A friend… not the man pictured here:
but a different man different than this one. Possibly a woman, even. Possibly a girl:
This friend who I have not pictured here, thanked me recently in the forward to their book.
I found this touching. It is a grand gesture, after all, acknowledgment.
It is broad and sweeping and indells my name forever in ink. And not just my name but a whole piece of my person. The part of me that this friend is grateful to…
my intellect,
or my cheer,
or my comfort,
or my advice,
or just my company.
Some quarter of my being is cast inside the tiny quantity of ink that holds my name. And that quarter of myself is being thanked and it is being thanked thousands of times over.
In every copy of the book that is produced, my name is produced again and that enormous slice of me is honored therein.
And further, even every time the page my name appears on is read, that chunk of me is gratiated again and again, once for each eye that sees the word.
So you can see why I found it so touching.
But then, after a time. It weighed on me, all this gratitude.
The grateful are like drunk friends who lean on you to walk them home.
And I thought of all of the people reading my name and thinking that I must have done something really quite amazing to be made so immortal, prefacing the preface of the book.
And I don’t know at all what it was that I did.
Why I was thanked.
Why I’d been acknowledged.
I’m sure I was amazing whatever it was.
But the not knowing gnawed at me.
And I couldn’t just ask this friend.
Because I don’t really know them, you see.
I mean, I’ve met them and
spent time with them and
had drinks with them and
talked with them and
along the way something was done that I’m sure was worthy of this thanks. But they are the sort of person listed in my phone with their first AND last names and both spelled correctly.
There are no nicknames between us. We were never that cordial.
I wonder if the other people being thanked on that heavy, wretched page felt the same as me.
I called a few and got only voicemails.
I began then to think less and less of this friend. My reasoning went that if my paltry contribution was worthy of thanks then their thanks therefore must also be paltry, and worthless. And so then must their book, and so then must they.
My diminishing regard for this singular person then gnawed and gnawed at me. The less I thought of them the more obsessed I became. Nights I dreamed of my name in heavy ink sitting uncomfortably on the page, the letters squirming, trying in vain to jump off and rest somewhere else–the floor maybe or the sofa.
Days I paced my room inventing revenge after revenge for this injustice that now ate at me like sitting in a gentle but incontrovertible bath of acid.
I began buying up every copy of the book I could find and then arranging them in my library, filling first one bookshelf and then another and another until the entire room was nothing but copies of the book, the forward unread, my name never seen. But this proved my further undoing for whenever I would sit in that room, surrounded by issue after issue after issue I would feel the letters of my name pressing in at me from all sides, pulsing like something hungry, or desperate, or in love.
I walled the room up then. With brick and mortar and left it to dust, but the press of the thanks never abated.
And finally at the end of my wit I burned my entire estate, house and yard and garden.
even the hedge-maze, which I know was your favorite.
I salted the earth and doused the ashes in lye.
But the sad truth is, a word once written can’t ever be unwritten.
And a thing once set to type can’t ever be unset.
And so I sit here under the weight of this horrible gratitude, like the world on Atlas.
And there’s nothing to do but let it crush me
slowly and
lovingly.
