How It Started is a blog series exploring the development of a piece of writing from its initial idea, image or line, to its final version. You can read my previous post about my story “Still, Life (With Avocados),” published in Capsule Stories here. If you would be interested in sharing the story behind one of your pieces, please feel free to reach out to me to coordinate.
Read “Happy Now,” published in Flash Frog Lit.
Maybe they need therapy.
Maybe they need a time machine.
I once told a therapist that what I believed I needed most to be healthy was a time machine so I could go back to a certain point in my life and change the way I responded to a particular set of events. Instead of reframing my current thinking, practicing radical empathy for my younger self, and learning how to let go and move on, it would all be so much easier if I could just go back in time and respond differently.
“What I need is a time machine,” I told her, to which she responded yes, that would be nice, but for now all we had was that day’s fifty-minute session.
“Happy Now,” is a story about a marriage on the brink, but it began as a woman in conversation with her younger self.
I set out to write a story about a character confronting her past, both admonishing and forgiving herself, then and now, for her actions. It was structured as a disjointed, jumbled back-and-forth between her two selves, never entirely clear what was a spoken thought and what was internal dialogue, or even which version of the woman, present or past, was speaking at any given moment. It worked if I was to be the only reader of the story, but it was a confusing, nonsensical mess for anyone who wasn’t inside my head. But within that confusion was a truth about the ways people struggle to communicate with each other.
I shifted the story’s characters to a married couple in part because the idea of therapy versus a time machine felt like two opposing approaches to addressing the cause of a failing relationship. Was the problem a single act of infidelity, the marriage saved by simply going back in time and not committing adultery? Or was the problem larger than that, as most problems are? An inability to communicate the emotions and frustrations at the root of the action? Needs left unspoken as the couple grows farther apart over time?
The way in which I structured the story originally—a combination of internal thought, disjointed dialogue, a confusion about what has been communicated directly, versus what has been left unsaid—felt to me like how couples communicate when they are struggling to communicate, all of their exchanges underpinned with resentment and frustration. I stripped out all quotation marks and focused on quick, statacco sentences, lots of short back-and-forths.
What if we forget the whole thing, he suggests.
What if we become fabulously wealthy?
Why not both?
I tried to infuse many of these exchanges with a wry, pointed humor, because that is the way my husband and I argue: aiming for laughter even when we are angry. I wanted to hint at a foundation that was not completely cracked and crumbling. There was still a soft landing place for this couple on the other side of their turmoil, a connection that allowed them to joke, to banter, a time of happiness that they couldn’t travel back to, but perhaps could recreate in the future.