The Story of Christy & Jackie, Phobias, and a General Longing for Days When We All Used Pens More Often

For a few years, I really thought I wanted to be a writer. I started a book, the title is unimportant, but it revolved around a main character who suffered from a wide variety of phobias; strange phobias, the things that terrified him wouldn’t phase any normal person. Some of the fears weren’t too off the wall, but a few were a bit harder to sympathize with.

He was in a constant state of preparation for a specific set of natural disasters. He measured water in his basement according to medical journals’ accounts of how much was needed for certain time periods, and he labelled the water cabinets to remind him which supply was for which time period, as determined by the approximate amount of time he’d be sequestered from society given the disaster.

Forks terrified him.

Sidewalk cracks were bottomless pits.

He lived with his mother, who tried her best to understand but usually ended up making things worse.

The story was meant to be a mystery, the first chapter is entirely a police report, a collection of files and notes by our other lead, the detective. Our scared man has disappeared, and no one knows where he is, but he left behind a journal. The journal entries are interspersed throughout the rest of the book, giving clues as to where he might be.

The biggest clue, I thought, was his obsession with the daughter of his employer, a girl named Magdalina. I thought that making the possibility of love a possible reason for his salvation and a possible reason for a complete and total breakdown at the same time was interesting, because often, the possibility of love is both of those things for all of us anyway.

So at some point during the writing process, I felt like I was writing a love story, and I didn’t want to write a love story. Everything I knew about love I learned from songs and heartbreak, and the television was telling me that there was something else, some kind of life that involved yards and cereal in bed on those little trays and his and hers toothbrush holders. Even laxative commercials threw my ignorance in my face – look at them, getting each other’s medicine out of the cabinet. She knows he’s not feeling well after all that hard to digest food, she’s one step ahead because she loves him and she’s learned to know him inside-out. Somewhere in her, she’s become some part of him. That big fat ugly guy in the Sports Illustrated commercial whose ass is growing at an expontential rate due to their new bloopers video and its incredible watchability has a neat and tidy woman who loves him, and looks at him adoringly from her crochet, looks at that beast of a human as if he’s the center of the universe and feels proud.

Is that what love is?

An old boyfriend used to call me Heartbreaker. This was way back, back before babies, back before college. This old boyfriend had a way of making me feel like a heartbreaker, even though I never had been, as far as I was aware, and eventually, when he broke up with me, I was relieved we never got those tattoos we had discussed. It was my bus ride home from that break up that sort of shocked me back into writing regularly, and my story about the phobia-ridden apothecary employee began. But as I mentioned, when it became a love story I set it down, and seeing as how this was before I had a computer, before I even had an email address, when the spiral notebook misplaced itself, that was the end anyway.

But if someone found it, and actually read it, they’d probably feel a lot like the detective did when he found our hero’s diary. They’d read it and think, “What the hell is going on here? Why did this person draw a fork with a face on it and horns? And why would someone write so much and then just leave this behind? Where are they?” If it was me, I’d wonder where the person was, the way you look at bathroom stall graffiti and wonder if the author would be embarassed if they were confronted with their crime in the midst of whatever situation they were in then, at the moment you read their scribbled accusations and testaments to the never-ending love they have with their boyfriend.

I wonder if Christy and Jackie are still friends, and I wonder who altered their work, if the person knew them or was just bored in a bathroom in a strange restaurant bar in the Midwest, standing at the sink with a pen in hand, unable to keep her childishness to herself. I’d like to write a story about people that take shape after I’ve read their bathroom graffiti, I’d make it a series of vignettes that center around a local bar or pub. We’d make it a movie, we’d cast Phoebe Cates as the bar owner and make her cool again, and at the end of the day I’d retire to some room, stub my toe on something and say aloud, to someone, “We left our breakfast trays on the floor this morning.”