Oh, Carlos.

I wish she would tell me to stop what I’m doing. I wish someone would; I wish someone besides Joseph would care enough, ever, to do anything to prevent me from getting hurt besides saying “I don’t want you to get hurt.” But maybe this is not a realistic thing for an adult to want.

…Soon we got off the phone. It was bizarre to get off the phone without saying “I love you,” or calling him “baby.” It seemed unlikely that I would ever say those things to anyone else, either. My life from now on was going to be waking up in strangers’ beds and making my way to a beloved relative’s funeral alone, basically.

…Once as a gift he recorded a My Bloody Valentine-sounding cover of the Fleetwood Mac song “Sentimental Lady” for me, his beautiful voice tentative and plangent under layers of distortion. A few days after I got back from North Carolina, after that final phone call, I was listening to my iTunes on random and the song came up, and I deleted it. The song was beautiful and now no one will hear it again. The past is not a place that you can visit. The present is destroying the past as every moment replaces the moment prior. But if I close my eyes and listen hard I can still hear Joseph’s voice singing that song.

—

I finish reading Emily Gould’s sleek memoir in the bath tub which has fallen cold again after several reheatings and I try to mentally pin down a theory: Everyone I know is at least halfway unhappy. And of course that is ludicrous: I think of smiling girlfriends a half gallon of milk away from their wedding days. Friends cohabitating, renovating eco-friendly houses on shady streets. Sisters with sleeping new babies, down headed and wrinkly and pink.

It is not all of us, in this vague dissatisfaction. So why does it feel like everyone I know right now?

We have been wandering around the city this summer like rote mourners. We meet back up at the bar or work-year-kick off lunches and we shrug. July was fine. Work is fine. But even the bartender could tell you that something isn’t ok. There is a section midway through the book, a passage that confesses Gould and her unemployed best friend Phillip “weren’t brave enough or rich enough to do anything interesting with our spare time.” Which makes me laugh and cringe. Wonder how long we’ll stay in cities we are outgrowing.

I haven’t thought much lately of heartache, and that is a reprieve. I came home from time away thinking I would consider myself free, untethered. And now, instead, I am thinking of meals cooked in quiet tandem; anticipating evenings spent reading with the heat of his body in the room. I don’t want to talk, but I would like you here while I read.

It took a while for me to fall in love with this book. The first third or so is fine, interesting and competent but detached from me as this town becomes. The second half, on the other hand, is read and digested in some other region of the body altogether.

Initial stories of nights waiting in blues clubs and college frat parties and moving to New York file in to the head and, skimmed at a brisk clip, hold interest.

But stories of Joseph and this nonsensical, unavoidable falling apart are gulped straight down to the gut, wet and frantic with air bubbles. Consumed too fast for their richness.

My therapist said once that I use food analogies a lot. That even now my monologue descriptions of How I Ought to Feel or Act (this is a common theme in her office) are dotted with jargon better suited for discussing meals, appetites, hunger, restriction. I suspect I would use the same language if I were to really talk to you about this book. At some point, it begins to feel vital and to demand descriptions of consumption.

I think I love that Gould is still half sad. That life has rolled out of or on to itself and down the line. That there have become new men and new jobs and successes, really. Honest successes. And still, she speaks of him and those years achingly, reverent as a widow. And I wonder what kind of person loves her enough to let her do that.

In the end, I don’t just like this book. I end up loving it and I don’t begrudge the memoir of a not even 30 year old girl. I want to thank the publisher, funnily, for recognizing that all the snide young pride burns off eventually and in the end, there is just this surprisingly sincere account of loss. Loss that, maybe, needed to happen, but isn’t any cleaner for it. Loss and how it lingers, how it changes you. How you can’t stay with it but you don’t exactly move beyond it; not the same anyhow. Maybe this is the first or best presentation of loss as an unregrettable, wholly unavoidable part of the modern process: Here is what we will all leave of ourselves along the way and what else could we do?

There are at least ten dog eared pages in the second half of my copy of the book and the lines are not just memorable, they are the sort that you reread until you can’t for a while because they are too apt and it all begins to remind you. And at some point, you just can’t anymore. Rereading all this life doesn’t do you any good. But there she is, riding bike and going to nonchalant weddings too, saying it isn’t gone altogether so let’s not pretend it is, ok? And you respect her for that.

In the end, you should know that the heart does not at all say whatever, even if that is the generational shtick, the salve. It just takes 200 pages to undermine the irreverence of the title.

(via beenthinking)

Posted August 8, 2010 at 7:07pm || home