An Absolute Truth
image from author
Up at 2, up at 3, up at 5. The dog, now a senior, has been most playful in the darkest hours of the night. Nipping at your hand like she is a puppy again. At 5:30, 5:45, 6, at 6:30 a long walk. The sunrise today looks like plastic. Shades of pink and purple like a 90s ToysRUs.
Is this writing or am I trying to “write.” Am I trying to prove I am smart enough to make you listen to the bald confession that I am so, so, sad.
He would say baby, it’s been such a hard few years. Finally we will be a family. Finally we will have some peace.
Is it regression? The dog again. Or does the dog wake up too missing the family after dreams – the toddler playing with her long tail on the sofa.
On this night last year he was searching for the family home online, and I fell asleep leaning against him. A state of bliss. He was seeking the walls I would paint, decorate with shelves and our combined libraries. The roof where I would smoke cigarettes and read and think this is euphoria. This is a fantasy. But the body on heightened alert, vibrating with fear to the point of pain. The way of fairy tales. He gave me less than two months.
I build train tracks for his son. They loop, over and over, in circles.
Maggie Nelson said, about writing a second book on her aunt’s violent rape and murder —
“The book is really a long critique of catharsis. But the irony is that my catharsis was writing down that there is no catharsis. The stories we tell ourselves don’t heal us…”
For New Years an ex-lover visits from London. In 2015 we lived together in Istanbul in a stranger’s walk-in closet. Our belongings stacked on my big red suitcase. I had pneumonia and would snore. We were both opposite kinds of very sad, and now we have switched. I tell her I feel better. She tells me I seem worse. Outside the closet there were long evenings near the Bosporus, salt water on our skin and hair. I would listen to her explain the nature of our relationship in Turkish to teenagers or old men who think at first I am a very pretty boy, but become unsure. An optical illusion. The teens, when they understand, are very serious and kind. Offer us weed and chocolate. On cliff tops. In alleys. The old men laugh, why isn’t everyone this way? I know many people this way. And my girlfriend and the old man will talk for a long time in a language I can’t understand, while I lean into her chest, under her arm, against her breast. On boats. Gulls. Waves. A rocking of an ageless sea.
I am often near tears before we reach either continent, mourning the one we have just left.
This December I am holding this lover in a cheap Art Deco hotel, haunted, and the lover turns towards me. The train. Do you remember? I say I do. The subway cars opening at Eminonu station and I am in the seat, and she is at the door. We are surprised to be facing each other.
No, this lover tells me, you were at the door and I was in the seat.
I tell her she must be mistaken, but now there are two memories. There is the memory where I walk towards her through the open door and she moves down the seat and rests her arm behind me and I tell her I have bought a ticket home. And there is the memory where she walks confidently towards me, and sits and rests her elbows on her knees and leans forward, and I say I have bought a ticket home.
For four years now I’ve been writing about one topic. Telling one story, about one person really. Novels, screenplays, poems, memoirs. The myriad forms of rejections, all with the same face. His. But also, maybe mostly mine. Collapsing in front of a bakery in sobs. Sitting alone on Christmas in lingerie, the apartment decked in tinsel. Or, smoking cigarette after cigarette waiting for him to come home. Our home. Baby, he would call me baby — this is our family home. This is our new life.
He reads a book about Celia Paul and says it is a pity her friend cannot make art and be in love. I only laugh after I close the door behind him. But I laugh very hard.
Again, what is the purpose of this? It seems violent, to make you listen to my sadness. Is it for myself here — just an attempt to understand? A space to confront? One path is communication, one path is elucidation, one path is art. As I write and rewrite the memories multiply. And look at themselves. And warp themselves. And say, tell this better. Find the truth.
And I tell the memories what I have been told, which is that truth is subjective. And the memories say, that is not what you believe.
Maybe you can only forgive yourself for forcing the same story out of your gullet on repeat if you believe there is something to find. Something other than the absolute truth of cold dismissal. The truth of an uncaring lie. The truth that you simply were not wanted.
So, there is the memory where the train pulls into the station and the door opens and I look into the train car and am surprised to see my lover sitting across from me. And I walk towards her and she moves down the seat and rests her arm behind me and I tell her I have bought a ticket home. And there is the memory where the train pulls into the station and the doors open and my lover is standing, silhouetted, and walks confidently towards me and sits and rests her elbows on her knees and leans forward. And I say I have bought a ticket home.
