this won’t be [published] chronologically

I kept a journal in early life. I started it when I got my first computer at 18, then stopped for the most part in my late 20s. It was around the time I found my voice in fiction. Before that my fiction was straining and awkward, unsatisfying to both readers and writer. I kept a journal to explore and recount, vent my frustrations for running in quicksand. I needed a place to look for what I was trying but failing to find in my intentional writing.

Over time my journal was written in more of a pigeon english. It was shorthand in some respects, drunken in others, an attempt to stay ahead of my thoughts. This was the only place I could write without constraints, because I never expected anyone else to read it. Unlike when I “tried” to write, my journals were almost always satisfying, just unordered, undirected, chaotic.

Of the writing I showed others, both fiction and non, my romantic partner at the time summed it up best when she told me, “I think you have a brilliant mind, but you’re not a brilliant writer.” It was a sucker punch, but a fair assessment, one I heard confirmed by all professors and mentors for years to come.

I’d heard the expression before, about finding your voice, and it always sounded like an achievement. I thought I had to read as much as possible, and learn the craft of writing, and all that brilliance my teenage lover saw would spill out. I think the discovery of voice might be that for a lot of people, but it’s not how it happened for me. For me it’s more accurate to say my voice found me. It was an exhilarating, but also humbling experience. It wasn’t mine, in a possessive sense, and I instinctively knew that if I ever tried to grab hold of it like that, it would slip away, maybe forever, like an old fish wised up by too many hooks that almost got him.

I was in my second year of a BFA program, in a fiction workshop. I wasn’t happy with my work, but I hadn’t read anything in 4 semesters of workshops that impressed me either. I aspired and hoped, for myself first and then the others, but in my honest heart, at the time, I thought we were all a bunch of amateurs and posers. We were doing a poor impression of what we thought writing was.

Enter K. Harris. I look him up sometimes. I think he’s a teacher of some kind, still in the city. He’s not a published author, which I find tragic, but mostly because of how much one thing he wrote changed my life. It’s like Q Lazzarus giving the world, “Goodbye Horses,” then going back to being a bus driver in Queens. I was always happy she was happy, but like so many also wanted all the music inside of her she never let out.

K grew up in Jamaica, I think, or maybe just one or both of his parents were from there. We were never friends outside of class, so I just have this one piece to go on. He missed a lot of class, if I remember correctly, came just often enough to be around the next semester.

My reading lists up to that point were porcelain white. I didn’t do it on purpose, but that’s how things worked back then. Culture was controlled, dictated, largely by white academics. So when I read K’s piece I thought he’d invented his own language. It was the kind of piece that grabbed you from the first line, teaches you it’s dialect, takes you somewhere. I still read that piece at least once every year or so, although I should have much of it memorized at this point.

When Rome was burning, I was already in Paris. The spirit flies swiftly in decadence. The bright lights diminish and cold, lost time is left. The spirit has already traveled leagues in time and place to America in the 1990’s. A rich, creative time in which the spirit was ultimately increased.

It built on itself, higher each paragraph, in what I would learn afterwards from a humble and flattered K, was not a language of his own invention, but Jamaican Patois. He was also amused with me, I should add, a sheltered white boy who didn’t know there were whole universes around him he didn’t see. He said he’d give me a reading list after I asked, “you mean there’s more stuff written like this?”

I read more of it, and I loved it, but nothing ever hit me as hard as K’s short story. It was because when I experienced it for the first time, my ignorance was a gift. First reading it a dozen times between getting a printed copy at Tuesday’s class, then hearing K read it on Thursday. The professor -I’ve forgotten his name, but he was a pale as me- he used to always read our pieces in workshop, but he asked K to read his own, either out of wisdom or fear. I’m so glad he did because I loved it before I heard it aloud, but I felt like I was at some cult ceremony when the author, a usually quiet man, put all of himself into it. I remember fighting back Jodie Foster from Contact tears, fighting back wanting to jump up and scream at every other student sitting there calmly, “get up! this is fucking alive people!”

