For the Story

Elizabeth Nguyen - 2009-07-12

When I heard Rich Robinson speak a couple weeks ago he talked about preaching a sermon that the writer needs to hear. This is definitely one of those.

Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes now/That's what you get for waking up in Vegas. This is actually a pretty crappy song in my opinion – catchy but the lyricism is a little lacking: Katy Perry sings, You gotta help me out/It’s all a blur last night/We need a taxi ‘cause you’re hung over and I’m broke/I lost my fake ID/But you lost the motel key. But maybe Katy – little badass pop starlet that she is – knows something about living and claiming her story.

I am sort of obsessed with stories – as source of truth, as healing, as how to see the human in everyone – each person with all their stories in a cloud around their ears, hovering, like mosquitoes. Or halos.

But sometimes it happens that instead of embracing these stories that make us, the hard ones, the coming out ones, the ones that end with waking in Vegas whether Vegas means a lost job or lover, drinking a little too much a little too alone or lying, or loving things instead of people.

Sometimes absolutes are easiest. Vegas was bad. I am never going back. You don’t want to hear about it. I am so sorry I ever went to Vegas.

But stories, especially waking up in Vegas stories come from somewhere: Rashid would wiggle his eyebrows mysteriously and make witchy fingers in the air. ‘From the great Story Sea,’ he’d reply. ‘I drink the warm Story Waters and then I feel full of steam.’ ‘You have to be a subscriber.’ And as Rashid tells us, ‘that’s much Too Complicated To Explain.’

Much Too Complicated to Explain. Or so Rashid says. Maybe Or maybe stories can come from saying yes. Yes, to marching with the greene county democrats in the Fairborn fourth of july parade. Yes to drunken volleyball with kids I haven’t seen since high school. Yes, to California by train, retracing a trip my mom took, many years ago after she finished college.

Summers, I think are good for stories. There’s a possibility that comes with daylight and freedom – either of schedule or of mind. I’m out of school, you might be harvesting your kohlrabi or garlic, taking vacation days or biking instead of driving, playing instead of watching, fishing instead of shopping.

We heard it on the radio. Mix 94.9 True Variety St. Cloud Minnesota. Send in a picture of you and a fish you caught this season. Win big, the DJ voice says, even if your fish isn’t. My friend Mya has a classic big fish photo: one 18in large mouth bass caught a couple weeks ago. Whether she’ll win the full week vacation on North Star Lake is unclear. But that she’ll send the photo in, is not.

When we come back in the fall and pour our water into a communal cup, we’ll have to have been somewhere. We need to go off to far places – far like St. Cloud Minnesota or far like living with my parents for a summer after college, in order to find our water. If we don’t go anywhere, whether place is geographical or spiritual or emotional, it so much less to come back.

The kinds of summers that birth stories are always the riskiest, the most widely lived. A friend of mine says you either have a good experience or a good story. Vegas may not have been the best experience, but coming home to tell about it can be.

I’m spending the summer away from some people I care about a lot – the three friends I’ve lived with for the past two years, women who taught me about spam and eggs and beets with butter, dumpster diving and living by loons, we filled a notebook with beer labels, got that sacred piece of undergraduate paper, made a home. I miss them and all my assorted – my co-workers and crazy queer community at Carleton College’s Gender and Sexuality Center, my academic and artistic mentors, the ladies at the liquor who don’t aks for my ID.

Lately, it’s been taking a lot to make my life happen in away that seems worth telling about. It’s not that I’m not waking up with glitter on my clothes; it’s that I’m struggling to see it. Good luck with transition time my mom told me the morning I said goodbye to my girlfriend. Transition Time. I’ve always been better at moving on, briskly, mall walker style, than transitioning with reflection and feelings and space. And I’ve always been better at the crazy, at waking up in Johannasburg or Mexico City or Havana. It’s waking up in Dayton, Ohio that feels like an unhappy ending.

It seemed like a good project. Learn to like to Dayton. See it not as high school: as a place of stagnation, complicated by inertia and isolation. Fault it not just because other places have been so good to me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with here, just that I can’t shake a heavy reminder of a life I thought I’d left. One where I only dreamed of waking up in Havana, instead of actually doing it. One where I watch movies about it, instead of living it. But I’ve done it, drank the Cuban coffee and guava smoothies, read the Gramma, lied to the customs officials. And just because I find myself here, where the salad dressing from Mama Disalvo’s is both my favorite and familiar, where the challenge I meet isn’t how will I get to Pinar Del Rio for free but how will I be happy standing still, mending pants, putting papers in folders, remnants of the part of the past four years where I had no time for patches or labeled piles, doesn’t mean Cuba or Vegas or wherever I’ve gone with this Katy Perry life metaphor won’t happen again. It will. When I wake up in Boston in August. When I start another story, this one called grad school. But sometimes it is just so hard. And the process seems far far too complicated to explain.

I’m not sure; a friend told me I require a lot of adventure to be happy. I don’t want that to define me. I want to be able to make adventure, to engage with where I am. To see the great Story Sea in the carpet of my bedroom, in the Segway police at the Greene, in the very texture of post-collegiate sadness, if that’s where I wake up. I want to have a photo to send in at the end of this month, I want to have been to Vegas, even if it hurt, even if it was sort of hard and exhausting, even if it looked like this, summer 2009, I went home. I want to have tried. I want to be full of steam.

We deserve, I think not to be absolved of our stories or accepted in spite of them, but to be loved, enthusiastically and openly, because of them. ’Ahem,’ the Walrus began. ‘Happy endings are much rarer in stories, and in life, than most people think. You could almost say they are the exceptions, not the rule.

But exceptions exist and impossible happens so why make a fuss about this particular impossible and even when it doesn’t – when the impossible happy ending slips away and it’s only an ending, we have the story, the water to take back, the summer after college we went home, another thing that made us.