Why? She asks in one.
I tell her because I am so sad.
In the second she does not ask, because she knows. And she now moves the arm which was on her knee to my back.
Where is the truth?
Why am I writing?
Would it be sufficient to transfer the bodily experience to you? Would that cruelty provide satiation? Playing with my hot stockinged toes against a stranger’s cold dashboard in the lonely PA woods, drunk on champagne. I say, “I feel like a barnacle. I feel like a parasite. Like nothing has ever been as disgusting as I am.” I am trying to explain. The stranger accepts this. Puts his right hand on my shoulder while keeping the left on the wheel when I begin to cry and say I miss my family, I miss my son, and he does not interrogate the my. Lets me mourn however I want, and later the stranger has me however he wants.
I should be more appreciative of the attention. So many hands have been on my body this summer and fall and now winter. And so infrequently with desire. All around my shoulders or upper arms or elbows or head. The parts of my body least used to being caressed or held. All pulling me in while the tears come — like it can be taken away. The forever sadness. The kindest people who hold me close like they are micellar water. Charcoal. Like this sadness is an oil that can be absorbed by them. They are trying to give me enough room without it to heal. To be in the body which fell to its knees desperate. The friends hold the body who begged him, “Did you treat her like this?”— the ex wife. And he would tell me never, no. He would tell me “I would never treat her the way I treat you.” And I would hide from him beneath the kitchen table as he told me you are cruel in the way you write of us. I say I am honest. He says the bald exposure is nothing but a cruelty. I say I am sorry, I say I want you, not the book. I say I want the family, not the book. I would never have written it, anything. And he will tell me again, you don’t know what you do.
Every memory being experienced by two, I must at least know half. I must at least have entitlement to, ownership of, half of the truth. And what is art's purpose other than to speak honestly? To find the core of experience and expose it so it can be touched?
A pink vulnerable thing this truth might be. If I pull back the curtain, expose it to harsh light and your prodding fingers… will this cold-blooded exhibition make the essay a success? I am not a poet. I cannot nurse the truth at my breast in the moonlight while a soft eye contemplates. I must expose. Memoir is frightening. It leaves no place safe to hide.
After the fights he would take my body again. He was so gentle and adept with it in bed. He would whisper while inside me there is nothing better than this, than us. I could never want anyone else.
And using my cruel hand to write it all down does nothing to help me clarify which memory has more weight to it. I am gaining so little comprehension for the amount of work the writing demands. But still, I keep trying.
The body, my body, was already skilled at producing sadness, talented at tormenting itself without his help. But sometimes he would offer release from the torture. He would sit with me and have coffee. He would kiss my cheek. And the hungry body has always been treated in a way the ex wife’s body will never be treated. It didn’t start with him. And the friends hold the body and like magnets some of the pain is transferred to them. And the friends care for the body like it is a precious thing and not the thing he felt deserved such neglect.
But that is a cruelty too, to ask the friends to take the pain. For what? Ten minutes of relief? Is he right? This is the only purpose of the essay? To gain pity or compassion? Cruel to write an essay about sadness to be read? Is there anything else to be gained for me? For you? Some glimmer of something new and useful?
And around. And around, and around. I’ve asked myself these questions. Volumes precede this. And around I go again.
The train, that is the original memory friends, the memory which begets the essay. The memory that so often still makes me cry — when I have moved beyond so much. The train on Christmas. The train he builds now with others, new lovers and friends. I see his son on social media while I
am in New York with a beautiful woman I met on Twitter. Who is more brilliant and ballsy and funny than him. Who buys me $500 dollars worth of natural wine in Manhattan and kisses me with a dreamy hungry kiss and asks to fuck me, and I open my phone and his son is there and both of them have forgotten me. Each week I lose them both anew, as they become whoever they are becoming.
And the body keeps the score as they say, and produces and breeds. Sadness. Whatever the sadness really is. No amount of therapy or self-help books or feeling wheels will give me the vocabulary. Maybe the sadness is merely inherited, my mother’s gift to me. Or is the sadness just the consequence of living? Maybe the sadness is a disease, or maybe the sadness is an anger, a righteous anger in the face of injustice. A product of the body being treated as less than the ex-wife’s body since zygote.
