Why We Write About Our Oldest Wounds

You’re on a train when you receive a text from a friend you haven’t seen in almost two years. He was your best friend; someone you rode bikes with to your local Friendly’s; who always, without fail, ordered an unsweetened iced tea with a lemon slice. You always ordered, without fail, Honey BBQ Chicken Strips, only bringing $10 for a meal that cost $9.99. Your best friend begrudgingly shouldered the tip, time after time after time.

He was someone you had met when you were a toddler, but became better acquainted with in middle school after you defended him, telling a menacing friend, “he’s cool.” You sat in the back of the bus with him on the way to wrestling matches, amused as you both listened to the stories other boys told about girls they’d kissed, but hadn’t, knowing the other stories they didn’t tell, about the girls they had kissed but would never mention.

You had other friends, friends who fit neatly into the boxes you’d placed them in, but he was boxless. He was someone who you knew wanted to make his dad proud when he watched him wrestle. Someone who you carpooled with to soccer practices, who you explored the limitations of your liver with when you began to drink, who argued with you about minor things, but remained loyal to the point of taking a beating that was meant for you. Everyone has had a friend like this, and he was yours.

As the train bumps across the tracks, rocking you oceanically, you receive a text from him. It’s in response to a text you sent, letting him know you haven’t forgotten about your long overdue plans to get together. (You haven’t forgotten about it, but you still don’t know if you want it to happen. He is only one of many people you grew up with that you haven’t seen in a long time.) He says no problem. You say you’re moving back to the city. He asks where. You tell him. He asks about your writing. You send him a link to an article you recently published.

The article you send him is about a time when an Italian photographer told you to “hold a gun out, like the nigger from Pulp Fiction.” This happened while studying abroad in Italy, the country of his parents’ parents whom he reps proudly, as if putting “Italian” before the hyphen in “Italian-American” makes a difference. You have your own hyphens, many, in fact, but have never known the order with which to arrange them. You envy him for this.

“I read that,” your friend texts. “Never knew that story.”

“That’s the tip of the iceberg baby,” you write back, trying to act nonchalant about commodifying your pain—pain that, despite all of the bike rides, carpools, drunken nights, ceramic plates of Honey BBQ Chicken Strips, and hard plastic cups of unsweetened iced tea with a lemon slice on the side, he never knew you felt. It is, as you said, the tip of an iceberg that has been submerged in the depths of your heart for over two decades. An iceberg you know will eventually collide with the people you grew up with, the people you worked with, and with the perception that people hold of you as someone almost fearless; something they admired in you because you pushed yourself to new heights no matter what you had done before.

And while you were nervous about writing that piece, anxious to think of people’s responses, you knew that only strangers would read it because you would never share it on Facebook or Instagram. But your friend has somehow read it, and you are curious about will come next.

Three weeks later, you enter a swanky Brooklyn hotel. A man greets you and asks if you’re a guest. You say no, that you’re going to the rooftop bar. You picked this place for the view, because if the conversation became strained, you knew you’d be able to lose yourself in the Manhattan skyline, floating above every building like an out-of-body experience.

Your friend enters, wearing an expensive leather jacket. He looks almost as he did two years ago, but carries himself with a confidence you hadn’t seen before. You hug in the same way you’ve hugged each other hundreds of times throughout the years. You feel his warmth.

The conversation takes all of the turns you anticipated, starting with normal niceties before dipping into questions of where you’ve been and why anyone hasn’t seen you in so long. You were prepared for this, so you respond calmly while letting your friend know you have no ill will against him or anyone, that, despite the issues you have with things people have done or said, you know no one is a bad person.

You want to tell your friend about what lies beyond the tip of the iceberg you proudly mentioned via text. You look out the window, the sun diving lower into unseen distances, but you don’t allow your mind to leave the room; to hollow out until all that remains is a shell of who you’ve painstakingly become. So you stare at your friend, trying to decide whether to take the plunge, and it’s then that you realize you have nothing to lose. You understand that change can only occur when you’re placed in scenarios you’ve been in before and act differently than you have in the past.

You jump.

