My First Book, page 10
written by sad girl in the third person
TW: mentions of cigarettes, capitalism, death, swearing, cringe
Around 3 a.m. she opens her parents’ bedroom door and watches them sleep. She wants to ask them who she is. She spends her nights wondering about that while smoking cigarettes on the roof and eating Tums like candy. They made her, so they should know the answer, but she knows they don’t. They’re as clueless as she is, as clueless as babies, so she pretends that they are hers. She at once wants to have a baby and to be a baby. These two desires are ruining her life. She tells herself that her life is something real enough to be ruined, but deep down she knows that not enough has been built to be destroyed. This isn’t a comforting thought. Her life, her real life, her adult life is beginning. She is twenty-two now and there are no more comforting thoughts to be had. Maybe that is what adulthood is all about. Maybe she can find some comfort in that.
She loves her boyfriend, but he isn’t her baby and she isn’t his. He holds her and she feeds him. He protects and provides and she amuses and cleans. He teaches her things and she teaches him other things. They play games and laugh and cry together. Sometimes she feels like his baby. Other times she feels like he is hers. It’s not enough, she tells him.
Her boyfriend jokes that “want” is her favorite word. She is always asking for things, always trying to fill some void. She wants a cigarette or an agent or satin pillowcases or peace in the Middle East or AirPods or to understand how the CIA works or to have sex or to not have sex or to be skinny or to be pregnant or to be no one or to be someone. She knows that the end of desire will be the end of all suffering. She knows how to meditate. She knows she can stop wanting, because she does not need and want comes from need. She has never had to need. She’s always been somebody’s baby. Maybe that is why she feels the need to have her own. Maybe wanting a baby and wanting to be a baby are what womanhood is all about. Maybe she can find some comfort in that?
She makes a long list of ways that babies are like books and books are like babies. They both are time-consuming. They both can be carried. They both bring comfort. They both smell good. They both can be thrown across a room. They both belong to someone. They both can be burnt. They are both useless. They are both beautiful. They both can belong to her. There are already so many of them on earth. She can make more. Almost anyone can write one or have one. Almost everyone should. They both can change the world. They both can amount to nothing. If she made a book or a baby it could tell her who she is or maybe make her into something new and knowable, just as she made it. She wants to know herself. She wants to know what matters. She wants to hold and be held. She wants to push something out of herself and into a separate existence. She wants to be loved and to love and to be loved and to love. She wants to stop wondering who she really is.
She’s a white, upper-middle-class Virgo zoomer who celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. She is the only child of Gen X coastal elite hipster atheists who own their home, lease their car, and hate it all. She is godless. She has been diagnosed as bipolar II, but she is not that. She has been diagnosed with clinical depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She has these mental illnesses and she has a vagina and she mostly uses it for sex with people with penises who identify as men. She laughs when she reads mental illnesses and people with penises who identify as men. She’s privileged enough to laugh. That is who she is. She is sad. That is what she knows, but the knowable is not enough. She hates when people announce that they hate labels. She hates labels. She doesn’t like to look at flags. She likes to think that she would never call herself bisexual or Jewish, but she often does in a sort of roundabout way. She thinks identity politics are mostly a bad idea. She can explain her stance some other time.
She will quote Žižek and Marx and Houellebecq and whoever else is trendy and probably call something retarded. She will not identify her beliefs as post-leftism, but that is what they are technically called and if she believes them it means that is what she is, a post-leftist with a nicotine addiction and a vagina and white privilege and obsessive-compulsive disorder and a birthday in September. She’s a registered Democrat, but she doesn’t like registering for anything or voting for most people. Why would she want to join any club that would have her for a member? She likes to smoke. That must mean that she is a smoker. She likes to write. That can’t mean that she is a writer. She wants to make her life out of writing. She does not want to tell people that she is a writer. She doesn’t know what a writer is. If you make a baby, are you a mother? If you make a book, are you a writer? If you want to make a baby, you are not a mother. If you want to make a book, you are already a writer?
If you tell people you are something, that is what you are. If you tell people you do something, that is what they think you are. She smokes, so she is a smoker; she writes, but she is not a writer. She knows that what one does is not necessarily who they are. She knows that action-based identity is one of the greatest tricks neoliberalism ever pulled. She knows that’s the sort of thing you can write in a personal essay, and that the personal is probably political. She doesn’t know quite how confused she sounds. But she knows she is anti-neoliberal, and she knows she thinks she knows what that means. She knows that capitalism is evil. She doesn’t yet know how wrong she is. She knows evil is a silly word. She has never been called evil, to her face.
She hates telling people who or what she is. She knows this hate must come from some incredible place of privilege, the privilege to live without pride, the privilege to have nothing precarious enough to protect yet, the privilege of being normal.
