"The Guardians" by Alexander Chee

as published in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2019)

annotated by me

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1

IN 2004, A MEMORY returned to me after twenty-five years. And with the memory’s return, I understood that I had lived for a long time in a sort of intricate disguise.

It was not so different, on reflection, from making an autobiographical character.

This version of me was living the life of a thirty-something writer in New York City, as if in a play. I had an apartment on the nineteenth floor of a building at Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue, a one-bedroom with a balcony and views across the top of the city in three directions. The many landmarks were outlined at night by their lit windows, as if in klieg lights, and I liked to stand with a scotch and a cigarette looking north on Third Avenue and imagine that I had made it. This was only a sublet, and I would be there for only six months, but it made me feel like either Batman or Bruce Wayne, depending on whether it was day or night. I had spent so much time in New York without a view, I looked at it almost as if I were hungry and this was a feast. I was there with these thoughts from Sunday to Wednesday, and then, every Thursday night, I left on a train for Middletown, Connecticut, where I taught at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, as their visiting writer.

At Wesleyan, I rented a room in the apartment of an art professor who was never there when I was, and so it was like having an entire second apartment for the weekend, another fantasy I indulged. I often stayed over on Friday night, after my class, and Saturday too, before returning to Manhattan. The apartment was on the second floor of an old house on a corner of the campus, done up a little like a summer home, barely winterized, and painted dove gray. A darker, nubbly, Spartan gray carpet covered the floors, dressed up by kilims, and the ceilings and floors were warped and thus changed height from room to room, disorienting as I walked the apartment. I sometimes banged my head on a doorframe. My bed there was an antique with a flat, hard mattress, covered by an old quilt, and the books in every room, on every shelf, were what I thought of as the wrong books by the right writers, the books that had disappointed, and they haunted me as I began my second novel.

Each week was a movement from New York to Connecticut and back again, from light and air in Manhattan to darkness and enclosure in Middletown, and I took to calling myself a Connecticut Persephone. This was a joke, of course, as only occasionally did I feel as if I were descending into the underworld upon returning to Wesleyan. I had a crew of student writers, smart, ambitious, funny students who reminded me of myself at their age and the friends I’d had then. Many of my former teachers were now my colleagues in the English Department, along with a few younger faculty members who quickly became friends. But every so often I would turn a corner in the night and feel as if I had wandered across the years into my own past.

I was teaching stereoscopic narratives to my writing students that fall: the same story told from two or more points of view. I had used one in my first novel, but I employed the structure of Batman comics as my example, as I did not want to be the kind of professor who taught his own book. Batman stories offered basic and effective versions of this dual narrative. There is a mysterious crime, then Batman’s attempt to apprehend the criminal. Typically the criminal, at one point or another, captures Batman and tells him the entire story from his own point of view, and the crime is made knowable, the criminal also. During the monologue, Batman manages to escape and bring the criminal to justice, explaining his methods, and the reader then has the complete story.

This was also how I felt about being back at Wesleyan. I was faculty now, had been a student before. I was inside my own story, looking at myself as I once was through the eyes of the professor I had become. I was also seeing what my teachers likely had seen of me when I was their student.

I thought this story of my education was the only story to see this way. I was wrong. It was just the beginning of the stories I would see this way.

BACK IN NEW YORK, I had a regular visitor to my apartment who was like my own strange secret—a relationship so oddly closeted, it was as if it wasn’t happening at all. He was a young writer who had set out, in his awkward way, to seduce me, after reading my first novel when he was my student. I had made him wait until he graduated before we even had a conversation about his feelings, much less mine. I wanted us to meet again, away from the circumstances of the class, and to see if the attraction was the same. I was sure it wouldn’t be. That I would just be an ordinary older man, and not his teacher.

This was something I had never, ever wanted. I had always disdained it for what may seem the obvious reasons, but also, my whole dating life until then had been directed toward men my own age or older. My type was someone in his thirties or forties, even when I was in my twenties. When the professor I’d rented my apartment from at Wesleyan had warned me against sleeping with students, I found the whole thing so ridiculous, I held the phone away from my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me laugh. But if he hadn’t heard me, perhaps the gods had instead.

