This summer I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and practicing the one-inch picture frame. Namely focusing on one small scene. One person. One detail. To stay there long enough to actually see it.
One example of this practice was my Lunch piece.
Technically, yes, I’m still a recovering overachiever, so I integrated two people in this childhood memory of mine: Nealy Shvil and Chris Clowar.
These are, for transparency, real children, and still real humans, albeit anything I write is only partially true. I am doing my best to remember them, as they existed to me based on my interpretation, and with that comes a natural biased because I am human and there is also a natural incorrectness because this is a memory. Who knows what I am fabricating or truly remembering. Even I don’t.
With that said, I’m spending today sitting with that story, reading it over and over again, and asking myself less about the initial role they played in my plot and focusing more questions about who they were to me as people. It’s an attempt to dive deeper and see if anything “better” comes out that I can add to my story.
To be crystal clear, this exercise and the original piece itself isn’t judgment of them; it’s my best attempt to revert myself back into my nine-year old brain and see through those eyes with as much observation as possible, including bodily sensations, scenes, and feelings, or anything else that arises. It is also me using the power of being an adult to dig deeper into my childhood psyche so that I can be creatively non-fictionary (if you will) with them as characters.
If, for whatever reason, the real Nealy and Chris read this, I’d like you to know that you two are amazing humans. I had no idea until now that what you carried in yourselves as children was medicine to my healing. Thank you for being you despite that my childhood self grappled with it. It wasn’t you, it was me–I was just trying to sort out the world. Weren’t we all? I hope that you are both well and I have no doubt you are leaving magic wherever you go. Lots of love.
NEALY
To me, Nealy was always a know-it-all. She was the first one to raise her hand, the first one to contradict a teacher, the first one to correct you. She was big, BIG energy in a tiny little body. She was even shorter than I was, and I was a pretty small kid. She had this intense walk where her torso almost twisted as she moved. Excellent posture. She looked a little like a tough bulldog. She talked fast. She always talked for long stretches of time. She would deep dive into things and explain them whether anyone had asked or not. At lunch she commented on what people were eating, what they were doing, how they should be doing it differently. She was constantly course-correcting everyone, and she always looked satisfied afterward. Her lips would get terse, her gaze would find the distance past you. Chin slightly raised. Sometimes her arms crossed. She didn’t even need to look you in the eye.
It didn’t seem to matter whether you agreed; she already agreed with herself.
As an adult, holy shit, what a superpower to possess! But as a kid, whenever Nealy started talking, my body seized. My chin pulled downward. My jaw tightened. My teeth clenched. My shoulders rounded forward. Her voice felt like it penetrated my body. I wanted her to stop talking. I wanted her to go away. Sometimes I would stare at her blankly, then look away, almost hoping that when I looked back she wouldn’t be there anymore.
Why is she always around? We’re not even really friends.
We were in the same elementary-school girl orbit. Six or seven girls who ended up in the same classes every year, played together at recess, went to some of the same sleepovers, but I very rarely spent time with her one-on-one.
I admittedly never really liked her.
I remember our class had a tree frog as a pet. Nealy picked it up because she was going to tell everyone how to determine its gender. I rolled my eyes.
Of course she was.
She held it above her head and looked up at it, mouth open while she was trying to explain something. The frog peed directly into her mouth. I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. It felt deserved.
This is what happens when you’re a know-it-all.
But when I stay with Nealy longer in this timeline, the thing that really seemed to bother me as a kid wasn’t just that she was annoying. It was that she could do whatever she wanted and somehow never seemed to get punished for it. She could be bossy. She could tell everyone what she thought. She could correct people. She could be completely certain that her way was the right way. And people still liked her. That part made no sense to me. Everyone talked about how annoying she was behind her back, but she also had really close friends who would defend her and hang out with her. Friends who seemed loyal to her. Friends who didn’t seem to care that she was annoying even if they complained about her. I could not rectify those things.
If I acted like Nealy, I believed people wouldn’t like me. If I acted like Nealy, people would find me annoying. And being annoying felt like something you should know about yourself and correct.
How could she not know? …or maybe she knew and crazily didn’t care…?
I believed there were rules around opinions. You could think someone was doing something wrong. You could absolutely believe your opinion was the right opinion. But you couldn’t just tell people what to do. Unless, I suppose, you were in charge, like for a classroom project or a group assignment. Then it was allowed. Lunch was different though. Lunch felt individual. For me, people could eat whatever they wanted. Except somehow that rule did not apply to me. I couldn’t just eat whatever I wanted. I had to eat what everyone else thought was good so I would be liked. Nealy did not seem to have that problem. She seemed perfectly happy believing herself.
Because of this exploration, I made a subtle addition to my Lunch story by adding this paragraph to encapsulate some of these additional insights:
Whenever Nealy started talking, my whole body seemed to brace. My chin pulled down, my jaw tightened, my shoulders rounded forward like I could somehow make myself smaller until she stopped. I never understood how Nealy could be so annoying and still have best friends. Everyone knew she was annoying. Except, apparently, Nealy.
