I. He tells me my body is deteriorating. Just like that. He says, “Your body is deteriorating.” Part 1 of me says Fuck you. Part 2 of me weeps. II. We’re fighting about sunflowers again. Or maybe the…
Breakups are boring. There are lit journals that explicitly state this in their submission guidelines: no breakup stories, no breakup essays, no breakup poems. Part 2 of me understands this. Part 1 of me says, fuck those journals. Not really, but also a little bit. Because breakups are miserable and profound and also kind of beautiful. But, more importantly, sometimes you need to write about a damn breakup.
I want to say something bigger about art here. Art—writing—should be vulnerable. I want to read work with guts, with heart. And therefore, I’m committed to my own work having guts, heart. Does this knock me off some I’m-a-serious-writer-in-a-PhD-program pedestal? Hopefully. Because when I write, especially when I write nonfiction, if I’m doing a good job, I really do feel things. It’s not just an intellectual or aesthetic exercise, but a whole-body feeling experience. When I write nonfiction, I externalize a memory so that I can let go of it. I can make it real and tangible outside my body, and that way I don’t have to keep spiraling through it. I can take away its power. Me. I can do that.
This is what I’m doing here, in “Parts.” The breakup—which took a year if you don’t count the other times we broke up, before the last year—was painful. But so was the relationship. This is something we often can’t see until we’re outside of it. But even in the relationship, I felt I was moving down a tunnel that was gradually narrowing. There was no light at the end. Just dark concrete walls closing in on me. I didn’t know how to free myself. Because my body was “deteriorating.” Because who would want me if he didn’t? Because because because.
I think a lot about form when I write essays. The form of memory is slippery in a way that is sometimes exciting and sometimes devastating. As we remember, events tend to slide around in time and events slip in and out of order. Remembering is a grappling. And I think with memory, form is intricately tethered to content. They both determine each other, and it’s impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. At least, that’s true when they are working well together.
I’ve been told that relationships are half one person, half the other person. Something like that. But for me, the half that I was in this relationship was also halved. Part 1 and Part 2. The parts were propelled by different impulses, but both were, in their own ways, fighting for self-preservation. Part 1 is strong-willed. She doesn’t take any shit. Part 2 is a bit of an open wound. She’s the one who loves and loves so deeply she sometimes loses herself. I am and I love both of these parts. And I am and I love the many other parts that I am, too. And I believe, ultimately, that writing is a constant fracturing and reassembling of all of these parts, of all the parts that make us whole.
ALLISON FIELD BELL is a multi-genre writer from California. She is the author of two forthcoming collections: Bodies of Other Women (fiction) and All That Blue (poetry). She is also the author of three chapbooks: Stitch (forthcoming), Without Woman or Body, and Edge of the Sea. Find her on Twitter @afb16.
