It might take me a while to get over my anger. But that didn’t seem salient to the argument we were having, so I kept it to myself.
“You can’t just set things on fire because you don’t like the way the world is going.”
“Oh, I can,” he told me. “And you already helped me. You’re just too much of a coward to own that and be really useful, so you’ll let other people do your dirty work and keep your hands clean.”
“You won’t do it,” I said.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I probably won’t. Don’t call me again.”
I think about calling. An anonymous tip. Or sending an email.
But I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t have a name.
“I know who wrote the manifesto. But I can’t remember his name. And I helped him come up with the plan. The plan to burn down a city. Except I can’t remember what city, either. Or the details of the plan.”
Yeah. No.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I am too much of a coward to take responsibility for something I believe in. For something I had once believed in, until I forgot?
Maybe I forgot because I knew it would feel like my fault if I remembered.
My mother gave me an expensive fountain pen when I graduated high school. It was a burgundy one, small and slim. Wrote beautifully. I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time.
I don’t think the new ones are as nice anymore.
I lost that one when I got thrown by a horse one time in college. It was in my pocket, and when I got up, bruised and hip aching, it was gone. And no amount of searching turned it up.
There are a lot of them on the internet.
But the damned things ain’t cheap. And how do you tell which ones are counterfeit?
But maybe the pen I was using at the time…
At the time it happened? At the time I learned the thing I can’t remember? At the time I did the thing I don’t want to remember?
But I didn’t have the pen long. Did I?
In any case, maybe that pen would help me remember.
I spend way too much money on it. And it comes.
I hold it in my hand. It feels… itchy. But it doesn’t fill me up with memories the way the other one had.
I remember the unused pages at the back of my old notebooks. There were always a few.
I find myself taking the books down off the shelf, thumbing through them. The unburned ones, of course. Thumbing through the burned ones would have been unfeasible, and even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t accomplish much of anything beyond getting my fingers ashy.
I find myself looking at ink colors, organizational choices. How my handwriting has evolved.
We lose all the best things to time.
But time brings a lot of benefits, also. Freedom from old wounds, for example.
Perspective.
Grace.
The wisdom to identify the heads that need to be busted, and the courage of your convictions to go out and bust some heads.
I have a couple of dozen old notebooks. And at the end of almost every one of them is a swath of pristine pages. Somewhere between twenty and fifty, a full signature at least and maybe two or three—just sitting there wordless and ignored.
Even after I stopped burning them, I guess I never really finished a notebook before I moved on. The lure of the next book was already there, like a pressure inside me urging me to set this one aside and pick up the perfect one that would be waiting. Untrammeled. Pure.
Without any mistakes in it.
Yes, I hate using broken things. Dirty things. I hate things that are cracked or warped or seem old and in disrepair.
So I would get to the point where I could conceivably justify getting rid of the old book with its scuffed cover and frayed page edges and all the mistakes inside it. And I would switch to a new one, clean and unscribbled in. And out the old one would go. Into the flames, at first. Later, onto a shelf with its sisters.
I can touch the notebooks. I can always touch the notebooks.
But they don’t go back far enough. They don’t have the thing that mattered in them. That had happened before. The thing that I can’t remember.
The thing that had happened and been burned.
The thing I use my new old echo of a pen now to write about.
With the one before him, I never argued. We never made enough demands on each other to have anything to fight about.
With him, I think I fought all the time. I remember… screaming matches. I remember arguments that made me doubt my sanity. I remember him telling me I said things I couldn’t remember saying. I remember letting him win because I couldn’t keep track of where the goalposts were, and because I never learned to argue to win.
I never learned to take up space in other people’s lives.
I wish I had known to be wary of the urge to crystallize my identity, to declare myself a thing—one thing, or another—and not accept that I was a continuity of things that would always be changing.
I might have been less eager to discard the thing I had been to become something new if I hadn’t been so afraid that acknowledging the old thing meant being trapped for all time. If I hadn’t been so afraid the people who knew me would never let me change, I might have held on to more of them, instead of shedding whole lives like a snake sheds skins.
Of course, sometimes people won’t let you change. Because their self-image is bound up with yours, and they’re afraid of challenging themselves too. Or because they want to keep you weak so they can own you. Or because their own identity gets stuck on you being and behaving a certain way. It’s a cliché to say that alcoholics and addicts often find they need a whole new suite of friends of when they get clean, and their lives no longer revolve around getting altered anymore.
But the thing is, over time, changes just become part of the status quo. Tattoos that marked a milestone or a rebellion to our younger selves soften into our skin, become unremarked. They become a part of us, a part of our image and who we are.
What is mine, and what is not mine—our conception of these things changes as we grow.
I moved around a lot. As an adult, and as a child. I didn’t have any place that felt like mine.
Until I met him. Until I met Joshua.
I write the name, and look at it, and know that it is right. I should be giddy with triumph. Blazing with the endorphins of having figured something out.
I feel hungry, and dizzy. And tired.
I was sitting in a booth at the airport, crying on the phone. “I wish you had just shot me,” I said.
At the time when I said it, it was true.
Joshua was telling me about the girl he’d met. The girl who was helping with his plans. The girl who would be taking over for me, he said, so that I could get some rest. Get my head together.