a letter, but something else first

i.

I knew her story long ago, but as I’ve done with many things, I packed it neatly in a little box and stuck it high on a shelf in my memory. Accessible, but not readily. Not thrown out or misplaced or with an incorrect label. There, but not easy to get to or even to see. 

Her story sickened me when I heard it long ago, but under ‘hey, what can you do’, was probably where I filed it. ‘Hey, what can you do’ is the thread binding so many things. Hey, what can you do about the crappy educational system where kids might melt like sugar in the rain, so they take brain breaks under florescent lights in the hall instead of smelling sweet air and green and what fresh really means. Hey, what can you do about a shitty war on another continent and dead babies washing up on shores. What can you do about cancer and poverty and how screwed up it is that we don’t take care of the mentally ill and the suicides washing over us. And all of it lives, of course, on shelves adjacent to what’s for lunch and then dinner, and then breakfast and lunch and dinner all over again. What to wear and do I have time for yoga and what to do with the coffee pods that are the wrong size. Shelves are packed with pressing questions and urgent ones, the gentle email reminding you that you still haven’t answered and the other one flagged a year ago in red, self-sorting itself to the top of your inbox as a small indication of how many things take up space just by being undone. Shelves within reach are jumbled with items, where the frivolous mix with the urgent and the nuts and bolts of an everyday.

#metoo poured out in essays and news items and I read and assessed and thought about it off and on, but the stories were not mine, the concept itself distant. Not my shelf, not my worry. Not even on the well-worn list of things I probably should worry about but don’t. Those stories were not about me. Dig into that. Babies washing up and the broken man with the missing arm outside yoga and the now and then money I slip him are also not about me, but I’ve made them mine, given them space and energy. Why the push back when it’s Hollywood, I forced myself only recently to consider? Is it the hint of jealousy - the ‘well you have the pretty clothes and the alabaster skin and luminous eyes so you deserve to suck a dick as the trade for things I don’t want but want?’ 

I live under a big blue sky with clouds trailing and tumbling above. I drive on dusty roads and am irritated by ruts and chipped windshields. I don’t know hotel rooms with directors and money and ‘do this, then that’, and then I realize I do. One day when I’m looking for something else, I remember (back when they made movies in my city) a director who bought us a bottle of champagne, and his hotel room with a couch, and the new jeans my friend wore the next day. I remember the twist of my gut when I got it, when I understood why we were there, and the relief when I understood it was not me he was after. And from there I remember the night we showed up to a party, but the party was not a party - it was fifteen guys in a garage and when they closed the door I remember knowing I had to open it now and get out. And I know the poured-out vulnerability of the anonymous Instagram page reflecting my small city, a city I both love and hate for its smallness. The only place I’ve ever lived and where I sink into its comfort like the ratty cardigan hanging on the hook by the door. And also the way I sink into the me that a person is when they’ve only ever defined themselves as wrong, well-worn treads of not enough, never enough and is that how so many of us are and why don’t we demand better?

My eyes easily travel the words she wrote and I don’t trip over any of them and my memory is more than a faint haze, and I understand what this means and I cry without meaning to. I wipe the face reflected in the black glass of the patio table and abruptly stand. 

I call a friend later and we travel paths- not the same but on the same journey, toward the same place - and her rage reminds me of my own and she gives me space and a permission I hadn’t realized I needed to sink into the white heat I’ve been reluctant to touch for fear it would incinerate me in an instant. Was it the knowing that rage is unbecoming, that it backs people into their own corners so they reflexively push back vehemently when it shimmers in the distance, fearful of what it might consume if they let it?

I don’t know yet, but I will. Things come as they come if you let them.

What to do now, though. Boxes are strewn about and opened. Their contents spill out and any semblance of order is lost. I can never put it back the way it was. Things have unraveled, and some are brittle with age and others expanded into the space I never gave them. Ugly memories litter the floor and I gingerly step over them as I trip back and forth with the milk and the broken window latch that needs to be fixed and the stack of bills I said I'd get to last week. It would be foolish to try to ram it all back in. I know it and yet I give space to the idea I could, maybe. Stuff them like I’m overpacking a suitcase, standing on it and calling someone to sit on it - if we both try maybe? - but what does that do, other than make two of us now, complicit in things we should never have been complicit about in the first place. 

One foot in front of the other, I say to anyone needing that slight lift, and I spin the refrain on repeat in my heart and my head, but it’s not light-footed running or even a quick stride. It’s deep down in the weeds and mud-sucking my boots and the exhaustion setting in as I fumble but now, knowing. I fumble forward and at least there is that. 

