message 24: 100 Writing Prompts
it's my birthday etc
Hey y’all,
I turned 37 yesterday. I am a Leo sun, Aquarius moon, Pisces rising—which means it was only logical for me to ring in this new year with a very very long zine centered around the act of writing, our melting world, speech theory, my ex-boyfriend, and getting out of Texas. (You may be better off reading this post directly on the site; just click the “Read In App” button up and to the right.)
If you like me, give some money to a local animal refuge today. If you don’t like me, I’ll take $37 gladly.
This year, I want to take this and other work and turn it into something paper-based. I’ve always been steadfast about making free art on here, and that won’t change but, well, you know. Maybe I’m confident in my stuff now and can see it deserves to be in print, too; maybe I’m having the ego flare-up of someone staring down mid-life; maybe it’s Maybelline. All the same, thanks for reading.
Love y’all,
Keegan
100 Writing Prompts
Aim for 2-3 pages unless instructed / inclined to do otherwise
Has it always been like this?
Loretta is on the phone with her sister. We never learn her sister’s name, but you can just go with Marion if that helps. The television is on–or, rather, Loretta can’t remember the last time she actually turned the television off. Everything in Phoenix is buzzing in G-sharp. Loretta stares at her hand for five full minutes before muttering into the receiver: “Has it always been like this?”
Let’s presume that Loretta’s name is now Charlie-Ann and her children have slowly started growing extra limbs. At first, everyone thought it was chicken pox. Then Charlie-Ann and her husband, Reggie, worried they were tumors. But by February the fingers and toes started coming in. Marion is still on the other end of the phone. Charlie-Ann looks at her own hands for five full minutes, smooth as silk. She glances at an old family photograph from Six Flags: everybody except her was already covered in dozens of extra arms and legs. Tell me what happens after she asks this time, “Has it always been like this?”
For the sake of argument, Charlie-Ann is now Darienne, Reggie and Marion are still Reggie and Marion, the house is now by the oil refinery, and the extra limbs are now tumors. The constant buzz is still G-sharp. “Has it always been like this?”
The doctor has asked Roberta to recall any of her sisters’ names: Loretta, Marion, Charlie-Ann, Darienne. Ever since the accident at Six Flags, the only sound in her head has been a constant buzz in G-sharp. Her husband, Reggie, holds the doctor’s hands in his, the moment smooth as silk. Saucer blue eyes, Reggie asks, “Will it always be this way?”
Roberta wakes up from a terrible dream, in which she wound up in a coma after falling off a roller-coaster. Fat chance, she chuckled to herself: that’s nothing she’d ever do. Better to stay safe and sound with her American Girl dolls: Loretta, Marion, Charlie-Ann, Darienne. After combing each of their heads of hair, Roberta leaves the dolls to write complaints to the local public television station. Finally alone together, Marion looks at the other three with her plastic saucer blue eyes and asks: “Will it always be this way?”
Depending on who you ask, and just as likely your political orientation, Peggy Lee’s first- or second-greatest song is “Is This All There Is?” In the song, Lee wanders from event to event in life, treating triumph and disaster alike with the same unimpressed resignation. Even the idea of meeting God elicits little more than a shrug. It is fado for the atomic era, Billy Pilgrim with brass backing. In five paragraphs, explain how the question “Is this all there is?” is different and perhaps diametrically opposed to the question “Has it always been like this?”
For extra credit: sticking only to one page, explain how “Is this all there is?” can never, as a question, even consider the parameters supposed in the question “Will it always be this way?”
In a previous life, I was a historian. For a decade my job was to hear the question “Has it always been like this” and sagely answer “No, no, of course not. Indeed, this is how we got here.” For a decade I thought I could also answer “Will it always be this way” beyond the truly theoretical until I realized other historians with actual full-time jobs would get itchy when confronted with the idea that the past only matters to people in the present concerned about their future. A year before I left academia I asked: “Has it always been like this?” Years laten, when the jobs plummeted to near-zero, I heard old pals ask “Will it always be this way?” Have you ever had a sorrow from your past that you know will shape your future, no matter how truly theoretical you try to make it?
So: has it always been like this? 20 words or less.
Preheat an oven.
Preheat an oven to 375. Why are you using the oven in a heat wave?
Chop an onion. Why are you using the oven when you didn’t even have one for most of your childhood?
