Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [8]
The stuff on those yellow pads was bitter. I could not recognize myself in that bitter whiny hateful voice telling over all those horrible violent memories. They were, oddly, the same stories I’d been telling for years, but somehow drastically different. Telling them out loud, I’d made them ironic and playful. The characters became eccentric, fascinating—not the cold-eyed, mean, and nasty bastards they were on the yellow pages, the frightened dangerous women and the more dangerous and just as frightened men. I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with this stuff inside me. But holding on to them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live—and clinging to that decision. For me those stories were not distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of my life, and they were necessary in ways I could barely understand.
Still I took those stories and wrote them again. I made some of them funny. I made some of them poems. I made the women beautiful, wounded but courageous, while the men disappeared into the background. I put hope in the children and passion in the landscape while my neck ached and tightened, and I wanted nothing so much as a glass of whiskey or a woman’s anger to distract me. None of it was worth the pain it caused me. None of it made my people or me more understandable. None it told the truth, and every lie I wrote proved to me I wasn’t worth my mother’s grief at what she thought was my wasted life, or my sister’s cold fear of what I might tell other people about them.
I put it all away. I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it. I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself. I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me. I worked on a feminist journal. I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head. I watched other women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage we all did to each other. I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing committees and pragmatic coalition fronts. I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it. Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head. The bitterness with which I had been born, that had been nurtured in me, could not be eased with a lover or a fight or any number of late-night meetings and clumsily written manifestos. It may never be eased. The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished.
But a night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again. All those stories were rising up my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God just once—to be