The Bookery: Alana Saab's "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me"

“I was trapped there alone, watching the bald planets in every lonely galaxy spin for nothingness.”

I never wanted to call it rising above because it sounds arrogant. It’s just that I never had the right combination of words to explain my rising out of my body and through the sky and into space that happens many times a day when faced with conversations or circumstances that in the grand scheme of things are ridiculous to me. When I do this, the ridiculous thing becomes mote-small and absolutely absurd. It becomes as tossable as the residue that you scratch off your skin. It loses meaning.  But then I read this book and the very troubled character(s), Norma, calls it oblivion. Lately, I have been calling it going to space. Regardless of what we call it, it is a leaving of the here and now, a blackening or littling of everything, or what Neil deGrasse Tyson may call a cosmic perspective. A perspective where the trivialities (and even the non-trivialities) of our existence are absurd (my experience) or completely annihilated (Norma’s experience). Two men elude social issues to bicker about golf scores on live TV and I go to space. Social media diagnoses every quirk as ADHD or Autism or what-have-you like it’s a trend and I go to space. Humans worry about the shapes of their faces and butts and I go to space.

In order to make things right in her life gone poor, Norma needs to rewrite it. Her great life’s work, a novel about a woman whose life has gone poor, is metafiction. Norma’s creator, the author Alana Saab, is a woman whose life had gone poor and so she wrote a novel about Norma. Norma struggles to write the perfect ending while struggling to live an imperfect life. She believes that through creating a narrative, her core beliefs (created by years of trauma), can be brought to fruition. A love can be created and had with “the one”. She is quite literally living a fiction.

“Sometimes, we live in these worlds unwillingly. Sometimes even unknowingly. But once you realize the truth, you can create your own world.”

and

“Yes, I think we’ve just been living in the wrong narrative--”

and don’t forget the reciprocity of narrative:

“…I have no free will. The unseen forces of others were once thrust upon me, and now I carry their burden. Choice isn’t real, but instead my choices are built from others’ ‘choices,’ which are built from others and so on and so forth.”

We (at least the western world) are an exposed species. Information, constant and slanted. Emotions, ever-flowing. Fences, knocked down, climbable. Misinformation, an ocean. Rabbit-holes, aplenty. It is no wonder, it is no wonder, it is no wonder.

“You see, oblivion is the only natural response to this world, because it would be mad not to be depressed in this world…not to dissociate into a state that turns this entire crumbling place unreal. Because for the most part, wouldn’t it be lovely if it wasn’t real? And wouldn’t we be utterly insane not to be insane when we can get any answer we want on Google in less than a second? And we can get the opposite answer of that one in another millisecond? And guns are more accessible than healthcare…And people can’t use the bathroom they feel safest in? And suicide is the number one killer in the world: not terrorists, not serial killers, not natural disasters, not mass murderers? And children (children!) would rather be dead than alive? And parents can’t even sue the tech companies that enact this psychological, neurological warfare on their kids.

If you’re not deemed “mentally ill” by this fucked-up society, I worry for you. I think of you. I pray for you.”

I finished this book while sitting in the blazing morning sun on my patio. I left it there in the sun, its black cover hugging all the heat, as if the flowers on the cover would burst forth and the eyes on the cover would see the sky I’m under. Within the next hour, I was walking in knee-high grass along the river with two gentlemen who talked about birds and documenting birds and the absurd ways that bird songs are rendered in field guides. They talked about birds as if bodies weren’t being decimated, as if innocent narratives were being annihilated, as if guns weren’t treated like vitamins. This is not their fault and this is not a criticism. I envied their concentration and passion--their feet on the ground in their passion. Their commitment is based off true interest other than just wonder or escapism. My difference from them reminded me of Norma, who may not have prayed to a god but prayed to stardust and dirt. Water, Earth, Air, and Fire. Like Norma, I am apologizing to the more-than-human world a million times. But I also want my feet on the ground, to come down from space and participate more than I do. Look the person in the eye. Lend the hand. Find a solution. Build something. Know the bird, so to speak. Be more body than brain. I have work to do.

“What matters is that now we’re the main characters, and if we want a good story, we can’t be passive anymore. We have to do something different than we’ve ever done. We have to go after what we want. We have to make choices. Hard ones. And if we do this, I believe we can all wake up from oblivion. We can make ourselves better and the world better.”