Preheat the oven to 375. Since when could you suddenly afford to have the oven on and the air running at the same time? You didn’t have AC either as a kid: what is this, Shangri-La?
Keep chopping that onion. Just who do you think you are?
You could probably chop another onion. When you were younger you lived off of menthol cigarettes and Totino’s party pizzas for an entire summer. The pizzas cost $1.07 at the grocery store across the street from the apartment you were illegally subletting. The cigarettes were 2 for $8 at the competing grocery store on the other corner. You didn’t have a car so you took the bus to your internship downtown. How did you get away with checking your mail when you had to use a fake name for several months?
This dish could use more onion. That internship was at the Orange County Regional History Center. You barely received credit because you failed to do half of the components of the job, however ill-defined. You were nineteen and still had two entire years of a full-ride scholarship funding that you refused to take because you wanted to be done with your degree as soon as possible. You figured nobody wanted to convince you to take even one more year because everyone was already sick of you. Just who did you think you were?
Please preheat the oven. When a cardboard-box pizza costs $1.07, it is a fantastic treat, a sinister delight, a bit of daily mischief, a way to stave off the endless feeling that you’ve ruined everything–a cheeky little way to keep the menty-b away. That term, “menty-b,” is only okay for kids half your age to use. Every few months you are suddenly disgusted anew with the person you were half a lifetime ago. You figure nobody from back then could convince you otherwise now, because everyone was truly sick of you. How would you apologize through a multi-course dinner, knowing a dinner is probably the least genuine way to make amends?
If you don’t fucking start chopping that onion, I swear to fucking god, who the fuck do you think you are, Peggy Lee?
Have you always been like this? Will you always be this way?
Describe a field.
Describe a field as a field. You–you as you, as a human–you are not there. Nor is anybody else. You, if there is a you, are a field. Describe a field.
Describe a field as a field as it first feels humans come in. When comes the oxen? When comes the till? Describe loss.
Describe a field as a field as humans first feel other humans come in. First come the villages and then come the hordes. First come the sailors and then come the swords. First come the towns and then come the empire. First comes the empire and then comes the crusaders. First comes empire and then comes empire. First comes empire and then comes empire. First comes empire and then comes empire. Can loss be never-ending?
Describe a field as it realizes that humans will never return again.
Describe the first field you – now you as you – can remember. You can substitute this with a mangrove or a sand dune if you’re from Florida.
Describe the first time you as you realized humans as humans were ruining fields as fields. Again: you can substitute this with a beach or the Everglades if you’re from Florida.
Describe the first time you felt bad about wanting to write a book, worried about all the trees you’d kill printing out all your little thoughts. You can substitute this with cloud servers ruining the Amazon rainforest if you’re under thirty or lack a narcissistic streak.
Describe the first time you hoped part of you would be of some use after you were no longer you: bones for the seawall to keep Florida afloat, blood for the trees to drink after the drought, hair for the magpies to build the softest nest, fuel for the fields to sleep again. Describe the end of loss.
Describe yourself as a field. Has it ever been like this? Will it ever be this way?
Consider the first time a man ever gave you head.
Diagram the moment you first found yourself in a man’s mouth. You were 17 and he was 21, but you were sleeping with his girlfriend, who was older than both of you. You said you were a guy then but that always felt half-assed even before you abandoned the term wholesale. Can two people have gay sex even when neither person was or is gay? Use both complete and dashed lines.
Is there only ever just gay sex? 2 pages.
Walk me through why you wanted to look him up. Use complete lines.
Tell me about a fool’s errand that didn’t start in bed.
His name was Tony. Everything else is unusable as a search parameter: “Tony–I think Hernandez?” you imagine Googling. “Tony Maybe Hernandez? Miami area but probably way the fuck up in Pompano?” You begin sweating, not out of anxiety but because you ostensibly went to school for ten years precisely to be the Keeper of the Search and Historical Memory when society reverts to dingleberry gooning around computers and this is somehow the best you can do: “Tony something like Hernandez, he was Cuban American and like 5-6 and tiny, teeny even, 130 maybe, he had the most beautiful chestnut hair and a velvet tongue?” “Tony Hernandez once he got a sty from his shitty factory job it was a red welt on his eyelid, which made me really sad, but it wasn’t there when he looked me directly in the eyes as I came in his mouth?” “Tony this guy who sucked me off a few times but I’m not sure he even touched another guy after that?” Who do you think you are?
