Far Enough

*Published by Essay Daily on May 30, 2001

We know how to take up space. Midwestern essayists can detail vast expanses heavy with dense, river-valley air; recreate the contrasts between time-worn folks in little towns with abandoned main streets and the hubs of Missouri’s flanking cities where downtowns cling to re-birth. But we also occupy space with the absence of words; we know how to fill a page with spareness, to make the emphasis not what we’re saying but what we aren’t. We’re stubborn that way; sometimes we don’t want to go there, spell it all out for you. The “show-me” attitude could also be defined as “make-me.”

Much of my writing life has been spent exploring the contrast between the need for language to describe every inch of our external and internal lives and a simultaneous desire to strip things down, be bare and sparse. There is value sometimes in just letting things be. But I’ve come to question my motives for saying less.

Sometimes, scarcity allows us to shrug off our cloak of responsibility. And I must admit my own propensity to be a voyeur; to watch, but not acknowledge connection. To shake my head from the East Coast at my home state’s political gaffs, environmental heartbreaks, at a cop murdering a black person miles from where my best friend grew up. Distance allows me not to feel responsible. But it’s also taken me away from what I know.

Avoidance hasn’t allowed me to go far enough. It doesn’t ask the questions that require answers from the reader or the essayist. It won’t explain why my experience at a private elementary school that was evenly split, black and white, is still not normal in St. Louis. Why my childhood friend died of opiate addiction, or why another friend clings tightly to her Catholic faith yet voted for a president who contradicted her beliefs. Or why, no matter how far away I run, I still feel a pull to a part of the world where it smells of honeysuckle in the evening, where the Arch looms large over the muddy Mississippi, where I learned to write what was inside of me.