend and I would sit together on a rough, cement ledge that ran along the road outside our college and she would smoke and we would trade stories of the barely-begun romances that neither of us knew how to let go of.  My story began like this: From the moment he walked into the classroom, I wanted him.  He looked bad – not like he was ugly, the opposite of ugly, but like he was trouble – and I loved it.  I always get the guys that look good – not attractive, just like they’re nice people – and they always turn out to be the wrong kind of trouble; the kind of trouble that mixes itself up with issues I have with my mother or with my father.  But him…  He would be a hot mess entirely of my own making.

Now that I am back from France and about to start graduate school – where I will be working to complete a book-length work of nonfiction – I have set myself the task of writing the roughest rough draft of that book-length work this summer.  So every day I sit surrounded by the journals I kept while in France, my old essays, receipts that I made notes on when I had forgotten my journal, pictures, train tickets, everything that holds a memory…  And I make lists.  I list the important moments that I need to write about – like when I was fourteen, in Wales, walking alone along the rocky coastline and feeling strong and free for the very first time.  But most importantly, I list the people, for – as I once lectured the man I dated while in France – people are the most important experience one can have.

Today I sat staring at these lists of people from my life: my brothers, my best friends, men I’ve kissed, all the women in my family, every man I’ve slept with, the one that got away.   In the lists I had broken them each down to a couple important scenes that would best demonstrate to a reader who I was – as a character – based on my interactions with these people.  But the fact was that on the pages of my notebook they had become more than people; they had become stories.  They were stories about how I should have known better, about how I was proud to be my Nana’s granddaughter, about how I’ve been hurt and how I’ve survived; stories about how I evolved.

One name on the list is that of the first boy I ever truly fell for.  Beside the name I made a note: I was sixteen, going on seventeen, when I learned the fascinating trick of love: it brings us out of ourselves. He will be the story about that lesson.  Five years after the summer in which he and I were a part of each other’s lives, he is now a story about a lesson well learned.

And that is the thing that I am trying to say – the thing that unnerves me and comforts me at the same time.  We become each other’s stories.  Family is the story we inherit, but everyone else…  They are the stories told to us, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we retell until they are no longer a person at all but an anecdote demonstrating who we were and who we’ve become.

And when I look at my lists of names and scenes, or when I read the notes I’ve made in my journals, I wonder what story I might have become for someone.  I wonder if the stories are ever similar.  I wonder if I am someone’s story of growing beyond themselves, someone’s mistake, someone’s favorite missed opportunity. 

One of my favorite twists in my story is that, after four months in France and three months dating someone else, I found myself standing in the midst of one of my favorite versions of my life: rock’n’roll music and dancing and a summer night in Chicago.  After London and Munich, Paris and Salzburg, everywhere else and someone else; there I was being kissed by the man from the story about barely-begun romance.  And there the story was, beginning again. 

I know what that story tells about me.  I know what it says I really wanted and what it says I didn’t really want.  And I wonder what story I might tell about someone.