What part of you is still a dashed line?
His old girlfriend–technically also your old girlfriend, your first girlfriend–has had no real online trace in over a decade, even though her name is fairly clockable. You also know you’re snared in a logical fallacy based on humans’ inability to understand really big numbers: something rare is far from impossible. There’s even three other people with your very name, and while you understand intellectually that that’s quite possible in a nation of 300 million people, let alone the entire English-speaking world, it still feels profoundly wrong. She once said your poems were relatively graceless but had a clear voice, like Galway Kinnell’s, which still feels profoundly wrong for both me and him. There may be three other people with Galway Kinnell’s very name, but I doubt it, even in a nation of 300 million people, let alone the English-speaking world. Is something rare something good? Is something rare something hard? Is something good something hard?
Describe the first time that writing a poem won’t feel like a fool’s errand. Do the other two people with your exact name feel this way? Has it always been like this?
Describe the first time gay sex made you feel like a complete line. Will it always be this way?
Tell me about this headache I’ve been having right now.
It usually starts in my jaw. Then it moves to my neck and behind my eyes. Sometimes it hurts so much I can’t sleep but sometimes it goes away if I throw up. This has happened on and off for twenty-five years, drinking or sober, starving or stuffing, blue balls or drained balls. I went to a dentist exactly once as a kid, and they said I’d probably need to reset my entire jaw to fix my open bite and, in turn, the recurring pain in my jaw. My parents laughed and I waited for my wisdom teeth to come in. Tell me about the moment you realized you have A Thing and it’s always going to be A Thing and it’s fine, sure, but it’s still A Thing.
Let’s be real: even headaches have social context. I live in Texas. Every day it’s something new and something worse. Every day it’s something bloody and something bleeding. Every day I worry that my partner will run into an unhinged transphobe with a gun. Every day I worry they’ll only identify me from my jaw bones, my misaligned teeth. Every day I worry that this state will not let us leave out of spite. Tell me about the moment you wanted to salt the earth until nothing could grow again.
Let’s also be real: headaches carry the history of your body. I’m from Florida. A few years ago a nutcase went into a nightclub and mowed down several dozen people in a gay nightclub in Orlando. I lived in Tampa by then, but I knew some of the dead: nearly every queer in Central Florida knew someone who died because everyone drove to Orlando to dance. Death existed in the conditional tense for hours: piles of ravaged flesh that remained unidentifiable while police slow-walked doing fuck-all. Death existed in the conditional tense for days: everyone in the community considered where they would have been if they didn’t want to fuck with certain I-4 traffic or certain cover charges or certain theme nights. Death existed in the conditional tense for months: the dead became discourse, caught mid-smile in the pixelated amber of grieving family member’s second-generation digital photos, while politicians and pundits only talked about the murdered as objects, their bodies now stiff political pawns for two 69-year-old presidential sociopaths, one holding an upside-down pride flag like a dog proud of its own carpet shit, the other unable to answer why or when she about-faced on gay marriage. Death existed in the conditional tense for years: now that these folks are bones with annual vigils, Florida’s governor felt comfortable banning the existence of queerness in schools, banning medical care for trans people, running roughshod against Disney only to come up thirty-five points behind a now-76 year old sociopath in primary polling, egging on a dozen other governors to figure out who could make life for trans and queer people the worst, a twelve-way witch hunt for grooming by people who all have clearly molested high school boys themselves. Tell me about the aches in your body that came from realizing your pain is no longer your own, and maybe never your own, but that of millions.
Death like this will come again and again: the governor just signed a bill allowing emergency medical responders to refuse administering treatment to people based on moral and religious grounds. It takes a very low reading level to get that this allows medics to keep their hands off bleeding queers. Debate whether the last gay club in Florida will be shut down because it held a drag performance and got sued or because it held a drag performance and someone came in with a gun.
