Storystorm

This is true.

In the past forty-eight hours I have cried nine times. I cried when I dropped a yellow M&M on my blue shirt and it left a mark. I cried reading Cheryl Strayed's “The Love of my Life.” I cried thinking about the fact that my last workshop is in two days. I cried thinking about the fact that I might cry during my last workshop. I cried because I couldn’t stop crying. I cried when my mother told me my writing was textured because that was such a beautiful thing to say and she is always so kind. I cried listening to Jason Mraz because it reminded me of college and how that was once something that is now nothing. I cried when I thought about grad school and how wonderful it has been and how soon it will be nothing, a scatter shot of fading memories and remember when’s.

For weeks I have been putting off this final Storystorm, responding to Amy’s emails asking when she can expect it with flustered excuses: a story due, twelve papers to grade, conferences to conduct, essays to read.

This is the truth: I don’t want to write my final Storystorm because I don’t want it to end.

I don’t want any of this to end.

To make this easier, I thought it would be nice, instead of reading something new, to return to a beginning: the first short story I ever read and loved, the first that ever made me think, “Holy god I want to do that.”

“How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien is appropriate for other reasons, too. It’s so much about the truth of our experiences and what we hold fast to after something that was everything becomes nothing: our memories of the battle, our experiences in between, and what we remember of people who were with us.

It is the people, after all, who make this story what it is. Men who feel pain, men who love, men who lose everything, and men who are, as a result, ultimately lost.

Last semester I was talking to a professor about avoiding characterization clichés. I was writing a story about a girl who takes a karate class, and every time I sat down to write about her sensei—a description, a line of dialogue—he came out sounding like Mister Miyagi.

“You have to combine the predictable with the unpredictable,” my professor told me. “If you have a sensei, take the stereotype and turn it on its head. Have him be a sensei who steals, or a sensei who hits on his women clients, or a sensei who is incredibly narcissistic.”

I thought about that as I reread “How to Tell a True War Story.” This creation of uncanny characters—characters we think we can predict and characters who at the same time surprise us—is what O’Brien does so well: Rat Kiley who, when his best friend dies, shoots a baby water buffalo into submission; Mitchell Sanders who tells the story of six men hearing an opera, an entire symphony playing in the middle of the jungle; Curt Lemon who fishes with hand grenades and who faints when he visits the dentist.

“How to Tell a True Story” is about the truth and memory and war, but it’s not a war story. It’s not about violence and death and war and guts, even when it is. It’s about how deeply we love the people who stand beside us as we fight and how much it hurts to lose them.

How do I do justice to this experience, then? How do I put into words the last two years of my life? I can’t, of course. Because the story of my time here is not a story about an MFA program. It is not a story about the work that I produced or the conferences I attended or the classes I taught or wine I drank, even when it is. It’s a love story. It’s about how deeply I love the people who have stood beside me and how much it hurts to lose them.

"How to Tell a True War Story" is from Tim O'Brien's collection The Things They Carried.