Feeling fragmented
These days, when I talk to Jin, I find myself starting sentences without finishing them. I think it’s that I’m really tired. It’s that specific kind of tired where my body can move and do things but my brain is on low-batt.
Still, I’m stubborn in my choice to stay up at night after the kids go to sleep. Even though Jin and I live in the same house, this time at night is the only time we do some actual talking with each other. We whisper, because the baby still sleeps in a bassinet close to the bed. We turn up the sound machine. This machine has several choices: ocean, rain, thunder, waterfall, and then just white noise, the one that sounds like the inside of an airplane. In my whisperings I start saying, “I just…” and realize I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. I recount what happened, though sometimes I end up mixing up what happened yesterday with something that actually happened months ago. “The other day,” I’ll say, referring to something from April.
This week, our topic in my nonfiction class happened to be about “writing in fragments.” I taught Richard Rodriguez’s “Late Victorians,” a stunning and devastating essay published in 1990 on being gay and living in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. The essay is made up of 13 sections, some short, some long. Some are written in 1st person, and a few in 2nd person addressing his friend who died of AIDS. There’s a section that sounds like a lofty professor lecturing on St. Augustine and Hamlet. Another section describes his Victorian house like an article in Architectural Digest, only to turn into a complex argument about the words and phrases associated with being gay (like “coming out of the closet”).
It’s one of those essays that I return to, not only to teach but to read for pleasure. I still remember the feeling of pure liberation when I first wrote an essay in fragments, the way he does. There’s something exhilarating about “breaking the rules.” In high school, you’re taught to write essays like linear formulas, because the end-goal is passing exams. (As some of you know, I rebelled pretty hard against this and tested poorly on all my APs.) In college, you’re taught to write complex arguments, and while this opens up the writing to more possibilities, you’re still meant to write like you’re speaking to an academic colleague. Even in the MFA, there’d be teachers and students giving each other advice as though they held all the answers, advising against the 2nd person voice because it’s “tricky to pull off,” or asking for things that weren’t very helpful, like “Could you add more interiority?”
Someone in my class suggested that our brain processes thoughts and feelings and memories in fragments. That’s why, even though Rodriguez’s essay is fragmented, it still reads smoothly.
I thought about my late-night doom-scrolling and how my brain has adapted to reading the world in fragments. A covid-19 report is followed by a photo of someone’s baby, followed by a candy ad, a video from a protest, a positive review of a new novel, someone mom-shaming followed by a bunch of people shaming that shamer, a photo of someone’s freshly baked cookies, and then her name over and over again like a chant: Breonna Taylor. I tell myself I’m catching up with “what’s going on.” But if I try to articulate exactly what that is, I’m stumped. There’s so much.
But also, it’s quiet except for the white noise machine. I still can’t finish a sentence when I’m speaking out loud.
Somewhere in the middle of the essay, Rodriguez starts to talk about a 19th-century mirror he purchased from an interior decorator.
“With reason do we invest mirrors with the superstition of memory, for they, though glass, though liquid captured in a bay, are so often less fragile than we are. They—bright ovals or rectangles or rounds—bump down unscathed, unspilled through centuries, whereas we…”
He doesn’t—maybe can’t—finish his sentence either. For a moment, I’m in San Francisco in 1990, inside Rodriguez’s head, no, his heart, looking into this mirror, thinking of all the deaths and what it means to be in grief when there’s so much to mourn all at once, all the time.
And then I’m back to saying: I just…