I could tell you that he was different from the other students, but it would sound like the same excuse offered by the few professors I knew who had crossed this line, the ones I had only contempt for. I was also hoping to be relieved of what I felt for him. The state of things between us was at least not a simple case of attraction. He was talented, and I had even consulted him for his thoughts on my new novel draft. I had what I knew was a crush, and feared I was in love with him, despite knowing that there was likely little to no hope in the matter. He was not entirely out of the closet at the time, and as my sense of how out he was kept changing, this was just one of the reasons I was cautious. He would invite me to join his group of friends, for example, at social events with all of them out in Williamsburg, but they were not aware of his sexuality, and I could see they were often confused as to why he had invited his thirty-something former writing teacher to hang out with them.

It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with—the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free. Despite his being closeted, after we left his friends he would turn passionate and kiss me, often on the subway platform while we waited for the L train to take me back to the city. I kept thinking he would draw back, but he was at his most amorous in public, which confused me.

I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this.

One night in the middle of the fall, he was at my apartment having drinks with me and some friends of mine. After the friends left, I kissed him on the balcony, and he seemed less inhibited, more passionate, and then his eyes flared, and he began gathering his things, nearly running.

What is it? I asked.

I have to go, he said. I need to leave.

But why? I said, and leaned in and kissed him goodbye. He kissed me again and drew back, his eyes still wild.

I have to go, he said. I’m afraid of me and I’m afraid of you.

We didn’t speak for several days. They were some of the loneliest days. I knew what he was trying to do, though. I had put together his seemingly disparate stories, not included here, and I had seen this expression on his face from the other side—this had happened to me when I was his age.

It takes one to know one.

He was trying to face what he wanted, and it was also what scared him away. His desire for men brought back memories and sensations he didn’t want, pushed down so far he was sure they were gone, until suddenly, there they were again. He eventually tried to tell me all of this. And I can’t say any of what he told me, or what I guessed, because it belongs to him and not to me, and his journey in that regard is his own. I just knew then that I had become the man I ran from when I was having my own flashbacks. And so I was patient as he fought whatever this was inside him, even as I knew how my own relationships then had ended. I was in yet another stereoscopic narrative.

He could be as old as I am now when he is at last ready to tell anyone about it all. He might also never get there. Based on my own experiences with flashbacks, I developed a theory that he could only kiss me in public places, because it made him feel safe to know he could leave if he needed to. But I didn’t like it, and I didn’t understand why until the night we were in the bar where we’d first kissed, in Brooklyn, a place we always kissed, in fact, and he leaned in and kissed me again. I remember that people were watching. That night, it made me strangely angry to be watched. And then for the first time in over twenty years the reason why it made me angry came to me, and the memory I am speaking of returned.

Watching him have his flashbacks, I had imagined I was done with mine. I was wrong. Now I was the one who had to make excuses, all these years later, and leave.

In Sleeping Beauty, the handsome prince makes his way through a forest of thorns and kisses the princess as she sleeps, awakening not just her but the entire kingdom. The barren wilderness is transformed into a paradise. This is not quite what happened here. I can say one kiss put me under a spell. Another kiss woke me. And I was full of horror to see the devastation around me.

2

WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.

There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me.^[1] Every now and then, I could see the distance between us.^[2] Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me.

IN 1993, THE FILM Sex Is . . . , an independent documentary about gay men and their sex lives, debuted at the March on Washington. As one of the interview subjects, I was invited to attend. I went and watched in horror as I described the sexual abuse I’d experienced in the boys’ choir I’d once been in, declaring it an education, even a liberation, and that it hadn’t harmed me at all. The film sped along to another interviewee. I said more things later, but could see, in the dark of the theater, only my huge, lying mouth.

