A Fading Reminder of Who I Used To Be ( #Nostalgia #OldLovers #LostLove )

By Annabeth Leong

I left the cursing out of the headline, but that’s a reference to the Nine Inch Nails song, “Something I Can Never Have,” which was a sort of anthem for me when I was younger.

It’s a slippery song. “You make this all go away,” Trent Reznor sings, and I don’t know if he means that the song’s object takes away the bad or simply takes away everything. I don’t know if the thing he can never have is in the present or the future, if it involves the person he’s singing to, or if he’s lamenting that he and the person he’s singing to can never have a “normal” sort of love together.

Despite these uncertainties, a melancholy magic starts in my chest every time I hear the opening piano melody, and every time I hear his voice crack as he sings, “I still recall the taste of your tears.”

It’s a deeply nostalgic song, and also angry and sad, and I think for me those things all go together. I miss the past and those who populated it. I miss the self I used to be. And I’m also aware that I can never have those things back, and I’m sad about it. I’m angry about the things that changed, the ways I can’t stay in the same place, even if I want to, the mistakes I made, and the thoughts I had that turned out to be wrong.

My heart is rather fickle, so while I identified with the song deeply, for me, its object often changed. (In a song I wrote back then, I included the line, “And I keep thinking, ‘Maybe if you were here…’/ But ‘you’ is a face that changes more than the shirts I wear.”)

But perhaps this is part of what it means for the song to have been slippery. It could contain whatever I was feeling at the time.

At one point, the song was a lament for an abusive partner, a person I’d loved deeply and made fearsome promises to. That person “made this all go away” in the sense that he forbade me from seeing friends, demanded I sacrifice everything that mattered to me aside from him, and generally reduced me to an animal state. The thing I wanted that I could never have was the original vision of who he was and what we could be. All that turned out to be false, but yet it glittered somewhere on the horizon. Even as I knew I had to get away from him, I felt nostalgia for the way it had been at first, the feeling of being deeply in love. And because he was a very early love for me, I felt nostalgic for the idea of there being “one” love, the thought that one could marry the first person to whom one gave oneself physically.

At another point, the song was a lament for a good partner that I couldn’t stay faithful to. He traveled often, and I’d sleep with other people on the weekends he was away, though I didn’t know why I was doing that. He “made this all go away” in the sense that he made me feel like a good and worthwhile person, but he was something I could never have because I didn’t know how to behave in that circumstance. I remember the way I felt years later watching the (admittedly campy) movie Black Snake Moan, in which the main character is a nymphomaniac. I’m not saying I actually have that illness, but I do know that I identify with a particular sort of passive helplessness. Back then, if someone asked me for sex, I didn’t know how to refuse it. I had no real resolve for that, and no sense of what my own desire was and if it included whatever I was being asked to do. There’s always been a way that I could feel other people’s desires, in a sort of overwhelming wave, to the point that I’ve sometimes felt I had no choice but to respond to them. When I think now of that time and the man I was dating, I see a muddled swamp of wanting and not wanting and not knowing which desires belonged to which people. You might think I wouldn’t miss it, but there was something about the way that confusion felt that was freeing and thrilling. I was sad about the things I messed up in the process, but I’ve often wished to do that time over, to try different outcomes, to see if I could use that messy stew to figure out more about who I actually am and want to be.

Another time, the “something I can never have” was an honest relationship with the girl I loved. I’ve written about her here several times before. We slept together, but I didn’t know how to be with her, not for real. She “made this all go away” in the sense that I wanted her with a sort of mind-erasing lust that I didn’t know was possible before her. After the first time we slept together, I wrote in my journal, “I had real sex last night, for the first time.” Then I tore the pages out of the book, ripped them carefully into tiny pieces, and buried them in the trash can under cat litter so they could never be found. With her, that sense of awakening and sense of shame were so deeply tied together that I still feel it now. I still have her picture. I still weep when I look at it. She had a birthmark on the side of her neck, and the studio that took the picture tried to airbrush it away as if it were some sort of blemish, and I fucking hate them for it. She had thick, curly hair that I loved intensely—so much that, recently, on the occasion of running my hands through another woman’s thick, curly hair, I shivered with recognition and longing for a person and a time long gone. I was cruel, sometimes, to the girl I loved, and that was both because I thought I couldn’t have her and a means by which I made it impossible to have what we could have had together.

And so I have a great deal of nostalgia for lovers of the past, and always did. In many ways, they now represent even more of what I can’t have. I can’t go back. I can’t make myself young again. There is only forward. That’s the hell and heaven of it all.

Rogues' Gallery

By Lisabet Sarai

Kathleen is responsible for this week's topic, “Nuggets of the Good Stuff”. Her explanation follows:

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe

But what about the world around you? What about your partners, your history, your setting, etc. do you mine for your stories? And how do they feel about being your muse, or fodder?

Oh, where to begin?