Smearing my menstrual blood over hard folding chairs in the chapel and speaking in tongues to spirits, finger combing my hair with wild eyes in Idaho fields — while she sat coiffed at a grand piano.
Of course he would never treat her the way he treats me.
But if I write this smartly enough, maybe you will think I deserve a little better than all that.
And the dog wakes me up at 11, and 1, and 4.
When I bring them home, the strangers, not the friends, and they bend me over their knee ask me to call them daddy or moan or give them a little show, because I have asked them to offer me desire. I have asked to witness what they perceive to be intimacy, because I used to love witnessing intimacy. When they ask this, so often I laugh. I am not trying to be mean but it is a tragic kind of funny to me. They are touching a body I do not even know. That is not even mine. That any connection or consent could be offered or made with something like me — scooped out like a melon. Hung on the rack and stretched. I inspect the body in the mirror when they are gone. What can I make from this discarded person? Since it first seemed useful to me as something for him.
What else are the rules of the essay for? Organizing the parallel structure and weaving the recurrent themes feels like riding a cock cowgirl style while your partner watches in a mirror. While you turn your face because you want to see their eyes, it is all to see their reaction, this artificial shape of wanting. To see if they will desire you for a few more minutes. I want you, reader, to look a little longer, take me a little more seriously. It is easy to attack my own character, to say I am practicing this craft for sadism only to make you hurt the way I hurt — but really I think it is something even less flattering. I am just trying to convince myself, him, you —the reader— that my memories are real. And therefore I am real too. Just as real as him, just as real as the ex-wife, just as real as you.
And the dog wakes me up at 4:30, 5. Searching. As if she too can smell that I am close to something here. Something that can either bottle or elucidate the sadness. The wrath. The agony.
As if this morning I did not take a big stretch and smell the flowers and laugh a little at how free I am. How alive. Fuck, I think. Is it finally over?
A dream on December 30. This night last year we made love and I begged for him, more please, every cell aroused. And I begged to hold him through the night, for him to stroke my cheek, for him to let me smell his hair. And in the morning I begged for him again.
In the dream the son is crying and looking to me for comfort. Baby, he says, you’re a parent now you can take care of this. And he is off somewhere else angry, engaged in a conversation. I hold his son and coo. It is okay. It will all be okay.
But I don’t believe it.
And the dream ends of course with him leaving, with him telling me I am crazy again. Too much. Too many feelings — the sadness again.
My impulse is to go further. To tell you everything. But that would not make this essay more successful. A list of grievances would not convince you that I have suffered, would not ascribe to the listed indignities meaning.
Craft is inherently manipulative, no matter how honest you are trying to be. No matter how much you try to accept responsibility as much as you ascribe it.
In the first book I wrote for him, I am not sure if I understood this.
So, I ask a friend if I can watch him fuck his girlfriend, if the two will consent to further evaluation so I may witness some capital t Truth. I want to narrate their experience together and tell myself I understand them both better through doing so as an objective outsider, rather than someone in the pair. I say I am writing fiction again, because no matter how much I observe and transcribe, I will always be losing something in the translation, making something up. Whether outside or in.
But here I am still trying to tell you something true.
Maybe I will try like this? If I were to say writing was like digging a hole, and the deeper you dig the further into your own perceptions and biases you go, the harder it becomes to climb your way out — then I would be mixing metaphors and you would have no more reason to listen to me. But you maybe forgot that trains go through tunnels, which are actually just long holes, maybe ones you become so entrenched in that you think — maybe the only way out really is through.
I wanted to plan a trip.
I wanted. I wanted. I wanted.
I want still to tell you something.
So, I pick up the dream. I turn it around and inspect where it might begin to reproduce more fabrications to desire. A hinge at the center. The mitosis of misinformation.
Is the alliteration pretentious or silly? I’m almost done I swear to you.
I hold the dream, and I am almost ready to let it go. I stroke the back of the dream’s head like it too wants comfort, then the dog wakes me and calls me back to reality.
The dog is a symbol. Another trick. The dog is a reminder to you, the reader, to me, not of what I wanted, but of the life I actually live.
Sam Heaps (they/them) is a genderqueer writer, organizer, and visual artist with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Heaps’ debut essay collection, Proximity, is forthcoming from CLASH Books March 2023. They have received support from Tin House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the NES Artist Residency. Heaps teaches writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and is currently seeking representation for a novel about Mormonism, climate anxiety, and attachment.