I believe this is how conflict ensues: Add too many heroes and the story doesn’t make sense. Add too many people, each of them thinking they are the hero, and the story moves.
MANILA, Philippines - In a short story by Raymond Carver, a man has moved his bedroom suite to his front yard for reasons unknown. The mattresses and sheets all on the grass. A desk is moved next to the garage door. Smaller objects are wrapped in newspaper. A boy and a girl, furnishing their apartment, stop by the man’s house, believing a yard sale is ongoing. The man, not fussy about prices, sells his belongings very cheaply, taking any figure offered to him. He pours himself a glass of whiskey and puts a record on the player, then asks the boy and the girl, “Why don’t you dance?” The drink swills in the glass and as the man’s belongings are strewn all over the yard, he asks the young couple to pull each other close, and move.
* * *
It’s 4 a.m. and one of my best friends and I are exchanging stories on a mutual friend’s roof deck. This happens shortly after a party dies down. We’re both freshmen and utterly convinced that we’ve found someone we can commit love and time to, and I think we both partly wanted to watch the sun come up if only to render the event a little more picturesque, Instagrammable, whatever. To make such grand statements, I think, is expected from anyone sentimental enough to wait for a sunrise. But can we be forgiven for assuming that whatever’s laid out in the open is there for us to take? Or bargain over?
That was 2012. It’s 2014 and the people my friend and I thought we’d be with for a long time kind of ghosted themselves out of our lives, their departures almost inconsequential. That is to say, they no longer weigh us down. The year 2015 will bring with it graduation ceremonies, and friends in our age group looking for jobs in different cities or going to law school or med school, and us just kind of scrambling in the dark, pretending that four years of tertiary education are more than enough. That year will be marked by leaving, and when we all go out into the working world, we’ll be doing so convinced that the world has presented itself to us like a gift, all its opportunities and resources, and that we are there, above all things, to use them. I think of how many people saw my departure from their lives, whether intentional or otherwise, as inconsequential. That is to say, I hold no weight.
* * *
I believe this is how conflict ensues: Add too many heroes and the story doesn’t make sense. Add too many people, each of them thinking they are the hero, and the story moves.
I’m speaking as someone who has gone through a long stretch of depression accentuated by episodes of self-harm. It was in the latter half of 2012 that I had ghosted myself out of a small circle of friends, believing my company was something that was no longer wanted — an unnecessary weight. For a while, I’d take elaborate routes around school to keep from running into any of them. I’d like to think I’m over that now. But why I’d take such unnecessary lengths to keep calm is something the other end of a crisis line will never be able to answer, so I would think and speak in abstracts, if only to sugarcoat the concrete, but not by much. At a certain point, you’re inclined to believe that you’ve thrown yourself off-center, that you have a responsibility to acknowledge and accept that your story is not a clear-cut narrative but a chaotic sequence of events — evidence that the world has never been obligated to conform to anyone’s wishes. And there’s the temptation to believe that this is deserved, thinking that if life isn’t headed in one clear direction, then this must be representative of a larger flaw in the protagonist, and if the story isn’t geared towards a redemptive arc, then where else? “Now and then a car slowed and people stared. But no one stopped. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t, either.”
At one point it became a form of relief, for me, to imagine that I was neither the boy nor the girl nor the man in the Carver story, but the front yard. Something like a transitory space, with valuable things strewn over my surface, a space that does not ask anyone to move but knows that everyone moves eventually. Cut loose here, let your feet breathe, pull someone close because you’re lightheaded. And everything’s for sale, and cars might slow down to watch, but they’ll never stop and there’s music playing. What else is there to do?
* * *
There’s a term for the traditional structure of a work of fiction: Freytag’s Pyramid. You’ve probably seen it before. Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement. The pyramid peaks at the climax, and that’s the only peak. It’s a helpful guide for anyone who needs a rough outline on how to assess a simple narrative, but the truly great stories are the ones with several peaks and long valleys and deep pits. A story looks less like a pyramid and more like an erratic heartbeat on a monitor. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… Or at least we do for a while.”
Carver’s point was never to tell us that we should all dance, but the query still stands: Why aren’t you? One way to dress up a goodbye is with ceremony. They don’t just hand you the diploma, they dress you in a midnight blue robe and ask you to walk up the stage and bow, and you feel compelled to just toss your hat into the air along with everyone else, and you all cha-cha your way out of the premises in one big congo line of grown-ups. The house is being cleared and wherever you’re headed, at least it’s somewhere, and the home you’re furnishing can wait. Why don’t you dance?