And then.

I take her hand and her hand and his too. And it changes the weight of my feet dragging down deep, my own load lightened by these helpful hands, first a few and then suddenly many, a chorus of sweet song in the dark. Someone calls out to just leave it when my foot scrambles free from my boot, and laughing I do and it’s much easier. And also I’d forgotten the sound of my own joy and my feet travel, not effortlessly, but with much greater ease, and I understand as dawn’s hue pinks in the distance. If we’re all in this together we can do it, but if we travel apart we make more work than any one of us can bear alone and this is not an answer but it is part of it, and that is my beginning.


ii.

Dear one,

I don't know, as Joan Didion said, what I think about anything until I write about it. I write around, through, up, alongside, against, between, for, because. I shift and my base - often - is sandy. Sometimes, clarity is clear soon. Other times it’s exactly not-clear and I sit in murky wondering, pondering things I cannot see, but feel. 

I wanted - needed - to make clear where I’m at. For myself and for the three girls I’m raising, and for the world I want to see. And for you. You need to know.

Let me preface this with a few things. I believe in healing, in redemption, in mistakes, in learning, and in leading. I believe in new ways of doing things. I believe we can build a better world. I believe our justice system does not serve victims. I believe you did what you could both as part of that system, and as a member of a deeply patriarchal and unequal society, one where you enjoyed the privilege bequeathed to you as a wealthy white man. I believe for some, that long ago reckoning is enough and that even if the system itself was (is) broken, it is enough because what are we, exactly, without the systems we’ve all agreed upon? But then I wonder about a world where the systems are broken and we know it and we still let them stand. 

Fundamentally, I believe the onus falls on victims to make peace with what happens. It has to be like that, right? But in the same sense, I also hold that the perpetrator is responsible for doing whatever they can, as much as they can, and as much as the community and the victim deem necessary to truly find peace. Peace for all involved because these things do not happen in vacuums and instead they ripple, lapping at the edges of even distant observers.

I believe in restorative justice. I believe that between the victim, the perpetrator, and the community we can find new and better ways of healing. That heal the victim’s hurt, yes, but also heal whatever gaping wound there was in the perpetrator that precipitated their behaviour. And I think that the justice served years ago was not and is not, in fact, justice. And recognizing that does not mean you have not been sorry, that you did not learn, that you are not a better version of the you who did a wrong thing long ago.

You have the chance to stand up and lead. You already are a leader, but this - well, it doesn’t negate the good you’ve done, but it surely casts a dark shadow. The thing about shadows, though, is we can allow the light to shine through. That doesn’t happen when we bury ourselves and hope things will sort themselves out by virtue, simply, of time passing or people moving on. That happens - time does march and people do shift, but it doesn’t change the standing of you in the shadow. You are still there. It is only the external that has shifted.

By refusing to speak publicly, you force our community to choose sides. To throw down and declare, ‘if this, then that’. There will be those who subscribe to the concept that your reparations were made legally and accepted by the woman you hurt. There will be those who know you, and by knowing you, will ascribe meaning and method to your life and your work. And there will be others who feel betrayed. Still others who decide that with silence comes complicity and who will be forced to say no to a silence that is not their own. Others who wonder what they missed, or did you change (or can you), and so many things as they do the thing people do when they aren’t given a story, which is to write their own narrative. 

Perhaps this feels like a walk through a deep, dark night. And I can’t say it won’t be that way. I can’t. Likely, it will, although I am guessing you are already travelling alone in the dark, because even if your people have rallied around you, the path is your own and we walk unaccompanied when it comes down to it. But here’s the thing about what happens when you come through something like this, because there is always, always another side. It’s cathartic, when you see the light through the trees. When morning finally arrives. When skies clear and the wind goes down and you are still alive, but better than that, you are fresh and clean and even if the night was sleepless and the journey difficult, you are cleansed by the process. Because I don’t think you are whole, right now, and that is a daring and perhaps aggressive thing to say, but still I say it. You can be the healing. You can be the light, the change, the way forward out of a mess made long ago. You can show our community that we don’t toss people into a ring be be mauled in shame, but rather, we sit with our people in the muck and then when we are ready, we lift them up and rinse them and they sparkle because nothing sparkles better than something polished by trial. We’ve all been there. And we will be there with you, holding you up, if you let us.

All the love.