Pinkwashing and homonationalism are just two big words for the American liberal treatment of queer people. More or less: corporations love slapping on a rainbow flag every June even if their bread-and-butter work actively harms queer people; queer people are often used in contemporary liberal politics as a pawns against substantially more profound political changes, especially those that would materially help queer people; by alleging to embrace queer people as a political aesthetic, liberal governments can portray despicable foreign policy as the defense of “Western progressive values,” including tolerance of queer people; using queer people as a foreign policy token allows Western governments to erase the idea that queer people exist around the world while shielding scrutiny against domestic policies that actively harm queer people; queer people are held hostage by liberal politicians and are told to be grateful for what they have been given in lieu of worse treatment by conservatives, despite their literal rights being erased during liberal governance; queer people who challenge corporate phoniness or liberal government chicanery are labeled unruly and unserious because they have always already been labeled unruly and unserious within the Western liberal order. Describe the last time straight homeowners told you that you didn’t really understand the way the world works.
Explain to me why so many gay men are fine with living in their own version of Tel Aviv.
For extra credit: tell me how the end-goal of homonationalism and pinkwashing is four or five American Tel Avivs.
“I’ve seen more self-professed progressives support the writer’s strike on social media than care about trans issues,” my partner said a few months back, and I couldn’t really disagree. Obviously, observations are only useful as anecdata, I’ve seen the same anecdote about the last Writers’ Guild strike leading to the begrudging renewal of The Apprentice and, by deduction, the cultural saturation of Donald Trump, as if there is literally anything I can do right now besides not watch television. There is a certain type of leftist who still thinks that sociocultural matters and, by deduction, issues of sexuality are epiphenomenal to economics, as if anybody understood economics that way, as if I wanted to fuck a widget factory, as if I care whether you were in Seattle in the late 90s, as if you can speak about economics outside of gender or race or ability or, yes, sexuality, as if everything isn’t cocreating each other again and again and again. Tell me five actual tangible things you can do for trans people and, by deduction, for economic justice and, by deduction, for trans people.
Tell me five things I can do about this fucking jaw and, by deduction, by headache. Will it always be this way?
Tell me about the limits of speech. Has it always been like this?
“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” is a longstanding judicial guidepost for what is fair and foul in public speech. But of course, that’s always been kind of nonsense: the case which brought that into legal commonsense only used the phrase as a metaphor. Eugene Debs didn’t yell fire into any crowded building: he opposed a profoundly stupid war, even as wars go. Nonetheless, Oliver Wendell Holmes likened opposing the churning meat grinder of the Somme to actual violence in itself. This wide leeway to punish any sort of speech as criminal was cordoned off in the late 1960s to the advocacy of “imminent lawless action”--but this expansion of rights happened after a KKK wizard challenged Ohio criminal syndicalism laws. Tell me: is there anything good in American jurisprudence that isn’t coated in dog shit? Don’t talk down to me.
I was the runner-up for a job at the First Amendment Coalition. I can probably say this because I didn’t get the job. Amid four – four! – interviews, I was asked more than once whether I had any personal objections to defending free speech. I said more or less that my personal beliefs aren’t pertinent to a job beyond what can be deduced or assumed by my employment at a political organization. What I meant to say: “The bastards aren’t going to stop, so why should I?” I brought up being an artist who worked with gay adult content, which elicited as much interest as reading news headlines to a comatose dog. The unexpected relief of missing out on a job after four – four! – interviews came in realizing I dodged a bullet after hearing my not-quite-director say the lawyers on staff have “the real jobs” and, by deduction, I didn’t, despite ostensibly being the person who would work year-round nonstop to keep these lawyers funded. After two years of working for another legal nonprofit where I was treated like a mental toddler by lawyers, I knew a blessing in disguise. In two pages: why are lawyers so goddamn arrogant despite being some of the stupidest people I have ever met?
I once worked with a lawyer who gave me unprompted feedback about a meeting for which she showed up completely unprepared. Later, she complained that she couldn’t understand a grant budget worksheet that I designed at a ninth-grade level. She once cried when I said in a one-on-one meeting that I don’t really talk about my personal life at work. She was still the third-most obnoxious lawyer on staff out of seven. This doesn’t lead to a prompt: just write down “I hear that, dude” or some other kind gesture.
An old coworker of mine insisted it was ableist when I said that the thing I hated most about Greg Abbott is that the tree branch didn’t hit him a couple inches to the north. A wayward tree branch fell on Abbott when he was jogging during a storm. The insurance settlement after suing the homeowner and lawn care company paid for his hospital bills. Years later, when he was attorney general, Abbott supported medical malpractice caps of $250,000 – maybe 3 percent of what he’s received as a result of running in the rain – even while he was receiving monthly structured settlement payments. Someone injured in the same way as Abbott would barely have any of their lifelong costs supported. They certainly wouldn’t be able to live with anywhere near the financial or social dignity Abbott In two pages, what is crueler to disabled Americans: a joke about the person who has made their lives demonstrably profoundly worse, or the policies that person directly enabled?
