Before the Break

There is a version of him that exists before everything gets harder.

He can see it clearly now — the way you can only see the full shape of weather from inside the house, once the storm has passed and the sky is doing something new. He was twenty, twenty-one, building something. Optimistic in the specific way of someone who has survived enough to develop a theory about surviving — not a formula, not false confidence, but a working hypothesis: I have gotten through hard things before. This suggests I can get through hard things again.

The hypothesis was correct. He was also not seeing how hard the hard things were about to get.

He was publishing. He was writing every day. He had developed a routine that was not yet called a routine because he had not been doing it long enough to name it — desk, notebook, pen, first hour of the day before the

world made demands on it. He had Ghost but not yet Omen. He had the Holyoke apartment still, though he was starting to understand that Holyoke had given him what it was going to give him and he was ready for a different city.

He was twenty-one and he had already been writing for six years and he had not yet learned the specific name for what was happening in his body, though he was writing about it — had been writing about it for six years — in the only language he had, which was the language of the feeling itself rather than the clinical language that would arrive later and organize the feeling into something he could hold at arm’s length and examine.

He was twenty-one and he was optimistic and he was also — this is the part he has had to hold alongside the optimism, not instead of it but alongside it — already carrying more than most people his age would carry in a lifetime.

The carrying was not visible. He was good at the carrying. He had been good at the carrying since he was old enough to understand that some things you carry alone because there is no one to hand them to, and making someone else hold part of it requires a trust that can only be built over time and has to be earned through

evidence, and the evidence takes time to accumulate.

He was twenty-one. He was waiting for the evidence.

* * *

The relationship starts in the summer after he turns twenty-two.

He meets her at a reading — not his reading, a reading for someone else, a local poet whose work he respects. She is in the audience three rows ahead of him and he notices her the way you notice certain people, not because anything specific happens but because the noticing is immediate and complete, like a recognition rather than a first impression.

He does not speak to her that night.

He is not good at the first move. He is a person who writes about human connection with more fluency than most people have in actual conversation, which is either ironic or entirely predictable depending on your understanding of how writing works. Writing gives him the time to find the true sentence. Conversation requires the true sentence immediately, in real time, without revision.

He speaks to her at the next reading, a month later. She is there again and this time she speaks to him first, which he will always be grateful for, which he has told her he is grateful for, or rather has written about being grateful for in a poem that he has not shown her and possibly never will.

She says: I saw you at the last one. Do you come to these often?

He says: Yes.

He means: I don’t know why I keep coming, I thought I was doing it for the poetry, but I think I might have been coming because you might be here.

She says: I’m trying to get back into reading. I used to read a lot of poetry.

He says: What happened?

She pauses. She says: Life.

He understands this. He understands this more specifically and completely than she knows. He says: Yes.

* * *

He does not write about the relationship while it is happening. He writes around it — about the feeling of being seen, about what it means to let someone into the rooms he usually keeps closed,

about the specific vulnerability of showing someone your notebooks and watching them read without being able to know what they are thinking until they look up.

She reads the notebooks. Not all of them. The recent ones, the ones from the last two years. She reads slowly, which is the right way to read them. She looks up when she finishes the first one and says: These are the truest things I have ever read about what it feels like inside a person.

He writes about that sentence for a week.

He does not publish any of it. Not yet. This is private. This is the protected interior. He has the language for a public that needs it and he has a separate language that is only for the notebooks and only for himself and the boundary between those two kinds of language is something he guards with the specific attention of a person who has learned that not everything belongs to everyone.

* * *

He is twenty-three and he is in the relationship and he is writing and he is building and the website is still years away and the Best Sellers

are still years away and he does not know yet what the next three years will bring.

He is twenty-three and he is writing a book called An Inconvenient Attachment and he thinks he knows what it is about and he does not know yet that he does not know what it is about — that the book will teach him what it is about over the next four years of writing it, that the understanding will arrive at the end, not the beginning, and the end will require that some things first come apart.

He is twenty-three. He does not know what is coming.

He is writing. He is always writing. Whatever is coming, he will write through it.

He has always written through it.

He always will.

* * *

The relationship ends on a Saturday in April.

Not dramatically. That is the thing he has had to hold — the undramatic quality of the ending, the way it happened slowly and then was done, the way the last conversation was not a fight but a sitting at the kitchen table with the coffee going cold between them and the specific

honesty of two people who have run out of ways to be what the other person needs.

She is not a villain in this story. He has worked very hard to keep her out of villainy, in the writing and in his mind, because she is not a villain. She is a person who loved someone who could not always tell her why certain rooms were closed and certain hours were impossible, and who eventually ran out of energy for the not-knowing, which is a human thing to do.

He does not blame her.

He goes home that Saturday afternoon and he feeds the cats and he sits at the desk and he does not open the notebook. This is the only Saturday in years that he does not open the notebook. He sits at the desk with the closed notebook in front of him and he looks at the index card on the wall and he looks at the city out the window and he sits.

He sits for a long time.

Then he opens the notebook.

He writes one sentence: He left himself in her keeping and she gave him back.

He closes the notebook.

He feeds the cats again, even though he just fed them, because Ghost is asking and he does not have the energy to decline.

He goes to bed early.

He sleeps badly.

He gets up at 6.

He makes coffee.

He finds the notebook.

He writes for three hours and what comes out is the first chapter of An Inconvenient Attachment, which he does not know yet but will understand later.

He is twenty-three. He is still here.

The work is still here.

The work is always here.

* * *

He emails his father a link to the Spectrum News segment on his father’s birthday.

He does not say: here is what I said about survival. He does not say: I thought you might like to see this. He does not attach a message at all, just the link, because sometimes the right communication is to simply send the thing and let the thing do its work.

His father watches it. He knows this because his father, who is not on social media and does not own a smartphone, calls from his landline an hour after Vincent sends the email.

His father says: I watched it.

Vincent says: yeah.

His father says: you looked good.

Vincent says: thank you.

His father says: you said true things.

Vincent says: I tried.

His father says: happy birthday to me, huh?

Vincent laughs. It comes out easy. He says: happy birthday.

His father says: come to dinner Sunday.

He goes to dinner on Sunday.

He thinks about this on a Thursday in October, sitting at the desk in the afternoon light. He thinks: the way to thank someone for being there is to keep going. He keeps going partly because the going is what he gives the people who have watched him struggle and stayed anyway.

He writes this in the notebook.

He keeps it.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The cost is time. Writing time given over to distribution, to logistics, to the machinery of getting the work out.

He resents this imperfectly. He does it anyway. Because the work has to reach people or it is only half itself.

He lifts the pen.

The pen moves.

He takes in what is there.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He reads it back. Is it right? Is it true? He does not know yet. The light is different. The day has moved on. His body is tired. Ghost is asleep. Vincent looks at the notebook. The work outlasts the pain. He picks up the pen. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

He puts down the next line.

He has never not written the next line.