At the time I filmed the interview, my first relationship with a man who loved me, and whom I also loved, was falling apart because of my PTSD related to what I was describing. Worst of all was the smile I had on my face on-screen as I said this lie, a smug sort of superiority that I hated.

The film went on to win Best Gay Film at the Berlin Film Festival and had a national, and then international, theatrical release. By the time I moved to New York in 1994, I was regularly being recognized for my role in it. I remember taking part in New York City’s Gay Pride celebration that year, in Greenwich Village, walking against the crowd, searching for my friends, when I noticed two teenage boys coming toward me arm in arm. One lit up in recognition of me and his arm shot out. “You’re the guy from the film,” he said.

I paused, terrified, but also curious. Yes, I said. I asked where they were from.

“Saskatchewan,” they said, and then wished me a Happy Pride, and were on their way.

I have to fix this, I remember thinking. Wishing for a solution as big as the mistake, or as big as me.

IN OCTOBER 2001, I had my phone in my hand, about to call my mother. My first novel, Edinburgh, was about to appear in bookstores the very next day. The story is of the legacy sexual abuse leaves in the life of a young man angry at himself about it, and his apparent powerlessness over that silence. She’d complained that she hadn’t seen the novel in manuscript, and I had pacified her by assuring her I wanted her to have the bound book. This was partly true. I was proud to finally be able to hand my mother the physical thing, to say, Here. I’m a writer. But now the bound book was in my hand, and I was preparing to send it to her, and I stopped, pulled up short by the memory that I had never told her what had happened to me.

The scope of this gap terrified me. How had I let this happen? I was thirty-four years old. I was about to publish a novel about sexual abuse based on my own experiences, but had never told her one thing about them. Not only that, but in all the time that had passed between when the events had occurred and that moment right then, I could see I had been very angry at her. A child’s anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her instead to guess my thoughts. That adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it.^[3] But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it.^[4]

Even at that moment, I was trying to stop myself. I was frozen in the act. I wanted to put the phone down and never tell her. I tried to imagine if there was even one way I could continue to pretend with her. But I knew she would be deeply hurt to be surprised by what was in the book. I could see how I passed myself off to others as someone who had gotten over it all on my own, the disguise I had put on of being unhurt simply a way for me to fix myself in private. I had never told her because I had hoped I could heal in secret and she would never have to know. And yet here I was, still in pain.

As I prepared to call and tell her, I did so knowing it had taken me eighteen years to tell her. Almost as long as it had taken me to tell myself.

And then I made the call.

IN THE SPRING OF the same year as the memory’s return, I was working as a writing tutor to a graduate student in nonfiction who felt I understood her better than her teachers did. She sent me a draft of her memoir, and as I read through scenes describing how she had attempted suicide and then, in therapy afterward, raged at her therapist for not knowing she had attempted suicide, I wondered at the therapist’s reaction to the suicide attempt itself. I sent her what I thought was an ordinary email: “I don’t see that you’ve included scenes describing what it was like telling your therapist about your suicide attempt, or how she reacted. If you could describe this, it would help the reader know why you’re so angry here.”

I received an email back, the letters in the tiniest possible font, smaller than she normally used, such that I thought, at first, it was some strange mistake, or even a hacking.

--
I never told her. I’ve never been in therapy for it, either.^[5]

--

My immediate thoughts: How could she not have told anyone? Did she not know how dangerous it was to just go around untreated? She could relapse at any moment. And then I remembered: most suicides hope to die without interference. Telling someone means allowing the person you told the chance to stop you.^[6] I had discovered something like the back passageway she’d left open.

Staring at those tiny letters, I realized I was meeting the person she actually was, underneath her performance of competence. All her life since then she had been waiting to see if someone would notice,^[7] and I had. And then another cold truth came to me out of those tiny letters.

I was almost exactly like her.