The homeowner whose tree fell on Abbott later voted for him. In two pages: Is Texas worth having? How about saving? Has it always been like this?
What are the limits of speech? Megyn Kelly has spent decades having yellow hair and a long horse face, telling people to shut up about whatever she has decided is peripheral to the actual health of the nation. Bush-era war crimes weren’t a problem, but abortion and gay people and certainly gay people having abortions were. Undocumented people were a scourge but not the senators and state department officials who created the conditions that pushed people to the border; the workers who wanted to afford literally anything beyond rent were monsters but not their billionaire overlords. None of this is news to you, and it wasn’t even news to her because she was paid to run her goddamn mouth nonstop, literally creating news from nothing through the sheer force of having an hour to fill every night. She was and remains only the obsessions of her own creation. Now her obsession is trans people–statement after statement on her social media despite having even less of a national audience than ever. Does Megyn Kelly rub her clit raw when she says there’s only two genders? Does she get three fingers in after changing her mind on pronouns? Does she show off her box dye cunt to all the other women in her extended family when she says these are the organs God gave her, organs with a purpose she insists at the dinner table? Does she call up her old colleague Tucker Carlson and beg him to talk about when he used his God-given penis to ejaculate into Modern Family star Julie Bowen over and over–do they say back and forth “This is my God-given penis” / “This is my God-given vagina.” / “My penis is pink, like that of the Christ child.” / “My vagina is white, like that of Santa Claus and his natural white wife?” In your blue book, explain how Megyn Kelly’s transphobia is reflective of the American sexual paradox: not repression but endless obsession? Whether you want to bring Foucault into this is your choice.
If you still have space in your bluebook, explain how British transphobia reveals the politics of self-imposed limits to speech–not in terms of the vitriol expressed but, rather, through the failures of imagination. In other words: how does British transphobia reveal through its relentless drumbeat its own inherent, albeit ironic, misogyny by suggesting that womanhood can only be defined by the condition of victimhood? To wit: there is a linguistic–and by extension logical and political–collapse in British transphobia, in which the power dynamic between men and women doesn’t define women through social relations but as a reflection of something genuine: “They have to be doing this to me, to us for an actual reason.” Victimhood follows the mark; the doer precedes the deed. To this end, there is no space for queers in mainstream British feminism. Trans women have stolen valor; where is their mark? Gay men are all suspect for claiming they face the same (or parallel, or replicated) power dynamic at the hand of straight people: “How dare they call themselves victims, too?” Trans men are turncoats and butch women, lesbian or otherwise, always approach the uncanny. It’s Valerie Solanis without the camp, Germaine Greer without the dog-jaw antipodean yarl (also camp); it’s a game explicitly designed for losing. Above all is the relentless fear that tomboys–today’s Sporty Spices–will be coerced into binders and testosterone cream: “They’ll change before they realize they were losers!” Tell me why the least surprising thing in the world is JK Rowling writing under a man’s name to sell abysmal detective stories, only to slap her gender-neutral nom de plume on the cover when sales flagged in the mere hundreds?
What are the limits of speech? Queer theory taught me that desires have a context but rarely have coherence. We have wiring but nobody has an identical manual. Besides, the instructions change every time we read them. You turn me on, I’m a piano. What I jerk off to at night has a different color and taste and shape than whatever I jerk off to before sneaking in a nap. Tell me about the last fantasy you had until none of the letters even smell correct.
“Will it always be this way?” I saw myself typing those words from above – the vision of my writing was more real than the actual action or the words themselves. That’s silly of course: speech defines our shape of reality. It is the sorting device – thanks Joanne – for reality and truth and fact and actuality. But of course that’s all bullshit, too. When’s the last time you felt yourself touch the void? Has it always been like this? Will it always be this way?
Respond:
Respond:
Respond:
Respond:
Respond:
Respond (Has it always been like this?):
Respond
:
68. Respond:
69. Respond:
70. Respond (Will it always be this way?):
Look, I’ll make this straightforward: what’s the point?
