The Words That Remain

Review

This book was mentioned last week in our book club’s discussion of We All Loved Cowboys. Hearing the plot, I made sure to buy a copy before I left the store. It is a short little book, and it can barely contain the emotion within it.

Letters are prized and terrible things. I cannot imagine carrying a letter for decades, knowing it contains the words of the person that I love and adore, and not having means to hear those words in my heart. I can imagine knowing that a letter like that exists, and not receiving that, because that has happened to me. But this is something different and something more.

Gardel beautifully illustrates intergenerational trauma, and how we pass our wounds from parent to child. Suzzanny says, “shame is a useless emotion,” and yet knowing it is useless is different from us deciding to put it out of our hearts. That takes something else, something more. A decision, and strength, and support, and in some ways faith.

It is Pride Month, a thing to which I have a complicated relationship. I don’t often feel pride. That is not a commentary on my sexuality, as much as it is my understanding of my course of life and a chronic self-interrogation. I live in Washington, DC, and for the past few weeks streets are being painted and buntings hung with the pride colors. There will be a pride parade in the nation’s capital this month. There will also be a military parade, supporting a leader whose government works to erase evidence of our existence from government data. All of us, I hope, know that this will only be the first of many steps, each darker than the last. And so, I am not feeling very excited to see Raytheon and Amazon floats in a Pride parade.

I was walking home from work yesterday, and I read Tristan Kern de Gonzales’s letter, published following the brutal murder of his husband, Jonathan Joss, before his eyes. The murder was and is a hate crime, and yet it is so rarely being reported as such. A man burned Joss’s childhood home down, he murdered his dogs, he staged the scene, and when Joss arrived, he shot and killed him in front of his husband. In Tristan’s place, I would want to destroy that man, everyone he knew, and obliterate all trace of his existence from this planet. I would want to turn his lands into glass. Newspapers are barely reporting it.

It was impossible for me to set these feelings aside, reading Gardel’s book, reading of Raimundo’s father beating him, his life lived in fear and regret. This world does not need to be this way. The choice is made each day for it to remain as it is, and they will keep making this choice to let us live in fear and death until that choice is grabbed from their hands. Sometimes I feel rageful. Yesterday, I nearly cried walking home after reading Tristan’s letter. I cried reading the final pages of this book.

“There is no justice for us, just the justice that I make myself, by getting out of bed everyday,” Suzzanny says.

Two Parades. “Justice.” What can “justice” possibly mean? What can it possibly mean for Raimundo, or Suzzanny, or Cicero? What can it possibly mean for Jonathan and Tristan? What can it mean for all those who came before and lived their lives in terror, those who were ridiculed, and beaten. Those were abandoned, if they were lucky, or killed?

I don’t know if I can take seeing Amazon, Raytheon, or Bud Fucking Light at a pride parade. I would rather see a flock of pissed off queers refusing to let our existence and our happiness be a choice for bigots and corporatists to bestow upon us when they feel so inclined. I would like us to seize it and beat them over the metaphorical heads with it.

Notes

p12 - It’s horrible not knowing, it’s like being blind though you can see.

p45 - I can’t let you walk down this path alone, I can’t, because we’re brothers, first and foremost, how can father not see his son? he doesn’t see you, he can barely look at you and can’t accept the truth.

p59 - …but he’d at least be with him, it’d be different, it would be daytime, he’d look into his brown eyes, the orgasm would be sweet, not bitter like the one he’d just had…

p73 - …I don’t have to show what I am to anyone, I did that with Cicero, then everyone found out, you let someone come inside you like that, and he goes through everything, rearranges the space, and then leaves, slamming the door in your face…

p89 - …one day they’ll learn, the way I learned, they’ll learn, but you have to want to, want to get out of your ignorance, like the way I want to learn how to read and write, I made the decision to see the world differently, to feel more like I’m part of it, because ignorance does that, excludes, isolates, and didn’t I live in isolation?

p117 - There is no justice for us, just the justice that I make myself, by getting out of bed everyday.

126 - …change will always come, whether we run after it or it runs over us, without asking us to move out of the way. And it’s good that it comes, closure is what’s good for you, the right ending that pushes us in the right direction, if it weren’t for the finality of the end, would we just live the same day every single day?