Xenia Ohio has nothing at all to do with this post. I didn’t want to cheat by using “ex” for X in my alphabet. Xenia, Ohio was the trapdoor in the geography game Daniel, Milo, and I used to play at the kosher restaurant after we picked up Milo up from the late school bus on Tuesdays. You say the name of a place (city, state, county, country) and the next person says a place that starts with the last letter of the place you named. You can spend a whole dinner just on the A-a places (Alabama, Alaska, Argentina, Armenia, Albania, Andalucia, Australia, then someone would slip in Arkansas or Alicante just to break the rhythm). Xenia was the response to Halifax.
Is there a deeper meaning here? Do I want a trap door? Yes I do. I want a Xenia, because after Halifax there was Fairfax, and I have no response to that. No place to go.
I am angry because people want me to write. My oldest friend, my lover/boyfriend/partner, and, now, Daniel. Here is what I wrote about that;
How to Get Divorced
Start by falling in love. Falling in love with a man who said, half my life later, later, “You really should write a novel. I mean it. And you’re not getting any younger.” I thought, “But don’t you know what I would write about you?” Then I realized, that was the point. He wanted to be mythologized. He wanted to be set down as epically, heroically, grandiloquently bad. And it would be my job to do it, as it was my job, always, to do the taxes, unload the dishwasher, fill out the forms, walk the dog, change the filters, to keep the machinery of life running smoothly. All right. I’ll give him the first paragraph. I married a man who diverted his prodigious talents into the boring, predictable, mundane, ceaseless effort of fucking around to avoid the fact of his mortality. And who will die nevertheless.
So… there.
I am angry because I do not know what I want, now. I know I want to write (but what? how? why?). I know I want a job, and during this endless day in which my only professional obligation was to send two emails (no replies yet — I just checked my sent items folder to confirm I sent them. If no one replies do I still exist?), I decided to set aside some time to think even more about what I want from a job, because my answers — which I think are clear and comprehensive — don’t seem to satisfy people who ask. I couldn’t come up with anything new. Will says I should (must?) make something, “not just talk about making something.” Now is the time I must (should?) say to Will: I am sorry I haven’t read your stories, which I asked you to give me. I am scared of them. I am scared because you thought of plots, scenes, characters, motivating incidents, and I never have. I have never thought a novel, never brought a story to conclusion — I am not even divorced yet. I am scared of what you made and realizing that I can’t make.
I can’t make. I have made. I mean, I made Milo, who is now in college in another city, adhering to some of the rules meant to keep the show on the road, breaking others. I made him into someone who showed up on my 50th birthday zoom call last night, and made a lovely, loving speech to Will, thanking him for bringing me happiness. I made a life with 20 people in their zoom windows telling each other funny stories about me and sending me love and happy to be there. That’s something. I make many things but none of them are tangible. I make safety. I make experiences. I make joy. Can’t monetize any of it.
I want more, but I don’t know the shape of the more (or the moor, were I to try to rewrite Wuthering Heights. I am resolutely Jane Eyre. Daniel imagined himself Heathcliff and made(!) Catherines out of all his mistresses, needing Jane to stay behind and manage the estate. What would it look like to drop Jane into Wuthering Heights? Cathy has already flounced, swooned, staggered prettily into Jane Eyre, and got locked up in the attic for her trouble.).
I want: to earn(shaw?) $200K a year. Not from writing! I am grounded, ever so, in reality.
To work with people I respect, more specifically with women I respect.
To be in give and take with my ideas and others. I am so tired of feeding myself all the time.
To create. Make — oh, too much too much! Create is a verb I can manage.
I want trust, security, and good tools. Why is that so hard and elusive? Why do people not hear and understand when I say exactly these things? I am asking for what I want, and people respond by asking me what I want. (The Alabama/Alaska/Arizona/Angola A-to-A loop.).
I can’t show and not tell. I have been invisible for too long. I don’t trust showing. I have been showing for years and not many people have cared to see. I thought I was showing Daniel how to be kind, how to be faithful, how to be attentive, how to be honest. I thought I was showing people who employed me that I was valuable and smart and worthy of more and better work. Show don’t tell might work in writing but I haven’t made a success of it in life. So I tell, and tell, and tell, and tell. And people still wrinkle foreheads and ask me, so what do you want? I want to them to notice I”m showing, and stop asking me to fucking tell them.
Another Door 