Last time I talked about adventures from long ago, about my friend Marta and her adventures on the Alaskan cruise. I do recall sitting in a Montrose bar listening to her recount her summertime tales. I was envious, of course. It was a good story, and I envied her her sense of having Had An Adventure. I envied her determination, too, her willingness at seventeen or eighteen to just do something.
I like having stories like that in my archives. I like being able to imagine invisible bookshelves filled with tales of delights and unexpected thrills and the sense of the new. I like imagining that the world is made of stories, not atoms.
The stories aren't necessarily mine, and may not even usually be mine. But they are part of the world around me, and discovering the stories means at least as much as having my own. I may be of an age and status where stories of my own where stories will be far and few between, but the world is filled nevertheless with stories, scaffolded with stories of youth and adventure and beauty.
I remember sitting with Marta over drinks and listening to her account of losing her virginity in that cruise ship gymnasium and picturing the things she told me--- the way the Jamaicans' dreads felt swishing across her bare back; the way the gym machine bench felt as she bent over it and hands straightened her body; the sense of being someone newly transformed when she walked barefoot and half-undressed back to her cabin. All those things became part of my memory palace, as did her grin there in the half-dark of the bar as she called up tales from almost a decade before.
My lovely blonde Kiwi friend wrote me once upon a time to say that her grey and rainy day had brightened:
It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun. i'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. I'm not wearing anything under either top or bottom, which I know you'll approve of. My lunch date was s a friend of a friend, up & coming young lawyer. i will probably fuck him, but i do think i like him more as a friend. very funny and cute. I haven't been in any new beds recently, but now that summer is coming on, I think I'll come out of my reclusiveness.
I loved (and still love) her self-assurance. I never did hear the follow-up to her story, though. Whatever became of the "up and coming young lawyer"? Did she sleep with him? What counts as "young"? And and as important as when and where and how she finally had sex with him is her own set of internal monologues: what were her decision protocols, exactly when and how did she decide to make herself available? I suppose I should follow up on her brief mention from three or four years ago. It matters that I have archives of stories, that I have information and backstories.
I do worry about something, though. I worry that I'll run out of stories, that voices one by one will fall silent out across the aether, that the world I'd like to write about (or experience vicariously) will narrow down to nothing.
I do worry about running out of things to write about. I worry about the world becoming empty. The last two years--- let me stress this ---have been a grim time here at the end of the American republic. It may be getting harder and harder to write about sex and delights and adventures. Everything in daily life seems jagged and depressive and threatening. Is there room right now for memories of lovers and encounters, of moments of excitement and exploration?
There are things that still catch my interest. A lesbian friend--- a very out-and-proud butch lesbian ---is angry at the trans community because, she says, the trans world wants to erase both lesbians as such and the idea of being butch. That's something interesting. That's a potential conflict that I'd like to hear more about. There are endless articles in the post-Weinstein world where women mock men who've written to say that they don't understand the rules of flirtation and seduction in a #MeToo world, and I've like to write about that particular male fear.
The world is made up of stories, not atoms. I don't want the world to empty out. I want there to be stories and histories and memories that I can share in, that I can write about. I do have a horror of being in a world where the memory palace has been emptied out, a world without stories.
