The Miracle in July

I’ll pick up a pen and plot it out
a lack of concentration

[Big Tasty] by [Tetris = Therapy]

Having my heart ruthlessly gashed, left behind to hemorrhage faith and clots of dark pride, was the best thing that ever happened me. Professionally.

Here’s the stark, underbelly truth about this “unprecedented success” of mine: in all of my works, if you know where to look, you will find a love story. My love story. Whatever piece I am tasked to write, I need only walk through those familiar scenes and lay them out as invisible guidelines to pattern a new story. Just modify the medium and the message, and shift the nouns. I amputate and graft and in each new story lives my lost love. It’s been the gravy train formula for my prosperous writing career. I endlessly regurgitate my rationale for enduring sadomasochistic pain and loneliness, in the name of love.

This is a forensic excavation of a bittersweet digital affair, and the last time I will ever tell this story.

Years ago I fell wholly in love with a man who lived in a far away country. We fell in love in a way that I had never experienced before. Loving him changed me for good. Not necessarily for better, but certainly for good. It wasn’t that we met and fucked and loved online that made this love different. It wasn’t the messy, fragmented end of us, or the truths dripping like an acid IV into my questioning mind, or the exploding shards of hard, unavoidable facts. Even the molecular change in my body from the addiction and withdrawal of his presence wasn’t what made this relationship different.

It was the experience of realizing, fully experiencing, what it means to “follow your bliss.”

I had never considered any man my partner before, a true equal. Daniel was my mirror image, and we took turns being angel and devil. We fell in love by accident, suddenly and passionately, and during the course of our love affair it was decided that I would become a brilliant writer and he would become a successful actor and together we would figure out a way to be together while living physically apart. It was terrible being apart, the most difficult thing I have ever attempted, and the truest test of my battered ability to trust.

When he left me (or I left him, I don’t know anymore) I was savagely broken, inconsolable, but not surprised. I canceled everything remotely social. I did my best to get fired from my job as a videographer for a shitty downtown [Portland, Oregon] law firm. I drank, and sobbed, and missed the man I wanted more than any other. I wanted so badly to hate him, but I couldn’t.

The parting of us didn’t stop spatial closeness to Daniel. At first I lurked around shamefully until disgust forced me to sever connections wherever I could online. Then offline I printed out hundreds of pages of our words and archived our digital records on DVDs, before deleting all of it from electronic devices. Next I gathered up souvenirs and reminders of my this man who shook me, our promises, and put all of it out of view in a spare room’s closet, sealed tight in a shoe box.

But I could not part with the music we shared, each song lyric a hidden message between lovers. And I was still furiously empty so I filled the void with words.

I had promised Daniel I would write. We were standing in his tiny kitchen in [Denmark], washing our dishes and talking about our future, and I promised him I would write again. Not just for the two of us, not just stories we wrote and shared, but write for me. To make a go at being a professional writer. We were both writers, we are both writers, and I took special care to perfectly word our digital conversations. It was precious and challenging. The words we wrote pulled me to Denmark, led me to leave my home and family, and travel to his home and be part of his family for two short, wonderful, revealing weeks.

In the end, the power of the written words that brought us together were not enough.

So I wrote [a love story]. It was the kind of love story that had no love in it unless you knew where to look. I painted a picture of my turmoil in livid words on a hand-splined canvas of revenge. It took me less than two hours of furiously punching at keys and drinking tall glasses of ice-clinking Sapphire and lemonade. And the next morning, after short fits of custom-made dreams with their glimpses of incubating theories, I emailed my spewed frustration to a couple of online publications accepting short fiction submissions.

At the time there were only a handful of online magazines and fiction blogs; in fact this was a time when the word “blog” produced a red squiggly line from Spellcheck. Self-publishing was considered the destiny of untalented writers, but it was my part in the partnership to turn any talent I had as a writer into something tangible. This would keep us together, somehow. We had faith and love and amazing online sex. That was plenty good enough for me.

I believed in the impossible, because I was following my bliss.

I had already researched and chosen the most promising places to pitch the kinds of writing I enjoyed doing. I had a whole life of slow boiling stories that I needed to write about, and my first paid piece was smoldering retaliation. I sent the story out to a now-defunct short fiction publisher who posted it straightaway, much to my martyrdom irritation. I got over my soreness when they gave me money for it. I took a photocopy of the check, stuck it to my refrigerator, and kept writing.

I couldn’t do anything else but write. I had a lack of concentration for anything not related to writing the same story, again and again, examining it from every possible angle. I wrote like a madwoman, with all the feverish intensity the word implies. I wrote critical essays, short stories, interviews with online relationship counselors and social Web proponents, deviantly detailed erotica, informational articles, and lancing film reviews. I even consulted on where to find great Italian and Indian buffets in Denmark for an online cookbook.

I started getting a lot of checks in the mail.

It was a routine that allowed me to live without him. I picked through the flotsam and jetsam in my memory banks, a flurry of words came out of me, I sent it off, money came. Quickly, maybe too quickly, my name was everywhere: Michelle Ray, Web 2.0 Writer Extraordinaire. The title makes me cringe. Michelle Ray, Love Story Cannibal is more accurate. It still seems a fallacy, this turn of events leading to the place I am now.

First I was Internet Famous for my online writing and multimedia storytelling. Then I became a Literary Star when I published a couple of short stories and an essay in a cultural studies academic journal entitled “Your Internet Boyfriend: Guidelines, Suggestions, and Are You Fucking Crazy?” which I submitted as a joke.

It was that joke essay that got me the cover of Wired magazine and a three page interview in which I’m called “a svelte, temperamental multimedia artist at the intersection of good and evil.”

Early last year my short fiction piece The Miracle in July was optioned for a movie, and now I am suddenly a Hollywood Screenwriter. This version of my love story comes closest to the truth as my heart knows it. Soon the world will see on the silver screen the blessed birth and flaming wreckage of my love story just as I have already seen it played out on the backdrop of my imagination over and over again.

Only now it’s a Merchant Ivory film and [Mads Mikkelsen] is slated to play my lover.

Over time new information in the brain reshapes what’s already there. We remember things that never happened. But with each remuneration there seems a chance to get it right this time. To see it from a different angle - what if things had been harder for us?  Or easier?  Would that have made a difference?  But more important to my ego, to answer the question Why? How could I believe, with all my heart, that this hopeless romance with this particular man could sustain a web-centric existence?

Rather than relying on flexible, rearranged memories of my love story, I’ve decided on a whim to fly to Copenhagen. To live, or maybe to flee there. I don’t know yet. With me I’ll bring that shoe box containing all the tangible evidence I have of the angel/devil man who loved me, once upon a time, and reconcile the evidence of the past with the memories carved in my heart.

It is time to find a way to cease forever circling the drain of the past, rewriting the same memories like a CD stuck on a single musical hiccup. I’ll pick up a pen and plot it out, protecting my leaky heart by adopting the stoic nature of my Viking lover. I will treat the spirits that I release from slicing up the past as subjects to study, impartially. I will ascertain some fashion of the truth, view it cleanly, and then let it go. I will commit to it.

And when the corpse of inexplicable love is splayed, weighed, and documented, I will not write this story again.

Read the next segment of The Miracle in July:  (1) Rewind

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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.