Practically every story I've ever written uses details from my personal experience. I have a reputation for tales set in exotic settings, and yes, I've spent time in Bangkok, London, Prague, Luang Prabang, Provence, and Amsterdam. The distinctive atmosphere of those locales can't help but seep into my writing. For the rare stories I write that are set in locations I haven't visited (Guatemala in Serpent's Kiss; Assam in Monsoon Fever), I tend to work by analogy, importing material from places about which I do have first hand knowledge, to make the results of my research more convincing.

I spent the first quarter decade of my life in school, college and grad school, and ten plus years working in universities since. It's no surprise that I count more than a few graduate students and professors among my characters. I find the superficially formal, conformist academic environment to be a supremely appropriate backdrop for outrageously kinky behavior.

The area where I borrow most intensively from my history, though, is in the creation of my male characters. I've had a rather diverse and colorful love life. It's pretty common for me to base my heroes on one or another of my past partners.

Of all my lovers, my poor Master has suffered most from my literary exploitation. Aspects of his personality and his physique show up in dozens of my stories, starting with my very first book. Raw Silk was partially dedicated to him, “My master, mentor and muse”. I even borrowed some quotes from his epistolary seduction of a D/s virgin (me, that is) to use in the novel.

How does he feel about appearing (in various disguises) in so many of my salacious tales? Simultaneously flattered and annoyed, I believe. As I've noted before, he's a very private person, and I'm sure he's somewhat concerned about his identity being compromised. This didn't stop him from bragging to his close friends about Raw Silk, though!

Another rogue who looms large in my fiction is D., the man whom I've referred to here as the “dark poet”. We had a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes depressing, relationship for a number of years while I was in grad school. Intellectual, creative, moody and passionate, intensely sexual but suspicious of his own carnal desires – lean and disheveled, with unruly dark hair and a droopy mustache – D. was the physical model for Rick Martell in Ruby's Rules, and has shown up in a range of other tales, most notably Truce of Trust, where I imagined him as my (that is, my heroine's) husband. (My master also shows up in that ménage tale.)

Then there's M. I met him at a friend's wedding and fell instantly in lust. The chemistry was mutual, even though at the time our lives and our values could hardly have been more disparate. M. was short, like me, with a strong, compact body and an infectious smile. He makes an appearance in my short story “Something Borrowed”, loosely based on that wedding, and also influenced the physique of Mark, my hero in Incognito. I'm still in touch with M., but like most of my friends and acquaintances he doesn't know about my literary endeavors. I plan to keep it that way – just in case he's uncomfortable with the liberties I've taken, making him bisexual and a BDSM switch!

In mining my history, I've gone back as far as high school. Gino in Almost Home bears a close resemblance to a guy who teased me relentlessly from the eighth through the twelfth grades and who I later realized was as attracted to me as I was to him. There's a lot of my past in that story, including the story about how “Gino” shamed my then-boyfriend, Gino's closest buddy, into taking me to the prom. I understand now how generous a gesture that was; I strongly suspect he wanted to ask me himself.

Then there's DD., my Indian lover who partially shaped Anil in Monsoon Fever; M., the first man (or perhaps I should say boy) I ever kissed, who was the model for Ray in Incognito; and the guy who's name I can't remember, who seduced and then abandoned me when I was a shy, naïve college junior. That experience appears (with some embroidery) in Incognito, as the justification for Miranda's fear of intimacy. The fact that I've forgotten his name is probably a good thing!

As I wander through the rogues' gallery of my past loves, I'm struck by the fact that I've never used any of my husband's traits to fashion a character. Perhaps one needs a bit of distance to stimulate the imagination. I doubt that K. would really mind, as long as I distorted enough details to preserve his anonymity.

Writing this post has also reminded me of all the other men I've known who haven't shown up yet in any of my stories, but who might contribute to future heroes. Let me reassure you, though, that not all my characters have a basis in fact. Indeed, as I become a more practiced and skillful writer, I find my characters becoming more diverse and more independent of my personal experience. My most recent release, Wild About That Thing, features two heroes who have little or nothing in common with any man I've ever known. Zeke is a blond, burly blues guitarist from Mississippi, a bearish type quick to smile but dangerous to cross. Remy is a slender, elegant, shaven-headed black man from New Orleans, equally passionate about the blues. The physical inspiration for Remy (and the germ of the story) came from a guy I noticed at a blues concert, so focused on the music that I doubt he was aware of anything else. His personality, though, flows entirely from my imagination.

I also notice that I can't think of a single female character who borrows much from anyone in my life – other than from me, that is. Some of my heroines are more like me than others, but I dare say that all of them, even the ones who are the most different, share some of my traits – whether I intend them to or not. I guess that this is what Goethe means. For the most part, my borrowings from the rogues' gallery are deliberate acts of literary license. In contrast, when I insert myself into a female character, I might not even realize that's what I'm doing.