I’ve lived in Texas for the past six years. Last year was the hottest on record, but then this year happened. I didn’t wear underwear for months, even in dad shorts. They said it was an unprecedented three-year La Niña–but La Niña is typically a cooling event. My neck glows in April even as I drift off to sleep. Will it always be this way?
I grew up in Florida, in the southern part which has a tropical monsoon climate. We have two seasons down there: wet and wetter. Since I’ve left, the wet is becoming wetter and the wetter is becoming wetter. Now it floods on sunny days. Now it floods even during king tide. Now it floods just because. This year, my hometown took two feet of water in less than twenty-four hours. Tell me about the last day my hometown will no longer be underwater.
I read about real estate agents in Miami banking on the fact that enough baby boomers will be stereotypical baby boomers and will agree to condominiums on the beach on the premise that they will either move to a final rest home before they’re too senescent to operate an elevator or die before the sea levels make it impossible to leave their building. Describe a Christmas get-together in a Vero Beach condominium in twenty years.
Florida has over twenty million people. The same size as Greece but twice as many people. The birthplace of the myth of Western Civilization grafted onto the sun-tumored skin of West Palm Beach, palm dates meet sugar daddy dates, Trojan War meets an MBA named Troy. Tell me about Floridian gods and goddesses of wisdom, love, earth, water, grift, and cocaine.
Do you think they’ll even have textbooks in a thousand years?
The water in the Gulf of Mexico has now been recorded over 100 degrees. The water in the Gulf has become warmer on the outside than we are on the inside. The water has become a fever. Describe the last sea creatures to survive a sea-wide illness.
I don’t know how long my grandmother was dead before she was discovered—whether it was immediate or days after the fact, whether it was in air-conditioned comfort or steamy squalor, whether a nurse was nearby or nobody had a clue. I only know she died in Florida and I learned two years later, when I was no longer in Florida. Consider how the dead will have to adapt when half of my home state is underwater.
Every time I write and rewrite this, something worse happens. A firestorm has destroyed a Hawaiian town. Various emergency alert systems were either never used or were completely broken. Nobody is sure who or what is more to blame. The governor has gestured vaguely toward climate change, which, yes, but also: are you fucking kidding me? The official death toll is around 100 but, more realistically, the bits of ash and char that remain in Lahaina contain hundreds and hundreds more. What’s the least glib way to talk about this?
When it comes to the earth’s climate, the answers to both “Has it always been like this?” and “Will it always be this way?” are simple. The question, then, is whether there is even a follow-up question at all. Is there any worthwhile follow-up question that doesn’t truly start with “What’s the point?”
In between the first and second drafts of this piece, my boyfriend of several years broke up with me. Will it always be this way?
This isn’t therapy, nor court, and I’m not particularly interested in being an open sore on the page. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a writer living as an untreated wound. But, still: Will it always be this way? Start your answer with either “Yes, if” or “No, but.”
“Just give it time,” a couple friends wrote to me. “That’s the only way through this.” No shit. No shit, no shit, no shit. No shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit–I even wrote a sonnet about it:
time heals all wounds
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit;
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit?
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit.
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit;
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit.
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit!
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit–
no shit no shit. no shit no shit no shit
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit;
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit,
no shit no shit no shit, no shit no shit
no shit no shit no shit no shit no shit.
When’s the first time you wrote a sonnet that wasn’t a disaster?
I’m at the point of the breakup where I walk through every moment I can remember even halfway decently and think Has it always been like this? Well, has it? Again, start your answer with either “Yes, if” or “No, but.”
Memory is a tricky thing. We filter even when we journal or take a photo or talk to ourselves. We polish and shine and stud and buff our memories. Memories aren’t really stories, not really. We do all this work not because humans are self-absorbed but because the sheer act of storytelling – the actual thing that makes us human – requires us to filter. A relationship is the best form of peer review that any story gets. It’s what lets “Can you believe this shit?” become “Do you remember that shit?” When’s the last time a boyfriend corroborated your story so you didn’t feel like an absolute dipshit at a party?
The absolute worst part of a breakup is the end of language. You expect the end of love and the end of sex – at least, the end of romantic love and uncomplicated sex – but the end of language comes as a shock. You’re left with years of references and allusions and inside jokes and shorthand and deeply imagined worlds – an interiority built for two, suddenly half-abandoned. Tell me about the final two speakers of a dialect who refuse to talk to one another even though they have each other’s numbers.
