How I’m telling this story.

There are some things a writer doesn’t want to write about, knowing that if she writes it she exposes stories that are not entirely hers to tell. Other times, she’s afraid to write because she’s afraid what she will say. And still other times, she doesn’t want to write because she doesn’t want to talk about it with an audience so large and unknown.
I suppose that’s the difficulty of writing: being honest enough with myself to admit, expose, announce all parts of myself and my stories and my experiences here.

And then I read Joan Didion’s book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and knew how honest she was and how sad it was, the thing she was writing about, and knew then that a good writer is honest. And tells the good and the bad because to excuse one part negates the whole.
It’s the way, though, that the writer writes the story that tells the truth or not. Maybe the writer will tell everything–exposing every detail in the order of its occurrence. Maybe the writer will describe a single moment of an event that is supposed to symbolize all of them together. The truth is, it’s up to the writer to decide how to tell the story. As long as she tells it.

And so this is how this writer will tell this story.

Vocabulary Words of the night: break-up, despair, search, clasp, exhale.

Over the course of four hours, Dennis and I, either one or the both of us, did the following:
wept
cried to our mothers
cried with our mothers
drank wine
were surrounded by friends
faked “allergies”
fretted
cursed the distance
ate chocolate
ate olives
hovered over the toilet waiting to throw up
folded laundry and wiped tears with said laundry
stood up and left circle of friends and/or family
felt afraid to talk with each other again
wanted to talk with each other again
dialed a phone
said “I love you.”
said “I’m coming to Brazil.”
said “I only want to be with you.”
said “I love you.”
said “You are everywhere here.”
said “You are everywhere here“
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”
said “I love you.”