something is always far away

on writing & longing

Dear You—

I’m really going through it right now. Nothing too terrible is happening in my life (knock on fucking wood)—not like the hell that was the last week of April through mid-May. In fact, June has been pretty good to me. No, it’s nothing external, it’s just my poor broken heart. My heart is always broken or breaking—what did I write in that poem in April? heartbreak is my praxis—so that’s nothing new, it’s just… Well, you know how when you’re in crisis mode, you’re just so busy dealing with shit that you don’t have time to really feel things for more than a moment, but then after things calm down a bit, all the stuff you hadn’t had time to feel during that time comes flooding in? It’s like that. Things are okay—good, even—but all those pesky thoughts and feelings are hunting and haunting me.

I’ve been thinking about something Adam Gnade once posted on his Tumblr blog. I searched high and low, and can’t find the actual quote, so I’m paraphrasing, but it was something along the lines of: when you’re a writer, you put what you miss or what you long for into your writing. Say you miss a friend, because they’re dead, or just no longer in your life, or they live far away; say a venue you loved closed down, or you’re craving the burritos that place back home makes—you put all that in your stories. You write a character inspired by that friend, you describe that venue, you have a character eat one of those burritos. And in that way, you get to keep those people, places, and things close to you; you get to relive those lost moments over again.

I miss everything (and everyone) all the time, so I put it in my writing. I write poems about my dead friends. I write personal essays that describe favorite bands who have long since broken up; friends and lovers who are long gone from my life. In a fictional short story I’m working on, I wrote a scene where two of the characters visit one of my favorite cafes in Philly, a place I haven’t been to in 16.5 years. It doesn’t stop my heart from breaking, and it doesn’t stop these people and places from haunting me, but, to quote Sandra Cisneros: I put it down on paper, and then the ghost does not ache so much.

I’ve been thinking, also, of what Mary Oliver wrote about Walt Whitman: It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.

My whole life has been one long longing, and the things I most long for are romance and adventure. By ‘romance’ I don’t necessarily mean romantic love, I mean more like the olden use of the word ‘romance.’ As Rebecca Solnit wrote in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: The word romance once meant this kind of questing journey—“usu. heroic, adventurous, mysterious,” says my dictionary. I guess I just mean adventure. I am always longing for adventure, and always have been. Even during periods of my life when I was constantly out in the world seeing new places and meeting new people, I always wanted more. As an old friend once put it: To tell the truth, I’m lonely for adventure. It hasn’t been away very long, but I get restless fast. The same has always been true of me, and is certainly true now that my life is, by most accounts, less adventurous—I still have adventures, of course, but they’re usually smaller, and the time between them is farther apart. So I put all that longing into my writing: I write memoir and poetry about my romantic past; I write fictional characters who get to go on adventures I’ve never had.

It’s nearly July, and my haunted heart is breaking. I sit out on my patio, listening to dusty old broke-heart country songs. I sip a cold beer from a Nashville brewery, and try not to drink too much, because drinking too much just makes it worse. I miss and long for everything, and I put it in my writing, and I try, try, try not to let the blues make me bad.