Thread: Forward: Letter #1 (from Paranoid Wasp) Language

Hello forum friends,
This is the frame for the novel (I've been posting from Chapter 1, Fear of Russians)... I've added letters between each chapter, so it's brought in some extra dimensions to plot and character... for clarity, the novel (chapters 1-7) takes place from June-December 1987, when the character is 15-16... while in the letters (if you want to calculate) she's 36. I've also made the main character the narrator. I think this makes sense and the rest should be clear (or at least, hopefully, as clear as it needs to be at the beginning of a novel...if not, please do tell...)
Looking forward to your comments (complaints, derision, etc!!)
best,
Roughin



July 21, 2007

Dear Ruth,

I'm sorry you had to see me that way. This last lapse was too much for me. I think I've paid enough for other people's sins; I know I'm not the only one, but everyone of us who is fighting has her limits, and I think we have the right to say Kefaya, enough, let someone else take it from here. Maybe it's cowardly, but I don't think so. We pay, and we pay, and we pay; in the end no one knows but our lonely selves, in those deep safe moments, what the cost has been. I would like to give tribute to those who have more courage than I. May humanity and this bleeding universe reap something from their silent tears.

As usual, your visit brought me back to sanity. When you left, they sedated me. I came to again with thoughts as clear as water and I knew that my time has come.

I'm enclosing an open letter to the American people. If you can get my letter pubished anywhere, I hope it will serve to open some eyes to the cruelty and fascism of this current order. The New York Times...? LOL!! Some of the activist sites may circulate it, especially the ones that defend the rights of the mentally ill, and the prison abolitionists (as few as they may be...)

I'm also leaving the novel with you. I suppose it's not really a novel, more like a fictionalized memoir of those six months when everything happened. Maybe I should have shown it to someone before taking my ticket out. But I have lived my life in isolation. If anything about it is strange, incongruent or distancing, I think it's only fair that the life this bloody society has imposed on me be imposed on my readers. I never asked to be trapped inside my imagination for 20 years. Let them fucking deal, or ignore what they don't want to see, as always. For me, this novel as been my only lifeline to the moment in my miserable years when I became free. However much they have punished me for my freedom, this is what I have left, and all I care about.

If I had to do it again, I wouldn't change anything--except maybe the fact that I didn't escape to Mexico with my mother when I had the chance. That was so stupid! I just wasn't thinking ahead. How many idiot chaplains and therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists have tried to convince me over the years that I'm paying for my own sins! And not the sins of this stinking social order, "the international of torture." I don't know if you ever came down on one side or the other of pacifism, but I think you know I never even walked that road. If I have any advice to give to those who want to resist with their life and their death, it would be that they shouldn't be too stubborn or proud not to preserve themselves when they can. There are no limits to what they will make you pay if you leave it up to them.

I'm sorry to say goodbye this way. With my pen. To make you feel this small piece of my years of solitary. This desperation of having only oneself with whom to share the deepest agony. Anyway, we all die alone. I have been dead for 20 years. If I had never said thank you during the brief moments of life when you were in front of me in flesh and in eyes, I would find it harder. But you know how vital your sane, pragmatic and fully alive support system has been to me. Don't think you should have or could have done more, or saved me from this decision. Carry on with your beautiful way of being, and I will carry on with dying.

In love, friendship and resistance,

Suzie-Q
1971-2007





July 21, 2012

Dear Suzie-Q,

Here is my letter to the dead.

You know since you left all your letters with me, I read them all. I tried to make my first letter to the dead on your birthday in 2008, but I couldn't. I was so torn up.

Your novel's finally going into print. I feel like I have to tell you, I added a chapter to the end. It's not that I don't get why you wanted to end the thing where you did, in that one crystal moment of freedom you ever knew. I certainly didn't get it that day--today, I feel like I understand but maybe I still don't. Anyway, they have to know your whole life. You are the free-est person I've ever known. Except Sam, of course. Yeah, Sam and Jack.

Speaking of Sam and Jack, they've gone into hiding. Don't worry, it's not a secret or they wouldn't have told me! Such a big mouth, but as you said, we all have our path, and our limits. That's probably why they went ahead and sent me the letter about Jack's escape and told me I could print it. And yeah, by what miracle of bravado and invention I have no idea. They're not dumb enough to let me in on that one.

I'm trying not to be angry with them. I mean about pulling it off for Jack, and leaving you to rot. But I know, because I know you, you would never think this way. You were always that generous with your hope. Believing we're all heroes if we just take that walk. "Winners and losers, known and unknown." We take that walk, and pray to God or nature that someday, somewhere, one of us will win. That was you.

I feel like we fought for years, but I think now you fought the world and I fought you. I kept coming back to you with my personal progress expecting you to say, Brava! Good job! You're finally there! But instead you would plague me with new questions, pushing me and pushing me and assuming I should hold my own. And I do, but God, I'm thirty years your senior and I still talk like your child!

Like that time I came and told you I'd joined the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. I was sure you'd say, at last you've come round! And you only came back with your aren't there any Palestinian groups in Washington? What a blast!

I'm starting to get over the feeling that you were untouchable; the constant nagging annoyance that with your suffering I couldn't say a word against you. You never asked for that. If I gave it to you, it's because I was usually convinced you were right. So that's my fault, and now that I'm free to judge you as much as I like and criticize in my memory along with the relief that you can't suffer anymore I am beginning to realize that you were probably aware of all your faults to such a degree it would have been pointless to point them out.

Now you've left me alone, and I can't keep protecting you and I can't keep asking you for approval. I tried it with Sam, ha! always elusive but really very patient when it comes down to it. That's when I thought, there was something you managed to grasp when you were 16 that I still can't touch. So the pedastal is in my brain! Schweya schweya, as they say. Now I am with myself; I have to accept and assume that my questions and preoccupations are not the same as yours, not the same as Sam's; that I will be obsessed with Jewish identity until the day I die; that I can't join Sam's movement, not because they won't have me but because I don't think like them. That, like you said over and over from your place of extreme isolation, we can only answer to ourselves. That no one can tell me my choices are right but me. That I'm not a pacifist, but I don't have the courage to join the other side of the fight. That I don't believe in the law, but I don't want to go to prison. That with all these alone decisions, we can still work together and do something.

So I'm taking charge of this one task, and making decisions you are not alive to make for yourself. My letter to you will be printed with your novel, along with all the letters you wrote the day you died, and many others I've been able to collect from your friends and mine. I don't think my prose is as eloquent as yours, but this is my way of standing with you, in life and death.

Thank you for exploding me. For making catastrophe, for surviving your own with such intricate stamina and leaving the rest of us to keep doing what we can.

Goodbye, my little dance step.

In peace and friendship,

Ruth

P.S. As I was editing the final proofs, I got two letters in the mail from Joe that are ripping my world apart. Again. No time to pen my emotions now. I'll leave the readers to judge you, and me, and them.