![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 2nd, 2010 12:51 pmI wanted to jauntily declare it Rex Manning Short Fiction Day, but once I started reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna's piece, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time, I couldn't because as usual she broke my heart wide open like a geode.
We were just talking because I always accuse her of making me cry at work when sneakily reading her writing and after reading part X. (see below), I was like, what makes you such an amazing writer is that even though our divorce experiences were v. different, the way you put it into words makes me feel like you described so much better and more eloquently what happened to me and you make this connection between us and who knows who else, all linked together by feeling this way when these things happened to us.
And then she said something amazing, which wasn't amazing in and of itself because she does that a lot, but she said something that really snapped me awake in the best possible sense and gave me a feeling like I had gained a dot of arete or something. She said, the personal is mythological. Yeah.
First she left his house, and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four a.m. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person's smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.
Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband's world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband's world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else's Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.
Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained a first husband, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California.
yuki_onna's piece, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time, I couldn't because as usual she broke my heart wide open like a geode. We were just talking because I always accuse her of making me cry at work when sneakily reading her writing and after reading part X. (see below), I was like, what makes you such an amazing writer is that even though our divorce experiences were v. different, the way you put it into words makes me feel like you described so much better and more eloquently what happened to me and you make this connection between us and who knows who else, all linked together by feeling this way when these things happened to us.
And then she said something amazing, which wasn't amazing in and of itself because she does that a lot, but she said something that really snapped me awake in the best possible sense and gave me a feeling like I had gained a dot of arete or something. She said, the personal is mythological. Yeah.
First she left his house, and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four a.m. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person's smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.
Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband's world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband's world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else's Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.
Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained a first husband, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California.
