Floods

And more disasters of 'yes'

CW/TW: sexual violence

A year before the earthquake, the idea for Sugarcoated was brought (kicking and screaming notwithstanding) into this world.

I’d spent a whole year typing out the contents of my brain, bringing the last few chaotic years into focus. I churned out morning pages, essays, poems, reflections, drivel, assembling a collage of stories that will ultimately amount to a queer memoir. My writing buddy and dear friend, Catherine, invited me to apply to a writer’s conference, a place where I and a small, trusted cohort would be mentored by a prolific and brilliant memoirist.

When my application was accepted, my stomach clenched. I knew my memoir would ultimately be funny, painful, moving,

the bad

informative, healing, beautiful,

the big bad

and

…and I had no idea how to talk about The Big Bad. It was the only thing my fingers refused to write. Every time I thought of it (every day every hour) I’d lean out, grasping for the safety of my clown, and write some other desperately mortifying thing, like when my crush found out I lived next to a cemetery.

The Big Bad lived only inside my brain, where it replayed over and over, impossible millions of times, every day for thirteen (now, fourteen) years.

I had choked it out in a slow, acidic drip of words to very few people, something only made possible once I broke the long seal of silence and came out. It was like trying to turn my skin inside out.

The morning after being accepted into the program, Catherine asks me what I mean to work on. I feel nauseousitchyhot. There’s an essay I can’t not write anymore. I can’t go to this program without telling this story. I need the guidance, the sanity, the deft skill to willingly annihilate myself.

I look at Catherine and carefully say the same five words I’ve told my therapist, my mother, my partner. Her face falls. Oh, honey.

She sits on the other side of our Zoom where, muted, I pant and sob and shake like my skin is full of bees, my teeth chattering and my hands jittering on the keys, trying to turn these five words into the police report that news-tickers through my head and body on an infinite loop.

Hours later? Weeks? Catherine’s voice calls to me from outside of the well.
I did it. I wrote it all down. I am ragged and raw and curl into a C for the rest of the day. It’s far from an essay—more a deposition under hot lights—but finally this wretched, poisonous thing has been wrangled from the projector of my mind and put down in ink.

I wasn’t trying to get so Biblical with this, but hey, it’s Passover, so—this is what happened the last time I said yes.

I write the awful thing and sit on it for months. I do a whole movie in between, processing and unraveling other jagged and bruised selves. On my birthday, I send the five-alarm document to the TA for collection.

Catherine holds her breath as I read it to her, pulling teeth for eight mind-numbing pages. By the end I feel like something that has been left on a metal plate in the sun. She gently asks me if I’m sure that this is what I want to share with the group. I am NOT, nowhere near it, but there is this high-powered magnet in my gut pulling me helplessly in its wake.
Yes. I’m sure.