“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…”
-Joan Didion
We all know this. And if we write, we know the rest of the quote and how it pervades so much of modern life.
Where we find ourselves with more means of expressing our stories but also so much more information to force narrative upon.
Through social media, the internet, and widespread travel, the sheer breadth of human experience available both to see and to live has never been so wide or global.
And there are more venues than ever to share the photos, videos, quotes, and fragments from which we as much capture as create ourselves.
We may not all be writers, but we are all certainly storytellers.
What keeps hitting me in all this is whether we seek to “freeze that shifting phantasmagoria” of our lives or do we create something more and seemingly beyond ourselves.
What happens when you can no longer tell the difference?
I‘ve never really talked about the Romanian though I lived with her memory for years. An immortal summer and those amazing and still not quite believable nights and days on the Dalmatian Coast; that feeling after we hiked to the top of the fortress in Kotor when we stared out onto the Bay and what felt like the rest of our lives, equally as sublime.
For years afterward it felt like I was carrying what felt like possibility lost. I never followed or stalked her though perhaps on a handful of sad wistful nights, I did pull up her profile or punch her into Google. As if to have a peek at another life.
The one where I should have taken the leap and run off and settled abroad. For so long that had been an ambition, a dream. To escape the surly bonds of home and live that transcendence of culture and language I’d always found abroad. And to do so in love felt surreal.
For years she lived in my head as a reminder of the life that eluded me.
It was the sharpest of possible contrast when I found myself back ashore, caring for my mother as she struggled with cancer, trying to keep my father’s spirits up.
After she passed, I’d never felt so alone in my life. I’d only ever met one person even remotely like her. Take care of Dad, she said. I got the house and gardens ship shape and it lifted my father’s spirits in those dark days.
I’d always wanted to write a novel but never found the time or inspiration until it stove my heart on the Dalmatian Coast. Mom always encouraged me to follow my intuition. Like coming ashore for my family, there was no choice. Writing it dulled the loss of the two most striking women of my life.
And yet something else, cropped up as I sat down to capture that feeling, that summer, everything, really. It was a long effort but after I finished it. I needed a break. Needed to get back out into the world.
I started sailing and delivering boats and gathering my sea time for a Captain’s license. It was a lonely existence and though I would meet girls and even have a girlfriend, I always felt this distance from my feelings.
They had become so wrapped up in the book, in the story I created, my own sort of myth of love, that anything short of that fantastic didn’t feel genuine.
As if my creativity might find some attraction and intensity and build up those feelings well beyond what was there, writing a relationship and blurring the authorship with emotion.
It felt like my every thought and word was not the expression of something real and happening, but a want chasing what I had found. Trying to fit the simple tenderness of affection, attraction, and even love into this grand frame.
And it would go on and eventually, a dispiriting sense of reality would creep in with disappointment that they would never live up to the story of us I was quietly writing.
That’s partly why I chose the peripatetic existence of working on the water. It almost foreclosed the possibility of a real relationship or the necessity of ever solving what felt like a rapacious doubt.
It felt like a new story. That I would forever be at sea chasing the past, like some modern-day Gatsby ever looking out onto the sea. A character in my own quiet tragedy, teetering between disbelief and the ever-defiant pinprick of hope like a ship’s light just scarcely visible on a dark night’s horizon.
It felt like the only extremity that could ever rival those feelings I had for her.
Years later, I ran into a friend of a friend and found out she got married. Of course, I thought. My friend even worked with her husband for a while and told me the similarities between us in personality, demeanor, and looks were absolutely gobsmacking.
It was real. And there was something heartening to know that that love wasn’t some illusion, what I’d never really felt before wasn’t some wanting trick, as if to write and insist my yearning into reality would make it so.
And yet, still, there’s that feeling, that sense of creating rather than finding and describing, that the imagination can carry life elsewhere. I haven’t lost the habit but if anything it’s made life clearer. I find myself seized by the things that elude my own narration and explanation.
It reminds me of what I felt on that mountaintop, something indescribable, a knowing that still brings a tear to my eye.
I still live with this story of love and sometimes I wonder if it really happened as intensely as I wrote it down. It will probably happen again and despite the pestering awareness of storytelling, it only reminds me that love is not something we make or create, it’s forever beyond us.
If someone ever makes me feel that way again, I won’t write a story about it but have the courage to simply live it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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