She will never be Joan Didion; she doesn’t quite know that yet. She knows that she’s not enough. Sometimes, late at night, she smokes cigarettes and hopes that something bad will happen to her so she can write a good personal essay.
She believes that one day she will quit smoking and she will be an ex-smoker and that one day she will be able to explain her beliefs to her children if they ask. Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe that is what she is, wrong and white and middle class and a smoker and childless and writing a personal essay. Maybe she’s something else. Maybe someone can unpack it for her. Maybe she needs to be called out or canceled or educated or told to educate herself. If you ask, she will tell you that she is lucky. She feels young and lucky and addicted to cigarettes, the way she imagines some people feel female or communist or Canadian. Sometimes when it’s time to announce names and pronouns, she wants to say nobody and nothing. Don’t refer to her as anything. She’s not even really here.
In the grand scheme of things, most people are never really even here. They’re born and they’re here and then they’re dead and they’re gone and then everyone who remembered them is dead too. Most books don’t get a second printing. The big ideas stick around, but who decides what the big ideas are and who keeps them safe? She wonders if that is her role, some protector of ideas, keeping memories safe until it’s time for them to be passed on. This idea frightens her. The world is scary. It’s just the way things are. The past gets bigger and the future shrinks. No matter who she becomes, she will stay the exact same size, but soon she will know who she is. Or at least she will know who she’s not. Too bad she just missed the personal essay boom.
To make herself feel like someone, she could build a hyper-specific identity, or brand herself like a cow or a vlogger. Instead she writes personal essays. She is not special. She knows that. She is here just like everyone else, trying to make something that will last longer than their body, whether it matters or not. She’s here to be a baby and to have a baby. To hold and to be held. To arrive and to leave something behind on departure, even if that something is just a yummy snack for a worm.
She thinks about mass graves in Central Park and imagines everyone she’s ever known, all the skater thems, literary magazine editors, Catholic cokeheads, bodega cats, hypebeasts, and personal essayists curled up together under the dirt, a real feast for the worms. She thinks about how who they thought they were won’t matter, because it never really did. All that matters is what’s left behind.
She wants to wake up her parents and ask what they have made besides her, but she lets them sleep because she already knows what they will say. They will tell her that she is the greatest thing that they ever made. She will know that she is not all that great, but compared to the money and those good investments and her mom’s crochet animals and her dad’s straight-to-video movies, it’s true, she is the greatest thing her parents ever made. If she woke them up, they’d ask why she smells like cigarettes and if she wants to get lung cancer and if she thinks she’s invincible or that smoking makes her interesting. She would tell them that, like them, she is dust and she will return to dust. The question is what will remain.
At the Party
At the party, someone tells someone that they heard that I make rape jokes. I ask someone who told them that and they tell me that it was someone else.
“Yeah,” someone else tells me, “I heard you make rape jokes.”
“Where? Where’d you hear that?”
“Around.”
“Damn okay,” I say. Someone else laughs. “I’m gonna rape you,” I say. I say it again, this time louder, “I’m gonna rape you.” Someone else stops laughing. It’s a joke. Get it? A rape joke, because I make rape jokes.
At the party, someone is upset and no one is laughing. “I’ve probably been raped as many times as they’ve told a good joke,” I say. Now everyone knows.
Somebody says, “That’s the first rape joke I’ve heard you tell.”
“Well, it won’t be the last.” This is my thing now. “Hey, everyone, what’s worse than a rape? A rape joke.”
“Heard that one before.” Yeah, that one wasn’t very clever. Someone says that I’m canceled and everybody says that I’m drunk or coked-up or stupid. Somebody says that I’m “drunk and coked-up and stupid and, also, canceled.” I’m “Baa”-ing or bleating or whatever in everybody’s faces, explaining, “Hey, I’m trying to speak your sheep language!” I’m laughing and “Baa”-ing. Totally out of control. Who can blame me? Everyone laughs. No one is actually offended.
After my rape jokes, someone squirts me with a water gun. “Canceled,” they say.
“I hope you’re reincarnated as a foie gras goose,” I say.
“Jesus, that’s harsh,” somebody says. It’s just a joke. Now someone is shooting everyone with a squirt gun! Everybody is screaming and wet and no one knows what’s real anymore. Everybody is out of control and I am everybody.
“This is like Columbine!”
Somebody says that no, it’s not like Columbine. I guess it’s not.
At the party, I’m dancing with someone or maybe just near someone. I’m all alone, really, and I’m yelling. “Do you know who I am?” Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am?
Somebody probably thinks I mean that I think that I am somebody or that I will be somebody, and/or that I mean that they are nobody and will stay nobody. That’s not what I mean. I’m not that mean. I’m yelling because I don’t know the answer. Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Can anybody tell me?
The End
Her hair had already begun to fall out by the time the Mormon supersoldier came down from the mountain. Began or begun, she wasn’t too sure which. There was no way to check anymore. No one to ask. No one to tell. It didn’t matter. Nothing much did by then.