CHRIS
Chris always made me feel a little dizzy. I could never keep up with all his thoughts. Most of what he said felt like a blur racing past me. He was noisy. Overstimulating. All over the place. And being around him sometimes made me want to disappear, but it felt very different than how I felt towards Neely.
Neely made my body contract. Chris made my brain scramble.
I didn’t emphasize it too much in my story, but when I spend more time thinking of him, I realize how much I physically remember him. Ultimately, I thought he was incredibly handsome. Bright eyes. Tanned skin. Great teeth. A mischievous grin. I had a crush on him when I was very young. Kindergarten or first grade, maybe. I was dazzled by his mom, too. She had the same incredible eyes, even lighter than his, dark hair, tan skin. They looked so much alike. My younger brother even had a crush on Chris’s younger sister, Megan. We sort of circled that family for a couple years. I want to say it was because of church… maybe?
Chris didn’t have a dad around, and I remember thinking that probably explained why he was troublesome. I assume I got that idea from an adult somewhere. He can’t help it. He doesn’t have a structured family like we do.
I thought Chris was cool partly because he was attractive. I liked the idea that we looked cute together if you put us side by side. Writing that feels strange.
Why was I thinking about whether we looked cute together in third grade?
But I was very boy-crazy very young; it feels like it started in preschool. My friends, Kristen Jones and Neda Emamjomeh, and I had crushes and secret names for them. Around the same time as my Lunch story, I had these scented markers where each color smelled like a different fruit. We assigned boys marker names. I had a crush on a quiet, smart boy named Jacob Sammons, and I called him Lemon. Someone else was Apple. Someone was Watermelon. We took this extremely seriously.
Chris was different from the quiet more studious boys I would allow myself to proclaim liking out loud. He was mischievous. Messy. He didn’t follow the rules. There was something “bad boy” about him, even as a little kid. It was alluring. He seemed able to be all over the place, following the feeling of being alive, and somehow became more likable because of it. If I acted like that, however, I was pretty sure my whole life would fall apart. I believed I had to be polished. Smart. Focused. Put together. A good student. At that age, being rebellious felt dangerous. If I got pulled into Chris’s chaos, maybe I would get in trouble. Maybe I would stop being a good student. Maybe I would fail life. I don’t know if I would have had language for any of that as a kid, but that is what the feeling seems like when I remember it. It was very dramatic.
There was also something dangerous about him noticing that I liked him. Part of it was normal kid stuff. Boys have cooties. What if he tries to kiss me? What if we have to hold hands? What if people say we’re boyfriend and girlfriend? All horrifying. Also intriguing. But there was another kind of danger. Chris was persistent. Years later, maybe seventh grade, we were at Hume Lake, a Christian summer camp we went to for a week. Chris kept following me around. Following me around. Following me around. I kept telling him to leave me alone. He thought it was funny. The more upset I got, the more entertaining it seemed to become for him. I finally started screaming at him. I screamed so hard that I got what I now think was my first migraine. My head started pounding. My vision narrowed. I could not tolerate any more stimulation. I had to lie in the girls’ cabin with all the lights off (mid day) while everyone else left and enjoyed the camp activities. My counselor helped me figure out that this was the solution: darkness and quiet. My friends Kate Noia and Stephanie Sears came in and checked on me. Chris apologized later. I could not accept it. I was still too angry. I could not understand why someone would choose to keep doing something after I had made it so clear that it was hurting me.
That feeling was sadly familiar. In second grade, another boy used to follow me around the playground. His name was Trevor Hughes. He pulled my hair, threw things at me, poked me. I hated it. I remember warning him very clearly.
“If you do that again, I’m going to have to defend myself.”
He did it again.
I told him I was going to punch him in the nose. He looked at me for half a second then he pulled my hair. I wound up and punched him. I broke his nose. Blood everywhere. He dropped to the ground. I dropped to the ground too, immediately apologizing and also justifying myself.
“You made me do this. You made me do this. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
That is how I got the nickname Rocky. My real name is Raquel.
I got in a ton of trouble because you are obviously not allowed to punch someone in the face, but I also remember this strange sense that nobody was entirely mad at me. Like everyone understood he had pushed too far. And still, what I had done was unacceptable. Another adult contradiction. Another adult rule.
Looking at Chris now, I think what he cared about most was whatever had his attention in the moment. Except firefighters. He really cared about firefighters. He talked about them constantly. He wanted to be one. In a really cool way, as an adult, he actually became one (thanks, Facebook). He was scattered in so many directions, but that one thing stayed. I like that part of his story.
Here’s a little addition I added to his character from my Lunch story:
Chris was always all over the place, but somehow it made him more likable. If I acted like that, I was pretty sure my whole life would fall apart.
What I notice now, putting Nealy and Chris next to each other, is how much they both violated rules I seemed to have made for myself.
Nealy could be annoying and still have close friends.
Chris could be messy and still be likable.
Neely could say everything she thought.
Chris could be chaotic.
Neither of them seemed to believe those things disqualified them from belonging, but the important takeaway is that I did. And that’s what I’m doing with them as characters. I’m using my observations of them to take a deeper look at myself. Which is why I am immensely grateful to both of them for being (involuntarily) part of my writing experiment.