You tell your friend about what it was like growing up where and how you did. You tell him what it was like when people said hurtful things about those who were as dark as the grandmother who traversed over 1,500 miles to eventually raise you and your brothers; who were intelligent to a nauseating degree, like your grandfather, but came to this country only to become a janitor, embarrassingly screaming, “Man aboard!” when he entered the women’s quarters in the hospital where he worked; who were sold wholesale, like cattle, yet were deemed only sixty-percent of a human when the authors of the Constitution allowed them to be counted as one. You tell your friend what it felt like when friends would say something, then turn to you and say, “My bad, man. I’m not talking about you, though. I’m talking about the others…” You show him what resides beneath the water.

Then you wait, blood pounding in your head, because you know that the next words to come out of his mouth will draw a line, and you will either end up on the same side or apart.

He looks out the window, then back at you. Contrary to what you thought could happen, he doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t shrug off the weight you’ve placed on him. He says he thinks back to how he and other people acted when you were growing up, and that it was wrong. He tells you that he can’t imagine what it was like for you. And, somehow—despite choosing to remain grounded in your seat instead of floating out the window, following the sun on its journey to the other side of the earth—you feel lighter. This acknowledgment is enough.

But it isn’t enough to make you think everyone you know would receive what you said with the same degree of understanding. Because you’ve learned, through skin-splitting experimentation, that when people are forced to view their flaws in the mirror, most look away. You believe that many people in your hometown fall into this category. A hometown you fled as quickly as you could. A place full of people who raised you in one way or another, and supported you; an area not defined by any geographical location, but by memories only you and those who experienced them with you can access.

So you write another essay. This time, it’s more personal than the first, dealing with people who have a higher chance of identifying themselves; it is an exploration of the distinct anxiety many feel while dating interracially. And you are afraid. Afraid of what will happen if someone sees themselves reflected in your words. This fear translates into anxiety that transforms into doubt that gives way to the feeling that you aren’t the one who should be telling these stories, or any stories at all.

You can’t sleep when you envision the comments people you know will leave. Specific comments from specific people written in specific ways to hurt you. You can see the red box on Facebook, containing a “1,” then a “2,” then a “3,” ticking towards infinity as you receive message after message. Messages from those playing therapist, from those who say, “you’re not talking about me, right?” and from those who take painful efforts to explain how and why you’re wrong. You want a wide audience of people to read your work, but only an audience of strangers.

Like the last essay, you don’t post it to the places where you’re in touch with people who actually know you. But you do wonder if this is fair, if you shouldn’t give people the same opportunity to surprise you, as you did your friend. And then you ask yourself who you are to be the one granting opportunities when you’ve inflicted your own share of pain on others, just in different ways. You lay in bed, struggling to free yourself from the disembodied, zombie-like hands of your hometown dragging you back and back and back into chambers you thought were closed forever.

But you don’t stop. You can’t. You weren’t lying about the iceberg. So you write another essay. This time, about an experience you had as a boy, when the boys on your soccer team, while on a trip upstate, laid in bed, uttering, “nigger,” building from a whisper to a scream, until it was your name someone called out. Your friend was in that room, and even though you’re almost sure he participated more in silence than in action, although silence is an action in itself, you sweat from thinking if perhaps this will push his understanding of your iceberg past its limits.

Between when you finish the essay and it is published, you almost throw up half a dozen times. You call your mother every day, starting, stopping, and stuttering into the phone like you are short-circuiting. Sleep is for the sane, and a sane person wouldn’t choose to endure this; they wouldn’t put their pain on display like an ancient artifact, expecting people to just walk by and nod before finding some new relic of the past to obsess over. When you can sleep, you have nightmares.

You consider pulling the piece. The publication didn’t pay you yet, so maybe it will be fine, you think. It will likely ruin your relationship with the editor, but that is a small price to pay for peace of mind. But then you read the piece to your younger brother, and he is still. He tells you that he has had many experiences like yours, experiences where being the odd man out cast him as the man to be manhandled, and you know then that the greater nightmare would be to wake up knowing you had the opportunity to let others, like your younger brother, know that they aren’t alone, but you chose not to.

The piece comes out on a Thursday.

You copy the link and post it to Instagram. Then to Facebook.

You don’t know what will happen, and you care about what people will say, but you force yourself to breathe. Truly leaving your hometown and the hold it has on you is almost impossible. But moments like these, where you are driven to risk embarrassment, shame, and a break between who you were and who you want to be, are also what propel you forward.