Stuff used to matter. Stuff used to matter every day. Stuff used to matter so much that they’d write stories about it. She could remember that. She could remember stories and something called bedtime, being under the blankets, chewing on the shiny cardboard of anti-racist baby books, and playing on the tablet, sticky fingers on the screen, hot November days of snow cones and talking to talking baby dolls. She could remember being very small not too long ago, and wars within wars, and 4D infographics about population control, and the ouch of the insertion of a birth control implant under her arm, and being in a boy’s arms under the abandoned ski lift, and starless skies and kisses and screenshots of screenshots, and her name and parts of the national anthem, but she didn’t. She didn’t remember any of that by the time the Mormon supersoldier handed her a can of corn and began his mask-muffled prayer.
Even if she could hear what he was saying, it wouldn’t have made any sense, since sense itself had long since come to an end. Lots of ends had come and gone, long before the girl or the Mormon supersoldier had even begun to begin. This particular end had been beginning and beginning and beginning. People looked for it on the horizon at the break of each new day and in the headlines as news broke each day. The universe seemed to be shrinking, but of course it was not. It had been like that for centuries: The seams are ripping, it’s all falling apart, unprecedented, unprecedented, reality is ending, the country is dangerously polarized, democracy is dying, the polar bears are dying, fascism is rising, history is ending, the sea is rising, history has ended, our story is over, it’s all your fault, it’s not your fault at all, you don’t even matter. It was this terrible sort of end, generations and generations old, that no one could know or see the whole of, but everyone felt it, since they had been born and lived whole lives under its long, looming shadow, a slow, slouching spiral widening and widening. People repeated and repeated, Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, haven’t you heard, things fall apart, the center really cannot hold. They said it so many times and in so many different words that it became a prayer in reverse. When the day came, it meant nothing at all and no one was ready, except a few Mormons in a bunker under a mountain that used to be the best place to ski in the whole wide west. Even they wouldn’t be able to escape the end for long.
Before the actual smoke and the real dust, the world had already gone foggy, things fading into a baseline haze. People had forgotten. People had been made to forget. People were miserable and making people miserable. There was no more right and wrong. No more good and evil. It all felt so complicated and tired and old and unclear. On that day, that last day, when the flashes went off and everything went up only to fall down, things were finally, once again, new, clear. The center did not hold. Every atom exploded all at once. And there was light. But nobody was present to see or say or pray or do anything about it. The Mormon supersoldier remembered the flash of pure, clean white light and wondered why he was still here as he stood above the girl and spoke.
He knew he wasn’t the new Adam. He knew this mission was doomed, and that all the other ones, to Tonga and New Tuvalu, had been too. He told the girl that he would be back and nudged the can of corn closer to her hand. They would never see each other or anybody else ever again. Whatever he said to her, or prayed for her, or prayed to his God for her, went unheard.
* * *
There is, or there was and there is, another god here, an old god. He wants it to be known that he was here long before the first people in the Americas and their first civilization. And that he was there for all the rises and falls of civilization to follow. He doesn’t know this is the last one. He thinks he will roam the earth forever and eventually rise again when humans do and once again study whatever befell their ancestors and once again use the same knowledge to find and to destroy. He hopes there will be nothing written left by the time the survivors’ descendants get around to studying stuff. The first people here, the Olmecs, had no written history, none that remained beyond a few controversial glyphs, so the scholars centuries later gave him the names God II or Maize God. But he can be called upon without words. He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t need one. You can find him in Veracruz, carved out of stone, surrounded by growing corn, his face that of a snarling jaguar. He is almost never depicted with a body. He doesn’t need one.
You can find him again written about in the histories of the Triple Alliance, the Aztec empire, where he went by the name of Centeōtl. Before the Catholics arrived with their conversion fever and their different understanding of gods, the Aztecs knew what he was. Not a god at all really, but a Teotl, “essentially power: continually active, actualized, and actualizing energy-in-motion . . . It is an ever-continuing process, like a flowing river . . . It continually and continuously generates and regenerates as well as permeates, encompasses and shapes reality as part of an endless process” (Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, James Maffie). In the cities they cut out hearts in exchange for their protection almost every day. Sacrifice was an average part of life. Mostly they killed in the name of other Teotls, like Tlaloc, who would bring rain in exchange for the tears of children, or Xipe Totec, “Our Lord the Flayed One,” who demanded the hearts of warriors, or Quetzalcoatl, the serpent, who accepted butterflies and hummingbirds. Still, he knew what it was to have true power over people. He lived in hearts and minds and actions and thoughts. He was everywhere. People sprinkled drops of their own blood around their homes, and in exchange he granted them bountiful harvests of corn. He knew what it was to be truly worshipped, even after the Spanish destroyed his temple and a few centuries later put up a parking lot. Even after the Spanish came with their True God, he remained.
