by Shanna Germain
Recently, the city where I live has experienced a sudden and unusual rash of
shootings. My partner and I were talking about guns and violence and how people
react to those kinds of events, when out of the blue I said:
“I had a gun held on me once.”
“You did?” he asked.
“Didn’t I tell you that story?” I was sure I had.
“No,” he said. “I would remember it if you had.”
So I told the story I’ve told only a few
times before. How when I was eighteen, I started working as a paramedic on the
local ambulance. How I walked into a doublewide trailer for a routine diabetes
call and a man in a wheelchair pointed a gun at me. He told me if I took his wife
away, he would shoot me.
Looking back, I know a lot of things that I
didn’t know then: He was disabled, she was his caregiver, he was afraid.
Looking back, there are still so many
things I can’t remember. Did he have the gun when I walked in? Was it loaded? What
did he look like? And the thing I truly cannot remember is what happened
between the time he threatened to shoot me and the time I pushed his wife,
still alive, into the emergency room.
Did I talk him down? Did someone else? Did
he give up his gun like they do in the movies? What kind was it? Did I hold it?
Did I cry? Did he?
I don’t know.
Maybe because I have never told that part
of the story. This is how memories seem to work for me: If I tell the story of
them, they survive in some form. If I never tell their story, they fade away
and die.
It isn’t just the story of the gun, of
course. It’s all of those memories that make me what I am. I’ve written many
times about my mother abandoning me when I was young, but I come back to the
same parts again and again. I’ve written a lot about my work on the ambulance,
about my divorce, about car accidents and the death of loved ones. But if I
haven’t written about it, it’s likely that I never will, because the memories have
already begun to turn into ghosts and fade away.
This year, I’m doing a poem-a-day project
and it’s taxing my memory in unusual ways. My poems are rarely
autobiographical, but they always have hints and pieces of my true past in
them, for those who know where to look. In order to come up with enough
material to write a poem every day, I find myself chasing down disappearing
ghosts, long-dead memories, and trying to resurrect them with an object, a
symbol, a line of iambic pentameter. More often than not, I fail. They are
fleeting things, slipping outside the reach of my pen with a surprising
quickness.
I don’t write to heal from trauma or to let
go of the memories. I write to save the experiences, to preserve them forever
in the seal of words. The trouble with that is they’re not perfect
preservations. After a while, they become recordings of recordings, so far from
the original that the truth I am trying to save becomes lost in
translation.
I’ve written about the man with the gun a
lot this year, even before the recent shootings took place. He appears in the
opening stanza of “Near Misses,” and you can see I’ve already begun to move him
away from the truth that he was. The true memory is fading and becoming a thing
of objects and universal truths.
Near Misses
As young as two, the rock through the
window
falls just to the right of vital organs. My
mother
screamed so I didn’t need to find a sound.
Fifteen years later, a man holds a gun
so close I can see the black hole of the
chamber against my eye.
On a river wild, I slid from the back of a
raft,
grasping at air.
The plane from Mexico struck by lightning.
Twice.
A car rolling on black ice.
A hole in the lower heart.
Lyme disease. Horse bucked. Riptide caught.
It’s a wonder we go on living at all.
It’s a wonder we go on living at all.
There is wonder in going on living at all.
[Rest of poem http://thisbodyofwork.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/110/
]
That day, as we continued talking about the
man with the gun, my partner asked, “What were you thinking when you were
standing there, with him holding the gun on you?”
That part I do remember. Because I’ve
written about it.
“I was thinking that I’d escaped death so many times that I was probably long overdue, that it was okay if he shot me, because I’d lived such an amazing life.”
“I was thinking that I’d escaped death so many times that I was probably long overdue, that it was okay if he shot me, because I’d lived such an amazing life.”
I thought that, at eighteen. I stood in a
trailer in my jumpsuit with my paramedic kit in my hand and I looked at that
man with the gun in his hand, and I thought, “If I die, it’s okay.”
Or maybe I didn’t think that at all. Maybe
I’ve just been writing that, again and again, so that it will become real. And
in time, the true memory will fade away into nothing more than gunpowder and
smoke.
~
Shanna Germain is a writer, editor,
leximaven, she-devil, vorpal blonde and Schrodinger’s brat. You can find her
poem-a-day project at https://thisbodyofwork.wordpress.com/
and more about her and her work at www.shannagermain.com
4 comments:
Shanna,
Thanks for joining us here on the Dead Good Blog this weekend.
Love the poem. Love the story behind it, and it was pretty cool to follow the link and be able to hear you read your work.
Ash
Thanks so much for inviting me. My absolute pleasure to be here. I've loved reading all the pieces from this week.
Best, s.
We edit our stories all the way through don't we? Swapping and changing bits according to mood or audience. Eventually we become our stories when they are all that's left behind.
Terrific guest blog, thank you. (You already know I love your poetry).
Vicky x
Oops. I commented, but I think I might have done it wrong. Trying again!
Thanks, Vicky, for the nice words. And yes, it continues to amaze me how many ways there are to tell the same story, how it evokes something different each time. There is so much power in the ways we use words.
All the best, s.
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