All of my attempts at therapy previous to this had been about the issues that moved above certain ruptures in myself that remained undescribed. The difference was that I had never raged that a therapist had not figured this out about me. If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured, I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.^[8]

3

PRIOR TO THE MEMORY’s return, if you asked me, I would tell you there were things in my life that I couldn’t remember. I would allow you to think that they were like your own missing memories, gaps made by pure human fallibility and impressionistic thinking. Associations that didn’t associate. And yet I recall feeling an empty confidence at those times, the hollow power of a lie. When I began Edinburgh, I knew there was something missing, something I wasn’t letting myself know. It is just one of the reasons why I wrote it as a novel instead of a memoir. I had written it as if the memory would never come back—as if this could stand in for it. I had imagined the missing memories were gone forever. I thought of the novel as the solution for what was lost.

Instead, it was a summoning. As if I had called and it came back to me.

Even now, though, as I try to write this essay, it dissolves in my hands. There is still a part of me that insists what I’ll tell you cannot be told. That insists that if the truth were known I would be destroyed. I try to write this essay and freeze, lose the path, lose my thoughts, my drafts, my edits, all of my purpose. I look up at the ticking clock in front of me and stop. My editor writes back, curious: What happened to this? And I am also mystified to find what I thought was the careful draft full of repetitions, mistakes, missing pieces.

My writing process is informed in general by my relationship to this—a process with a deep mistrust of myself.

The impulse to hide this from myself and others pushes at me. I change my sense of the structure again and again, moving events around, until the document becomes a mass of repetitions and fragments, elliptical, incomplete. A self-portrait.^[9]

Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned.

You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will—it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself.^[10] The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding.^[11]

You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else about yourself. This endurance, at least—this you can admire. You were too young to know what you believe is your complicity was something taken from you, but in your silence, you have become complicit with the continued pain, the wound that risks replacing you the longer you let it stay. But among the things you cannot imagine is that anyone would understand, or be kind. This is all you understand.

When I ask myself why it was so hard for me to let this secret go, the answer is that holding on to it was the only source of my self-esteem for years. It was all I thought I had.

I’m sorry, is what I would have wanted to have my replacement say in that documentary. Sorry I was so lonely as a child. Sorry that I was a child, with a child’s reasoning.^[12] Sorry I didn’t understand how this man could be punished, as I had only ever seen children punished. Sorry I dreamed of a kiss and then, when I accepted it, didn’t know how it would make my mouth a grave. Myself living inside of it. Sorry that years later, for having had that kiss, I would boast of avoiding the pain that was eating me alive from the inside out, and that this would be said on film, and it would go everywhere, around the world. Sorry for at least that, and more than that.

But I wouldn’t know this for years.

Edinburgh is a palinode. The gods, offended by a speech, require the speaker to make another, its opposite. Phaedrus, quoted in Edinburgh, is one example of this form. But there were no gods to make me do this, just me. And after it was published, the work wasn’t done.

4

THIS IS THE MEMORY I put away.

In September 1978, I am eleven, asleep in a dream in which I am at a lake with a boy who is a year older than me, a boy I know from choir. He lives one town over from me. We sometimes carpool. He’s as beautiful as the elves are supposed to be in the games I play about magic and wizards. He has blond hair and incandescent blue eyes.

In the dream he swims toward me, his hair plastered dark against his head. He chuckles and it echoes lightly. He reaches up from the water and gives me a kiss, a spark in his eyes. An excitement that is just for me.

I wake up in the morning dark. The dream is so real, I expect my mouth to be wet.

I’m gay is the first thought. And I am in love with him.

The choir is my refuge. My secret kingdom, an escape from the children who set traps for me at school. Classmates who have spent years tricking me into humiliating setups—pretending to befriend me before turning on me, or simply attacking me—situations that end with me being demoralized and alone. I had never encountered racism before this—in Guam, I was just one of many multiracial children in a diverse group of students. The intensity of it leaves me full of despair. In photos of me as a child, you can see that the light in my eyes at age six leaves my eyes in the photos of me at age seven, just a year after the move to Maine.

