a true story

I've been playing with pieces of this for a few months, just shuffling them around and trying to see where and how they might fit. This part of the process is like casting the bones, reading the possibilities. I don't know if this is "it," but it's something, for now.

When we first moved to Mexico, I thought I’d be a long email person. A few of my friends who moved far away from the tri-state had put me onto the idea with their quarterly missives: lovely, wandering rambles (just for us in the bcc club) through their lives unfolding in new surrounds, with that sweet, postcard feeling of being both closer and farther away.

I sent one. I might have sent a second but I can’t remember now and I can’t bring myself to look.

A friend told me recently that she’s trying to write nonfiction for the first time because a writing teacher told her she should explore not filtering her life through fictional stories. How rude, we declared, even as we agreed that it’s good advice.

It kept hovering in the corner of my mind, the idea of writing what happened. Of telling the truth. I’ve been writing nonfiction for years but there’s always been a squirm. I can call it the art of storytelling, or perspective, or craft if I’m feeling myself. But my troll mind always whispers the same translation back to me: Liar.

I’ve been obsessed with truth — credibility — since I was a kid. Too young for numbers. I know why I learned (was taught) to lie but it was still mine to carry: the shame, the guilt, and the heavy, heavy truth.

I don’t hesitate to point the finger at myself. At least, that part of me does not. I’ve only recently tried to engage in parts work and at nearly 40 years old, I have a lot of them. I keep coming across a bus metaphor: All our parts (inner children to some) are on the bus (that’s me, I’m the bus) because they’re all good and valid, but they’re not bus drivers. I think it works. Mine is a mid-year-field-trip-bound cheese bus with the inner selves equivalent of 20 ninth-graders and a bluetooth speaker (iykyk).

(But then: Who’s supposed to drive this thing while I turn my back to the windshield and sweep the passengers with my teacher face when things approach rowdy, and what do you mean “me”?)

Who’s in charge of the truth?

That part of me — the How It Happened department — has the worst kept records in the whole operation. I know better (I should, anyway) than to accept every citation they issue. But the manager of that department is the one I least want to talk to.

There was never anything I could say to the accusation. Maybe that’s a shared experience; there’s only so much you can say when someone calls you a liar. As always, the perfectionist part of me is utterly disappointed that I can’t come up with something clever in the moment (Aren’t you a writer? she wonders aloud, in the empty, echoing cavern of my mind).

It usually comes down to they-said-you-said, and all your emotions become evidence against you. If you’re too quick, if the indignation makes you pink, if you twitch and squeak, if you say too little, if words erupt and ooze in a lava flow of explanation and insistence. Even with receipts in hand, it comes down to feelings — yours and theirs, neither of which you can control.

(Unless you’re one of those people who can control their feelings, in which case please carry on piloting your clean, air-conditioned bus filled with well-mannered parts passengers and enjoy your day.)

I can’t ever win a ye-said-me-said because I’ve always been lying. The inner me’s panic and all of the cabinets and corners we’ve stuffed with guilt and shame eject their contents like confetti canons, because even if I didn’t lie this time, I have lied. So much.

My cousin attributes the spectres of our guilt to our Catholic upbringing. There are ten years between us, plus ten years of silence punctuated by a few ship-to-shore missives sent sporadically across the ocean of my estrangement. If I’m not careful, her childhood can seem like a funhouse version of mine — life on the right side of the looking-glass.

It’s neither accurate nor fair to her, but I could tell the story this way, braid together our heartstrings and yoke us to the curse of our mothers’ shared blood.

If you called me a liar, you wouldn’t be wrong.

I was taught to lie by someone who hurt me and called it “love,” or “fun,” or “our secret.” By the time I learned to classify the leaden queasiness and the breathless grasp of anxiety as pain, I had lettered in blaming myself for things I had no control over.

(So many people have said to me: How can you blame yourself for something you couldn’t control? All people who breathe air instead of shame, who don’t apologize for the weather. I bet not one of them has had a panic attack while singlehandedly destroying everyone’s vacation because they couldn’t pick a restaurant for dinner.)

So what would I write in the long email? Is it fair to send out sixteen paragraphs on money and stress and stories of tiptoeing through conversations with neighbors and trying not to set off any racist/homophobic/colorist/transphobic explosions? Fun fact: You (and by “you,” I mean “I”) can be depressed anywhere!

And is it untrue to talk only about the gilded edges: our next-door neighbor screaming my name over the wall between us to call me out for a warm plate of food or a sizzle of hot gossip, my husband beelining to the bakery aisle during our grocery shopping trips to admire the bold choices and steadily improving skills of the cake artists, the young pelicans playing diving games in the calm water of the Gulf in the morning?

The former stirs up the chorus to insist that I’m playing the victim in three-part harmony (my brother, my mother, and my worst roommate). With the latter comes the phantom of an ache in my jaw, which remembers the clench of a forced, full-handed smile, the floodgate crammed like a champagne cork topping off my swollen, airless throat.

I search my camera roll for sunsets and happy dogs and our shiny teeth, swallow the knot of anecdotes I am calling complaints and whining. It goes down like a fist.

If you called me a liar, I would answer with the apology that I keep tucked in the corner of my eye.

And if you asked me for the truth, I don’t know if I’d answer at all.

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xo, Priscilla