I am sitting in the corner of some overheated coffee shop in Upper Manhattan, furiously scribbling into my journal with a shitty mechanical pencil, courtesy of the barista with neon green pig tails. I think I might look crazed. I think I might be crazed.

This is about how I got here.

READING ON THE TRAIN

I was heading out the other day for the train when I randomly stuck my worn copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in my bag. Whether I read them or not, I think I stick books in my bag when going out for emotional support. I feel somehow more prepared for the world with a pocketful of prose. But it was Saturday and the trains were taking longer so I pulled the book out on the platform and simply fell in.

I’m an avid reader, but I’m not like my brother who can just tune out the world and get lost in a book for hours on end. Some days it comes easier than others and this was a lucky moment. It was the right state of mind, the right hour, I don’t know. I never know exactly what drives a page of prose to strike you with more potency on one day rather than the other, only that I can’t pull away when it does. And something about O’Brien’s words that day, they held me in their hands.

So I fall in, right into that trance where a few words can send you reeling over the edge, reaching out in midair for something to hold onto because suddenly your feet don’t feel like they are on the ground. You cannot really feel the earth beneath you anymore, only the floating sensation that some writers can just evoke. Someone has written something so beautiful that the ground has ceased to exist for a moment.

Maybe that sounds insane, but maybe you get it. Maybe you feel that way about sports or cooking or watching your kid laugh. Time just—stops.

THEY CARRIED GRAVITY

The book it an autobiographical collection of essays based on O’Brien’s time serving in Vietnam in 1968. They are haunting accounts of what it felt like to be drafted into a war that felt meaningless and amoral, and about how violently it has stayed with him.

I board the train and slouch into my favorite seat, the one that sits you backwards next to the window so you feel as if you are being yanked through space, and I stare at the words on the page. They carried gravity. Three little, basic, mundane words that O’Brien placed together in such a way that I am ten feet off the ground. He is one of those writers who doesn’t need too many words, doesn’t need the flowery language or extrapolated descriptions that go on for miles. He’s just a guy sitting on his porch telling you old war stories, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Like when he describes the death of one of the soldiers and he writes “the cheekbone gone”, instead of “his cheekbone gone”, and you realize that with one little word being changed, a whole world of meaning gets conveyed. The soldier gets dehumanized. He died and in that moment, his body was no longer his own. He no longer was. It was not his cheekbone anymore, but the cheekbone. As in, the tree or the sky, it was a thing, like any other, a mere fact of war. The war that O’Brien doesn’t have to tell you he morally despised. That little word swap does it for him.

I thought of that, and of so many other details that I didn’t pick up on in high school, and how much I would like to be able to talk to my teacher from back then about them now. He was always wanting us to think and come up with our own ideas and we never could and we never did because we didn’t know the things that we do now. We were quasi-illiterate punks and we didn’t know.

MARTHA

But I did know Martha. Martha was a college girl that one of the soldiers was in love with and I underlined everything about her because she was me.

“She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war.”

“He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.”

-Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried

I loved that. I highlighted it in the copy I hold in my hands now, back when I was sitting in the sun reading alone during lunch. It made the whole thing more beautiful than it ever was. I too would go on to become an English major who would write about her professors and roommates and poetry. I would also go on to take an entire course on the Vietnam War, a course that colors this book in entirely new shades of heartbreak that barely understood back then. I didn’t know any of this yet, but it was right there.

TELLING STORIES

The thing with this book though, is that even though it’s about war, it’s really about life and memory and how to tell a story.

My English teacher had us read it our senior year because he thought it would help us write better personal essays for our college applications. The New York Times called it a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well.

He writes,

“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. As I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words…the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”

“But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That’s the real obsession. All those stories.”

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

-Tim O’Brien

My copy was my brother’s copy first, a fact I am reminded of when I see the words “fucking brilliant” scrawled in his slanted handwriting in the margin next to this quote. I agree.

WHY IT MATTERS

To tell you why, to tell you why this book matters to me would be to tell a very long and a very sad story. Instead, I will just say that war was the melodramatic, metaphorical theme of my life that year and this book fell into my hands right when it needed to.

I would never be able to begin to fathom the horror of being a kid forced to go to Vietnam, to watch his friends die, to almost die himself, and to come back forever changed. But I did know what it felt like to fight battles that no one could ever win and how it felt to watch people become ghosts before your eyes. I met loss that year and when it shook my hand, it gripped it so tightly that I just knew. I knew it was the end of something. I was not a kid drafted to war, but there was something about it. There was just something about a book about kids having to go to war and watch their innocence go up in flames that reached me. It reached all of us. Looking back, I think my teacher knew that. I read it over and over, highlighting everything that meant something.

It was those highlights that got to me on the train. For there I was, not yet possibly knowing, yet somehow seeming to, that I was right in the middle and diving into the part of my life that I would think about when reading the words the bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over, four years later on a train in New York.

And so I thought about it. I thought about what O’Brien said, about how we are always crawling back into those wounds and peering around. About how every moment of our lives lives in its own dimension and even though we move on from it, it never moves on from us. It just keeps happening. Each moment becomes a world that we don’t live in, but we visit. Especially if you write. Especially if you are always closing your eyes and crawling through the years, opening them wide at different stops along the way, taking in everything that you possibly can.

What I notice more than anything when I open my eyes now, when I see the phrases I circled and the passages I underlined, is how deeply and unknowingly this book has stayed with me over the years. I will find certain phrases like “lives in its own dimension” and realize that I use this phrase all of the time in my own writing and that this must have been where I got it. Or his sentence fragments and how abundantly they populate everything I write.

Books are like people are like things are like places. They compose us, one cell at a time, until we are living mosaics of everything and everyone we have ever loved.

I raced off the train and onto a park bench to write this all down when my pen died one word in. Hence, the shitty mechanical pencil from the very nice barista with neon green hair. And hence, me, in the corner of some coffee shop, scribbling.

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