Amendment for a Work You Will Never Read
Written by Gavin Pritchard, Edited by Meaghan Burke
Duck by Sarah Pagano
Dear Reader,
This amendment is in reference to my work, “The Lumpy Body Society”. It’s about my body dysmorphia and the relationships that influenced it. If you have not read it (which is the case since it has never been released and never will), I encourage you to read on! If you want to read the original work, please don’t ask me! I will likely deny its existence, begin to sweat profusely from the armpits, and run naked from stressed induced mania outside of Dillingham. But it may be worth it for the laughs, I suppose.
What I am amending is only obvious to me – since I am the only one who has actually read the work being referenced. For starters, I have never been a non-fiction writer. When writing about real life, I find it is too tangible (shocker!). Life in itself is much too exciting for a dorm dweller like me. Perhaps, my fault comes from a larger disconnect from the world around me. But screw the world. It sucks. George Santos lies and gets into office. People kill each other over arbitrary border wars. And I am supposed to believe that fresh air will somehow heal me? I would rather be healed by a Tombstone Piledriver by the late and great Undertaker. (Yes, that’s a WWE reference. And no, I will not take it back.)
I’ve always desired good health. I’ve needed it for a long time. But the care I crave cannot be fixed with just some fresh air and a band-aid. When I was 13, I was in a child hospital in Syracuse. As a teenager, I was far from the intended age group. My legs hung off the bed, and the shower came up to my shoulders. Stickers of rainbow teddy bears stuck to the ceiling and the television buzzed with static. I was there for a week and only on the last day – the last day – did my TV work. It was torture. There is no doubt in my mind. It reminds me now of Eleanor’s clown house from The Good Place. (I watch way too much television. It’s becoming a real problem.) Everything was set up to make someone happy, and that someone wasn’t me. My IV dripped steroids into my bloodstream, and my arm flexed under the fear of the IV needle poking out of my skin. The thin linen of the bed sheet floated like a ghost across my skin. An hour became a day – a day became a week. Time flashes past quickly from the confines of a hospital bed. I just kept watching The Legend of Korra episodes on my phone. In all honesty, I felt so unbelievably isolated -- even as my parents came to my side. I had just been at a cross country camp, full of my friends and schoolmates. The camp was on a strip of land belonging to a religious foundation. We were public school runners that sinfully stained the Christian land with our language and late-night forest rendezvous. I was in the prime of my social life. There was no going up, baby! I officially peaked in high school. That had all been torn away from me as my chronic Crohn’s tore at my colon. From the camp, I rode in a car with Hotel California on repeat. I was in awful, stomach wrenching pain. Once I got to the hospital, my parents slept in my patient room on chairs in sleeping bags. Above them was a window that opened to Syracuse University. They sat, and slept, and stayed for the whole week.
I am not very good at nonfiction writing. I hate it. I despise the idea of taking someone or something and placing it into a tiny box. In nonfiction, we don’t write people. We write the idea of a person. It is a character who could never encompass the full existence of a living being. In “The Lumpy Body Society”, I felt I kept circling around the truth. I would race around like a cat pursuing a laser only to dive headfirst into a kitchen chair. When I finally put pen to paper, only false depictions grew on the page. I kept wrestling with the fact that sometimes someone you love, unequivocally, can say something awful. But I judged them in the isolation of that moment, and it felt so wicked. I was telling the truth, but I knew it wasn’t the complete truth. I won’t say who I wrote about in “The Lumpy Body Society”. In fact, I am keeping that work vague on purpose. Certain stories are just too complex and private to share. Even when I don’t share those stories, I feel awful for shoving people -- even those I really dislike -- into the simplicity of words when their actions are inexpressible.
For example, my mom has a pension for gift giving. She loves it. She hands out little cards with little words of understated love. She would chastise me for buying books, then turn around and give me Barnes and Noble gift cards. Then she would smile and say, “I know how much you love your books, Gav. I know you.”
My dad is a straightforward man. He doesn’t much like mushy emotions. I often say, “Love you, dad.”
His go-to response is “Ditto.” (Like the Pokémon, which he calls Poke-MAN.) However, I always know my dad loves me. It just isn’t something he needs to say. One Christmas, I gave my dad a collection of my fiction work. It was a simple collection, bound by an overpriced leather binder. I called it “A Collection of Unimportant Stories for Very Important People”. As my father tore at the wrapping, tears welled under his eyes. His voice cracked. “What’s this?”
“It’s my work, dad.”
“I’ve never seen it.” And I felt both incredibly guilty and proud and I knew -- it was better than any I love you. I never like to share my work. When it comes to nonfiction, I hate displaying my personal stories. I feel it is an invasion that I am incapable of handling. When I try to write complex moments, like my love of my mother and father, or the loss of my innocence in a hospital bed – I feel my words are completely inadequate in describing the emotions I still feel.
How can I capture that? How can a capture a moment, a person, a sensation, and not feel somehow responsible for its portrayal? Never have I felt so guilty for telling the truth. Nothing I said in “The Lumpy Body Society” was a lie. Not one bit. But it was dishonest to the people who I wrote about. It showed a bad moment in an otherwise wonderful person’s life. Therefore, I felt guilty for writing it in the first place. People are complicated and so are feelings. They are things that cannot easily be set into words. So, I amend it. I shovel it away. It belongs to me now. And know that I am sorry, reader. There is a larger story that I am keeping from you. But it doesn’t belong outside of my computer files.
I was once told that no tale is too complicated for a good writer; therefore, I must not be that good. Which, to be honest, feels relatively wonderful.
Respectfully From,
Gavin Pritchard