My mother was called in for annual visits with my teachers, during which she was told that I inhabited a dream world of fantasy, and that I would have to live in the real world eventually. Afterward, she would come home and tell me this, and each time I would say, I don’t have to live in the real world. Coolly, flatly, as if she were telling me I had to live in Boston and I could refuse. By the time I joined the choir at age eleven, it had been five years of being called a flat-faced chink, or being made fun of because I like to play with girls, who, yes, were all white, and soon joined in these traps organized by the white boys at my school. My nickname at this time is Nature Boy, because I like to go off into the woods alone, and part of the reason I like it is that I don’t have to be with them, see them, think of them. But the choir is made up of boys like me, and I soon enjoy a popularity there I’ve never had. I have friends, finally. Now my mother warns me about too many sleepovers, or of Dungeons & Dragons games that go on too long.

The boy from the dream is a part of this, though not entirely. He doesn’t like D & D as much as my other friends do. I don’t see him except at rehearsals. He is one of the soloists, and his voice is as beautiful as he is, if not more so. When I’m invited to go on a section leaders’ camping trip with the director, I accept eagerly, knowing he’ll be going also. The car is small for the four of us—a Pacer—and the dream boy sits in my lap, laughing, relaxed. He seems not just to touch me, but to meld, and I’m in a kind of bliss I didn’t imagine.

I remember my dream of the lake and the kiss, and it seems certain to come true.

We park the car at the trail’s parking lot and set off. During this hike to our campsite, the director jokes about how it is so hot we should hike nude. This seems impossible to me. He frequently talks to us about nudism, American prudery, sexual immaturity. How children should be able to vote, divorce their parents, choose whom they want to have sex with.

At the campsite, after the tent is set up, he begins to take off his clothes.

You don’t have to take off your clothes, he says to me.

But the other boys do, and soon they are all swimming together naked in the swimming hole we have chosen for our campsite. And so I take off my clothes and jump in. He takes photos of us, but especially of my dream boy, who is clearly his favorite, and who poses happily.

Soon it is evening and we are all in the tent. We are all still naked. The director has told me he knew about the crush, and he wants us to kiss. That the kiss is something he wants to see. The dream boy had told him of my feelings for him, and they had used it to bring me here. The director smiles as he tells me this, as if he hopes I will be amused, and also indulge him. The dream boy is there in front of me, also smiling at me, kneeling, naked, coming closer. There seems to be no way out, as if something is being cut off from me even as it is offered, and I can’t prevent it. As the kiss happens, I like it and hate it at the same time.

This is my first kiss.

After that night, the dream boy will never kiss me again. I will still want it. It is as if I didn’t get it, not like I wanted, and everything is wrong afterward.

I included something like this scene in the novel. I describe looking at my face’s reflection, and how this is when I began wanting to die.

I had, until that day in the bar in Brooklyn, remembered most of it except for the dream and what the dream led me to do. What I cannot, do not, let myself remember in that tent is the reason why I despaired. I put away the dream that night, and any memory of how I believed it was a dream coming true. I put away how I hated my silence, my inability to act, my shame at being humiliated this way—to have my secret known by those I thought were my friends, who then only used it against me. My despair was the despair of realizing that this was just another trap, that there was perhaps no end of traps. The boy from my dream was there to make everything the director was doing to me and the other boys seem okay. This trip is the extent of the director’s interest in me this way. He never tries to be alone with me again. He only wanted to control what I wanted—access to his favorite—and when I received it, and how.^[13]

As an adult, I understand my powerlessness. I can see I was in the woods without access to a phone or a car or another adult. I now know that the director chose me in part because my family was in crisis—he knew my mother needed a place for me to be after school, and that I needed the refuge the choir offered.^[14] Until the camping trip, the choir had been like a paradise for me: other boys who were smart, who liked me, who didn’t mock me, who wanted me as their friend, just for who I was. I can see that I was only a tool to the director, and this display of power over my desires was done to put me in my place. And that new place was to make everything seem okay to the other boys, much like my own dream boy had done for me. But what’s new, supplied by the memory, is how I gave up then, gave up believing my life could ever be any better. I would never escape the people intent on humiliating me. There was no place for me in this world, and there was nothing I could do about it. The despair I have lived with my whole life overtook me then, and until that kiss in the bar twenty-five years later, I had kept this secret, even from myself.