The only words I have left are song lyrics: “I can’t make you love me if you don’t.” “I miss that stupid ache.” “The language is leaving me.” “You’ve never been a waste of my time, it’s never been a drag.” “Knowing you lied straight-faced while I cried.” “In one more hour, I’ll leave this room.” “Seré la gata bajo la lluvia.” “Oh well.” Tell me: do sad songs help more because they make us get out our feelings – art therapy for the masses – or because they let us know that heartache always has a shared tongue?
The bitch of it all is ______________.
I will give you one memory – a great one. Last year, he and I went to Washington State. We both wanted to see the Hoh Rainforest. I took us to the black sand beaches, listening to the waves breathe in and out for an hour while I imagined how far I could sail west before hitting land. He took me to the spot marked the Quietest Place on Earth. We hopped off the main trail and maneuvered around a few trees and found a spot marked with tiny red rocks. We stood there and breathed in and out. We kissed at the quietest place on earth. I’d like to think he’d never been there before. I’d like to think there was a language we could suddenly hear in the quietest place on earth, the moss and trees and even the painted red rocks. I’d like to think that you could stand a hundred feet away, maybe even sail west until you hit land, and you could still hear us kiss at the quietest place on earth. Tell me a memory that heartache and silence couldn’t take away from you.
Did I already know the answer to “Will it always be this way?” Did I always know? Tell me a single thing I knew.
Roberta stares at her hands, thinking about the last time anyone said they felt smooth as silk. Her partner, Loretta, catches her: “They’re just as nice as the first time I held them.” Roberta looks up and catches Loretta’s gaze; despite the librarian frames and crow’s feet, her partner’s eyes still seemed to work. Roberta held them up to the buzzing light: “Remember the first time you held these?” “Among the many other firsts.” “Do you think we have a history?” Loretta’s brows arched over her frames. “What do you mean, doll?” “No, nothing bad. I just always wondered if there’s a difference between a love story and a couple having a history.” In two pages: What is that difference? Roberta and Loretta can be there, if they like.
You’ve been preparing for a party but all you’ve done is chop eight onions and preheat an oven for six hours. The guests arrive in 20 minutes. Tell me how to turn another obsessive-compulsive episode into a themed tapas party about irreversible climate change.
You are a field. You shouldn’t have to respond to anything a human asks of you. Go be a field.
We all leave traces. The fool’s errand of being a historian in and of the contemporary era is making sense of more and more people having more and more bits and pieces of evidence, most of which is increasingly the meta-evidence of their presence somewhere—somewhere digital and ephemeral—more than anything they’ve made, per se. Mountains of likes and retweets and heart reactions, buckets of memes like shrimp shells. What is the story and what is commodified information—literally a virus, not quite alive nor useful—and what is the story about commodified information? Is this the new social history? But, still: it’s weird when someone suddenly cannot be found online—colleagues from graduate school, people you spoke with some frequency within the last decade, someone who still is in your dreams—the crumbs and bits becoming dust becoming nothing at all. Tell me how you would suddenly stop
Tell me about the last election before the flood waters come. What signs are in the gayborhood?
Tell me the cruelest thing you can only ever say once. Tell me the nicest thing you can only ever say once. Tell me the cruelest thing you can say every day. Tell me the nicest thing you can say every day. Tell me something I don’t know.
Respond (Hey, hi, hello):
You are the last American textbook writer. Your books can only be printed in those states still in the union that haven’t signed into the Freedom from Unjust Coercive Knowledge and Withstanding Intellectual Tyranny Pact five decades prior. Your market is largely Connecticut north and Guam. Your assignment is to describe what happened after Miami and Houston flooded beyond livability. Accurately depict the diaspora of millions who could not afford to live on sudden private islands. Emphasize the development of internal passports and the reintroduction of restrictive covenants.
“The hardest part of this is that I still think about you all the time,” I say to the spot where you used to sit and watch TV. “I don’t know if I will fully get over you—I think part of me will always love you,” I say to a pair of underwear you left in my hamper.. “It’s unfair to ask, but I wonder if you miss me, too” I say to the last physical pictures of us together, from a photo booth in Austin. “My door is always open, whenever you’re ready to be friends,” I say to the other copy of the photo booth pictures, which you left in my car two weeks before leaving me.
What are you doing in an hour? How do you feel about societal end times? Would you like dinner? Is it okay if there’s a lot of onions?
