[cont.]
“I like that idea.”
“Hey, so do I. I can see all your quotes printed on bricks to form the floor of an entire room.”
“That would be a difficult book. Forcing readers on their hands and knees. A bit too much like penitence for my taste.”
“And right up my alley. Maggie, all artists like to share their pain. Otherwise they’d be accountants or engineers. You know, trying to ferret out an inner truth is never easy, regardless of your medium. As you keep saying, it’s never easy wrestling order from chaos.”
“Right, use my own words to convince me. But don’t you think a diary seems so self indulgent?”
“Like I said, if you don’t want to write an autobiography, write about your problems through someone else’s eyes. Be a mirror. Then collage their viewpoints into a narrative whole.”
“Yeah, but you know I don’t see life as a neat, linear narrative.”
“Then don’t write it that way. Look, I know I sound like I am bossing you around. Before you tell me to stop, promise to think about it. I know you well enough to know you’re only going to do what you want to do. Just think about it. But if you do decide to write, I’d be happy to read and make no comments whatsoever except the ones you ask for.”
“I don’t know if that’s really sweet or a threat.”
After they ended the call, she could see in her mind’s eye how Alex burned the story of his life, each page furling up and dissolving into ashes. He always turned everything into a metaphor. And how Teresa had painted all those works about her mother’s dementia by rubbing out elements, leaving the canvas almost empty, erasing the past, filtered and bleached, to leave the ghostliness of departed memories. The chaos which exists half hidden at our edges.
What would be analogous for her? A complete escape from the past, she thought. An escape from time and space into the vast whirling ether of nothingness. Star dust indeed until the great unraveling heralds the end of all that is, down to the subatomic quarks and leptons and gauge bosons spinning apart into the splendor of nothingness. No, as enticing as oblivion might be, that wasn’t the moral of her story at all.
Return on Wednesday for the next chapters of Just Like Suicide.