I was twelve when I put this memory away. The force exerting itself in my life was the power of pure childhood imagination, unmediated by any sense of my own power to speak, to create understanding and compassion. Instead, there was in me a dream of fear,^[15] so powerful I made a doll of myself to stay in my place, and I ran away. The doll woke up, stretched, looked around, and believed it was me.

5

IMAGINE WALKING INTO YOUR apartment and finding someone ripping up a piece of paper. You put your hand on his arm and this person turns to face you. It is you.

You read the paper, and as you do, you feel as if you are falling into it, endlessly, away from yourself and into yourself at the same time.^[16]

In the months after the memory returned, I continued with my life as best I could. But my recovered memory, for me, was like receiving a telegram one morning and finding inside the answer to twenty-five years’ worth of mistakes, twenty-five years of confusion and pain, and watching as around me the day turned as black as night. There was a story I needed to understand, the one I had tried to avoid, and it was all I wanted to listen to, and everything else I had to do was in the way.

The young writer I’d been involved with eventually moved on that fall. We never really spoke of what had happened, or whatever it was we’d unsealed for each other—my attempts at such conversations did not end well. Like me at his age, he did not seem ready to speak of it. We remain friends.

There was one more story I was inside of then, yet another stereograph. The one from the spring. The one in which I was someone who had not told his therapist the story he needed to tell.

THE FIRST NEW THERAPIST I found had been recommended to me by a friend. As her office was near where I was living at the time in New York, and she had helped my friend to a remarkable recovery after a sexual assault, and that friend had recommended her highly, I went. This therapist listened to me for ten or fifteen minutes as I described why I had come to her, and then she said, “I’m not sure I know how to help you. The people I work with usually can’t even name what happened to them, much less write a novel about it.”

I was suddenly very aware that I was sitting on a couch surrounded by stuffed animals and toys, as if I were visiting a nursery. I wondered if the toys were for her other patients even as I knew they were, and I fought the impulse to pick one up. She told me I seemed fine, perhaps a little neurotic, at least not as damaged as others—not in danger. She agreed to keep seeing me, and I did see her twice more. But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I’d had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end—the word FINE painted on it.^[17]

I had even used this image of the lightning-struck tree in the novel I’d written, and it was just one of the ways the novel allowed that hidden self to speak in public. The novel that seemed, that day, to have become yet another obstacle for me.

I thanked her and left. When I reached the dark sidewalk, I told myself I would find another therapist. But I felt something new. A wild fury of failing—no one believes I am not fine; why does no one believe it?—thundered in my head as I stood there. The one who knew he was still burning was trying to say so. And the one who was determined to say nothing did not allow it.

I had told my story but I had not told my story. I had written a novel and found catharsis, but I had not found healing, had not found recuperation. I had read self-help books to research the novel about sexual abuse, but I had not done the work, had not applied those books to myself as much as I had used them as a map to a character. Through it all I kept telling myself that nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me. I was fine.

But I was not fine. It would take me four years to try again. As I examine the reasons why, I first find a strange little lie that does not add up when I examine it: an angry feeling that the therapist did not believe me. But she did. She simply told me she couldn’t help me. And the copy of me who believed I could be fine without ever speaking of it took over again. No one believes you, the copy told me. A last—last?—lie. For that night, at least. I am built for this terrible pain, I told myself, and sent myself on my way.

