dear joan
a love letter of sorts —
Dear Joan,
I don’t know how to address the dead as I haven’t done much living myself. I have friends who are mourning you with me. One is crying on Christmas with Play It As It Lays. Another just lost his aunt to breast cancer and is reading The Year of Magical Thinking.
There was no magic these past two years, and your passing is proof. I first picked up your book in the back of my cousin’s car from Athens to Atlanta or the other way around, who knows best but my years of wilin’ out after I lost my father. I fell asleep during the medical bits, but there was something I never quite experienced before in the back of that car. One, it was reading a first edition kindle that had no backlight against the twilight buzz of the lone empty highways. Two, it was the construction of language, the house you built with your own words, the furnace you kept bold and burning, the harness that carved a sharpness in how keenly you saw the world, paid attention.
I wished I paid more attention as a teen, but your tactile tongue, the way you snapped sentences with syntax, sharp bursts of truth and longing, stuck with me, in that southeastern state of plantation McMansions and 2 for $5 butter-biscuit McChicken sandwiches.
I immediately needed a hardback, read it straight through, cried plenty, and became obsessed. It was because I didn’t know what I was doing in college. I wasn’t making friends or seeing much of San Francisco. I didn’t know what I was doing.
“I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes,” my friend texts me. And I read that line years ago, perhaps glossed over it too quickly, and yet, it still resonates now, years after years of not knowing what I’m doing.
Joan, what the hell am I doing?
Blue Nights came after. It made the most sense to follow up after Magical Thinking, to read about your daughter and that prologue, the hue still stands so true, that blue. I think of that blue which leads me to a break in your work with Bluets. It was then that I knew that my whole life was wrong. I needed to change majors. I needed to throw out old clothes. I needed to rent DVDs from the public library. I needed art, more of it, lots of it, more than I could understand. But I came back. I decided your fiction would be good. I picked up Play It As It Lays, used, in Berkeley. And it was during this time that I frequented the coast, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. California has always been my home, a terrain I never fully appreciated until I took the Amtrak, north to south, south to north, seeing the Pacific glimmer. Sea to shining sea, it made sense, the expanse. California is everything. It has deserts and mountains, left wing liberals and Orange County republicans. It has great marijuana and a strange mix of people. It is the whole world. That’s what my mother saw when she came here by way of the Vietnam War and Long Beach, the whole world. She couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else.
Joan, you’re still right, the center will not hold. This year feels like an extension of last year, and the next year will be the same too.
But I’m coming home in January, and it’s in these transitory moments when I pick up the White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Because the essay is how I’ve always seen you. Minor minutias of your life dragged out by the background of the Bay of Pigs or acid tabbed kids in Haight and Ashbury. You reminded me that though there are immense anxieties all over the world, that the self is also anxious. How does the self and the world at large maintain a center of gravity to make it from morning to morning? Joan, there were nights when I thought that the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t such a bad option, a leap of faith. But there would be your love for John Wayne or how the beaches settled sadness to a numbed hum that made me go out and buy a Coke because you drank them when you wrote.
So much of my life has changed because of you. I hope you know that. You’ve affected me and my friends, and whenever someone I know loses a loved one, I always send them a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking. When I think of days too humid for their own good, I think about Ryder Channing, Run, River. Whenever life has been so down it looks like up to me, I remember, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Love,
Forever from certain beyonds,
N