It left me with something, namely a beautiful misunderstanding. For 2 days I’d thought, this guy made up his own language. It reminded me immediately of my journal, which had become increasingly at this point its own language. I thought, if I can understand this, be made to understand this by the work itself, then why don’t I just write like I want to write? Nobody likes the fiction I write anyway, including me, so there’s no reason not to chuck it all and let it come out like your private writing.

So I did. First, I stuck to my journal, unsure really what the plan would be, how it would all work. I was almost afraid to try it in fiction. What if I lost it in my journal entries, started hating those as much as the stuff I wrote for class? The journal was my life preserver, so for weeks I kept it all close.

I was working a lot my first 2 years of school. My day started at 5, included an hour and a half of subway travel and another 20+ minutes of walking. I had to time my morning coffee just right, in a thermal cup, untouched but kept hot until I made my first transfer in Manhattan. Then I would start to sip slowly, no more than half until my second transfer in Brooklyn. Once that last train started moving I finished my coffee, still barely made it to the closest building on campus needing to evacuate everything.

All that to say, I spent my day there until 3:45, jumped on a train to get back on shift in Chelsea by 5:30. A couple weeks after the revelation of K, my last class was canceled. I was too tired to even think about plodding to the train (remember: undiagnosed/untreated narcolepsy). I found an empty classroom and fell asleep over a desk.

One advantage to having narcolepsy is our ability to sleep anywhere and near-instantly. There’s also a fact that’s equal parts advantage and disadvantage: since we don’t sustain deep sleep at any time, sometimes 12 hours of sleep feels like we didn’t sleep at all, but just as often a nap as short as 5 minutes will be as refreshing as a “full night’s sleep.” That was the case that day. I woke up, startled, because it felt like I’d been out for hours.

I was as alert as I could be, with over an hour to kill. I opened up a notebook, and started to write. I thought it would be a journal entry, but it quickly became a story. It felt like me, but it also felt like I was taking dictation. It wasn’t like trying to write before, but it wasn’t like journaling either. It was something new to me. Narcoleptics often have a twilight feeling, a slight dizziness from lack of sustained sleep. Sometimes it’s miserable, but others and in this instance, it was intoxicating. I felt high, like I was reading a story and not writing it, looking down at my hands doing the work but it feeling like an Ouija board.

I finished the story and can tell you, I will remember those few minutes as my life fades from me. It was like craving a god your whole life and all but despairing, before he or she reaches out and makes itself known. You see something, feel something, and are overcome with emotion. I wasn’t proud of myself, didn’t feel gifted or talented or any of that shit I’d wanted so bad. I felt a profound sense of gratitude. I didn’t expect anyone else to love it, after all, nobody loved K’s piece except me, but for the first time I could read my own work and feel, “this is exactly what I was trying to say.” That’s what my voice finding me was, something outside of me, transcribed. It was beautiful, truly, one of my top five or ten memories.

I thought it would go away at first, thought it was a fluke. I could see how wrong everything before that had been, and I didn’t know why it was coming out differently. I still don’t, but I think it was because I gave up on trying to be a writer, and learned to love what was already there that didn’t fit. It was still me, so I let it run loose, and it was great. I’ve instinctively known since then to not let parts of me through into the fiction.

It’s hard for the walking around me to let things alone. I’m better than I used to be, but I went from thinking Fellini’s quote, “I can live in my art, but not in my life,” was deep and cool in my youth to registering it as a complaint in my middle age. When I read back over personal entries like this one, I respect my voice, but don’t love it. Given enough time something about this will make me cringe, but I’ll leave it here. That cringe could be my final frontier, the grimiest parts I don’t want to love, just want to go away.

Working to heal the abusive relationship I have with my worst self. I resent the fuck out of him, like a dog who bit everyone I used to love.