I LEFT THE APARTMENT in the sky when the sublet there ended and moved back to Brooklyn briefly, to an ill-fated rental there, a one-bedroom apartment with an unfinished wood floor my landlord tried to pass off as hardwood—the carpet staples still in it. I did not complain, unable to tell him he was lying to me. I didn’t bother to unpack, and three months later moved out to Los Angeles—another sublet, this time with a friend in Koreatown, a share in his 4,000-square-foot apartment in a building named for a silent-film star, where I drove his borrowed white Porsche and tried very hard to be who I thought I should be at parties filled with professionally beautiful people I vaguely remembered or didn’t know at all.

I told myself I was chasing pleasure after so much grief. That I was writing my new novel. But I was desperate to escape the slow creep of deadness inside, the paralysis I felt in the face of this memory and all that came with it.^[18] The grief at following my dream of a boy into the woods, into what was just another trap in what felt like an unending series of traps. That I was still doing this was lost on me, though it came to me in moments, and I pushed the knowledge away each time. The paralysis that had stopped me again and again, this was what I was trying to kick away. I ran from myself by moving across the country, and even did the move twice, once out to Los Angeles and then back again, to Maine. I told myself I was making smart decisions, and sometimes I was—selling my second novel, applying to the MacDowell Colony, applying for a job at Amherst College—but that feeling followed me, the feeling of needing to stop and also to scream, as if I thought I could stop what was freezing me from the inside out by scaring it out of me. And there was always a new man, another will-o’-the-wisp of desire that I followed into whatever woods I found. With each move, a raft of boxes followed me, many never unpacked, joined by new ones full of unanswered mail from the previous address.

FOUR YEARS WENT BY.

When I finally found another therapist, I picked him by calling several therapists in the area and listening to their voices—I chose him for his timbre and tone. I went to him for what I thought would be triage after a breakup, something I’d done before. I had just moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, to begin a new job, and I had broken up with my boyfriend shortly after arriving, having discovered a sexually transmitted disease, despite being in what was supposed to have been a monogamous relationship. As I had caught him, the previous fall, trolling online for sex with strangers, and after discussing whether we wanted new rules—non-monogamy, specifically—or an end to our relationship—we had continued, as he’d insisted he wanted neither to be in an open relationship nor to end our relationship. This time, however, after certifying I had gotten my little hygiene problem in the way I believed I had—from him—I ended the relationship with no discussion. It was a minor illness but an unacceptable risk. This was what I thought I would be talking about with the therapist. And while it was where we began, we soon went elsewhere.

I had been talking about the patterns in my ex’s relationships, but the therapist kept turning me back to mine. He told me I had to stop trying to understand my ex and just accept the fact of him. I needed instead to understand myself. My habit of chasing after a fantasy. Do you know this phrase, the therapist with the nice voice asked me after a number of sessions, “In repetition is forgetting”?

I don’t, I said.

It’s Freud, he said. It refers to the Freudian repetition cycle. We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix the past, he said. We then only repeat it.

In repetition is forgetting.

He was a popular therapist in this town, and in conversation with a friend who was also seeing him, he had mentioned that one of our therapist’s specialties was treating gay men with a history of sexual abuse. I had silently noted this.

We can only break the future, came the thought. ^[19]

There is something I should tell you, I said.

And there, on his office sofa, I remembered my student who had never told her therapist enough, and began at last to try to tell someone everything.

I AM WRITING THIS from my future. The one I made from the one I broke, possibly only after that day.

The therapist gave me an exercise. You can’t get rid of the guardians who’ve kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they’ve been doing since you were a child.

I had never thought of them as protectors. The liar on the screen. The one who hid his wound from his mother in shame. The one who kept his hurt secret from his other therapists, trying, alone, to fix himself, unable to even think of saying the words.^[20] But finally able to write them. Of course each one was doing what I’d essentially told them to do, even if I no longer felt that way or wanted it done. They all were.

And then there was the one who’d left me the fragments of that novel like a trail through the woods, from the land I was in to this one. The one planning this world that the novel would make.

I had written a novel that, after it was published, let me practice saying what I remembered out loud for years until the day I could remember all of it. Until I could be the person who could stand it. The person who wrote that novel, he was waiting for me.

Texts Gardening

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