LAST RESORT

     “Your story doesn’t work,” Linda told me apologetically, evidently regretting having to be the bearer of bad news—she’s a writer in my ARTS group that I admire and whose judgment I trust. “Seely goes through a sea change after meeting Eben, but we don’t see enough happen between them to make this convincing.”

     Deflated and not knowing how to fix the problem, I relegated the story to a box in the basement.

     But even as a failed story, I would realize when I reread it sometime later, it expresses a number of things that are true about me—more, perhaps, than a successful one would have:

     Seely comes to feel, though apparently I failed to make this clear, that her journals had always been written for Eben, even if she didn’t know it until the moment of leaving them behind. Like her, for most of my life, my creativity has been directed, not at a mass audience, but a private, personal one, whether I was writing a song as a birthday gift for Kita or drawing cartoons on a coffee cup with china paints for Jack, or writing my Hamlet essay to impress my teacher Mrs. Griffith, or fashioning stories to teach Arielle and Michael to read. It has been in context of my relationships that I’ve found the inspiration and motivation to invent—a larger audience was simply too impersonal to excite my imagination. So to me, anyway, it didn’t seem surprising that in the end Seely would leave her manuscript for Eben to read, if he should want to, rather than try to have it published.

     The story also expresses the fact that it was in Cadaques that I came to recognize the limitations of words. I’d always tried to create relationships through language, imagining that if the things I said were interesting enough, I could win people over—the model for this way of looking at things being my relationship with my father, who couldn’t be bothered with anyone he didn’t find intellectually stimulating. It wasn’t until I saw Alana and Aaron’s relationship that I understood that there was another, deeper level of communication that people could relate on, never having experienced it with either of my parents, who didn’t seem capable of emotional intimacy. (Later I rediscovered this in my movement group, dancing with Rosemary and Jobie—that there were things we were able to express to each other though movement that transcended the verbal.) For this reason Seely’s abandoning words to become a painter made perfect sense to me back then.

     And lastly (unless I have an afterthought), while I used to sing for the love of it and to draw out of inclination, I sometimes think I only came to write out of desperation. I’m not at all convinced that if I’d had a twin—separated from me at birth, who’d had a less troubled life than mine—she would have authored anything. Words have simply been my last resort.