Sometimes the author I need to read is me

I said it during the Q&A section of the evening after I’d talked my heart out about the magic of fiction. I know that sometimes there is fretting over getting enough people in a virtual room to make the speaker feel welcome and wanted, and that’s totally valid—we all want to feel like we have something important to say—but at the same time, I loved the small group. It felt like meeting friendly people at the bar, sitting all alone in Chili’s the way I did one fall evening off Park and Preston, a short walk home after I’d gotten an apartment near the rehab center. The intimacy was comfortable. I mean, it’s been almost five years since the pandemic, and people’s social needs got weird. Or I mean to say, mine did. There’s some strange new mappings and the metaphors get a little odd. But you know what I mean. 

Anyway, what I said was: “Sometimes the author I need to read is me.” And the poet in the room agreed. And I was welcomed as wholly myself so I let that Shannon free, let her talk with no restraints. They asked interesting questions of me. The conversation flowed naturally; I didn’t have to confine myself to a strict question and answer protocol, silences naturally bubbling between the shyness of the crowd and air in my cheeks that I couldn’t quite let out all the way. They heard me. 

Sometimes the author I need to read is me. I can’t remember everything, but I can document. It’s important that I keep a record. I’ll never forget the way the emptiness crept in after that final Moving Day drive up to Plano when I dumped a whole tub of my diaries and notebooks into a dumpster somewhere near a barbeque joint. The SeaWorld diary, gone. Dr. Pepper, gone. High school Mead notebooks, gone. Travel logs, notes, nicely written down quotes. The songs of my heart, my badly drawn art, the drama, the details, the stories and retells. Gone. Gone. Gone. 

It happened again after that. Just about two years to the day (by rough estimates and a blurring of fact). I sat down in my closet in the yellow house. Well, first I sat down in the Ohio apartment closet. Two closets, the first to mourn what was lost, what should have filled up a closet of skeletons, the second to pluck out the treasures that were left of my shoebox. 

That Sunday, we had the Divorce talk and the next weekend, we hosted a Halloween party. Maybe it was during the party. Maybe after. It doesn’t really matter what day or even what time it was. The warm ceiling light glowed dimly as I made a trash pile of printed out msn conversations, jewelry from when I was young, notes, letters, pictures. I didn’t need any of it, it was all memory and no value, but how would you feel if your heart was a bird you were angrily plucking the feathers from? 

And so, these gaps in written experience and lost memories have shaped me, shaped my writing, but in ways that are outside the record. And I want there to be a record. Due to the circumstances, we’re already a little bit behind schedule. But the dream continues, despite obstacles. Someday, somewhere, somebody will find these words and they will need them, too. It’s a kind thing to do, for me and for them.

It doesn’t always have to be facts and footnotes and emotional excavation, though, mimetic as memoir can get. The most important thing is that it resonates and I can feel it, the other Shannon peeking out at me with a mirror in her hand. “Look,” she says. “Look how beautiful and magical, how dark and wondrous. Roar, little dragon!” 

You read enough books and catch enough looks that one day it occurs to you that you’re never in the story quite right. I mean, you’re there, but not the Main Character Energy you really are under that mask. That’s why I wrote Rose’s Locket for myself. And for my daughter. So I could feel seen in a book and she would learn to understand, if obliquely, my experiences and perspectives. Same with the poetry book, Mirrors Made of Ink. That's the one I want to read. So I compiled it. 

My writing belongs in a cozy closet packed with artifacts, the growing inventory for the eventual slide into museum that my house will morph into over the  years, budget willing. It’s something that belongs to me, a snapshot taken from a different angle every time. And some of the pictures are good, so I’m willing to share. But most importantly, I don’t want to lose any more, and the best way to get writing to outlast you is to write a lot of it and publish as much as you can. That, and sometimes I need to remember myself, to see the versions of her dance throughout the years. Sometimes I need her. More than anyone else’s words, my own are the perfect salve to every wound. 

Sometimes the author I need to read is me.