52 Postcards - postcard #1

The first thing I feel compelled to tell you is that this is not supposed to be good writing. Every week, I'm going to sit down with a different postcard, and write something related to that postcard for seven minutes. No editing, no cross-outs, just pen and paper. My desire to do this came from the realization that one of my writing problems is my unwillingness to sit down at the table unless I've got a phrase or idea that I am so in love with that I can't resist getting it down on paper. Sometimes you just need to sit down at the table, and see that you will survive the bad writing, and that the bad writing won't somehow commit you to more bad writing, as though writing was like a golf swing, and doing it badly would leave you with the relentless muscle memory of the wrong way to do it. Anyway, here's this week's bad swing.

Postcard: Have A Nice Day, 1977
Photograph by Paul McMahon
Exercise: Relate the postcard to your life

Last night in my dream, we were still together. We were at my mother's house, and it was the day before an event. Your old hatchback was outside, and as you walked out to it, you told me that you were going to see Sara and Steve. I wasn't invited. And with that, we broke up.

I hadn't dreamed that we were together in a long time. I hadn't thought about Sara in longer. In the dream, I couldn't believe that we had broken up, just like that, and when I woke, I wondered if I had ever believed it at all.

Days before we broke up in real life, I remember sitting in my car, in a parking lot that overlooked the beach. It was cold outside, that kind of cold that burrows deep in your ears. I sat in the car and wrote a letter in a notebook. When I write lettters in a notebook, it's unlikely I will ever send them, because that would mean tearing out the pages. I don't know what I did with that one. It was written to a girlfriend, one who I can think about those things with. I felt sad and content in the car, both at the same time, and I think maybe that was the first time I really knew we were about to break up.

The day we did, it was still a surprise. Talking about it was like walking up to a steep cliff you are going to dive off of. I remember a tablecloth that used to sit on the kitchen table, yellow and blue, that matched the tablecloth we had turned into a curtain over the window with the sill you later told me had rotted completely, so that you and your new wife had to take out part of the wall to fix it.

When I told Susan we broke up, she said "I feel terrible, I didn't even know anything was wrong." and after that, I didn't pretend anything was okay that really wasn't. But I'm not sorry that we kept that pact of silence about our relationship in a way, I think we had a quietness about things that came from the fact that we were closer then than Susan and I were. That seems okay to me, when you are with someone trust-worthy, like I was with you.

You wanted to talk about things after we broke up, but I never knew what to say. It was like we had been this postcard, a happy face drawn over a truth that was nothing more than blurry to me.