I'll pick up a pen and plot it out
A lack of concentration
[A Lack of Concentration] by [Tetris = Therapy]
Undoubtedly, having my heart ruthlessly gashed and left behind to hemorrhage faith and pride was the best thing that ever happened me. Professionally.
Chances are you’ve heard the rag-to-riches tale, my eruption into the minds and mouths of the world at large. The publicity machine loves to tell the story of my luck in riding the early wave of new publishing, how I embraced a storytelling technique at the right time, in the right way, and exposed myself to untold numbers of readers and writers – and, of course, the tabloids – to great fervor and professional gain. But that's just one part of the story, one degree of many shades of truth.
But here’s the stark underbelly 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 familiar scenes from a time long ago, lay them out as invisible guidelines to pattern a new story. Each time I just modify the medium and the message, and shift the nouns, and a new work appears, but within it lives my love story. I amputate and graft, and in each new story still lives the beating heart of a doomed love affair. The truth is, for years I have secretly, endlessly regurgitated my rationale for enduring sadomasochistic pain and loneliness in the name of love. In the unbelievable way miracles unfold, I owe my success to a Viking named Daniel.
Once upon a time, many years ago I fell wholly in love with a man who lived in a far away country called Denmark. Loving this man – loving Daniel – was a true test of my battered ability to trust. Our love was so different than any other I had experienced. It wasn’t that we met and fucked fell in love online that made it different. Even the molecular change in my body from the addiction and withdrawal of his presence wasn’t what made this relationship different. It was discovering what it means to “follow your bliss,” and realizing that where bliss leads us is not for us to decide.
My prolific writing career was set in motion when I met my Danish lover. Because our relationship demanded heavy reliance on written words to close the gap of the physical space between us – using instant message conversations, emails, short stories, erotica – we took special care to perfectly craft our digital conversations. It was precious and it was challenging, and the words that shaped our love sparked in me a long-dormant desire to turn my way with words into a lucrative writing vocation. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be Daniel’s great love; these things seemed plausible together, while apart they were utterly inconceivable.
But in the end, the power of the words that brought us together were not enough. My international love affair ended in an explosion of unresolved confusion that left me angry and determined to turn my intangible time with Daniel into something tangible. I refused to let sacrifices made mean nothing at all, so even though I no longer had Daniel to write for I kept writing.
First, I wrote a [love story]. It was the kind of love story that had no love in it unless you knew where to look. It took less than two hours of delirious punching at keys and inhaling tall glasses of ice-clinking gin and lemonade to write. I had painted a picture of love's turmoil in livid words on a hand-splined canvas of revenge
I released my spewed story into the hands of fate and a now-defunct publisher who was accepting short fiction submission. I sent the short story off without a query letter, or editing, or giving any thought to its future. I just returned immediately to stringing letters into words. I couldn’t do anything else but write. For a long time I had a lack of concentration for anything not related to writing the same story again and again – the love story of Daniel and Michelle – examining it from every possible angle, always disguised by topic or genre or mood. But it was there, the love story, between the spaces. For months and months I ached. I seeped in an anti-septic, alcoholic fog, and my fingers clicked the keyboard like bones on the stretched skin of my digital love story.
My frantic pace was broken by martyrdom irritation when I received a modest check in the mail for my first attempt at professional writing – for that vicious love story – a few weeks later. I took a photocopy of the rectangle paper that proved my writing was worth something to someone, stuck it to my refrigerator, and kept writing. With or without Daniel, I would write.
I wrote critical essays and short stories. I conducted interviews with online relationship counselors and social web proponents. I published informational articles on media ecology. I reviewed Scandinavian films and music. I gave away my stories and reminded readers they could send me money, if they so desired, which they sometimes did. I took on a lover or two. I became someone's girlfriend. And I kept writing.
Almost too quickly, my name was everywhere. A New York Time article published early in my writing career touted my “unprecedented success in redefining authorship and legitimate publishing avenues.” Wired magazine gave me the cover, a three page spread, and said I was “a svelte, temperamental multimedia artist at the intersection of good and evil.” But the swelling point in my writing career, as The Huffington Post will tell you, was the release of my first novel, The Miracle in July. The story of two international lovers drawn helplessly by chance into a doomed romantic tryst is the closest I've ever been to facing the brutal truth of the rise and fall of epic love.
My life, both professional and personal, became a pleasant routine. In work, I simply picked through the flotsam and jetsam in my memory banks, then a flurry of words came out of me, these words were sent off, and checks appeared in my mailbox. In personal, I loved who I wanted and let go of the question of a forever love. Slowly, in proportion to these checks and couplings, my heart unbelievably wise, leaving only an impressive battle scar and no worse for the wear. But the details of the Danish man who once promised to loved me forever – the facts of his dimensions and his intimate details – have eroded over time.
A well-oiled machine now, my writing career lies beyond single fingers and my personal, daily care. It's the machine that tells the story of my Danish love now, and rumbles in earnest with movie production details and rumors that Viggo Mortensen wants to read for the part of my tall, dark-haired Viking lover. Soon – just as I have imagined it stark against the blackest nights after my lover left me – The Miracle in July is under contract to become a Merchant Ivory film.
But I’m tired. I'm tired of the broken story of love's failure to turn distance into endurance. I'm tired of rehashing moldy memories and poisoned ash of a love that burned too bright. And I’m troubled with fairness, of motives. I know that over time new information in the brain reshapes what’s already there. We remember things that never happened and tint scenes with experienced reflections. I'm not sure which parts of the story of my impossible love are true. What of what I remember really did happen?
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 out some fashion of the truth. I’ll view it cleanly and then commit to it. But rather than relying on flexible, rearranged memories of my love story, I’ve decided on a calculated whim to fly to Copenhagen. With me I’ll bring a shoe box I sealed tight and put away years ago that contains all the material evidence I have of the angel/devil man who loved me, once upon a time. I will reconcile the evidence of the past with the memories etched in my heart.
This is an honest post-mortem of my bittersweet digital affair, and the last time I'll exhume the corpse of inexplicably blissful digital love.