CONCEPT
Dear John,
This is the letter you’ve been predicting me writing for awhile.
Your expectation has made you angry.
At first I responded by taking a summer off work to work with you. I did this again. You’ve only gotten angrier. I’ve ignored you. This made you angrier still. Finally, I gave you an open ulnar fracture, and a painful recovery, and finally you shut up for awhile. But when you began to speak again, it was with more anger.
You have gotten angry to the point that your voice shakes a little; you must be very angry, then, because I know how dearly you prize your self control.
Maybe it will comfort you to be correct again. I have been wrong. Your expectations were justified after all.
In the beginning, though, it wasn’t this bad.
I remember when I met you on a chilly March afternoon, way back in 1996. It was a gorgeous day. I discovered you at once in a pair of sunglasses. I’d already been working for two months on an abortive script I titled Urbantasm, but it was obviously going nowhere. There had been an even earlier incarnation of the project, going back to the summer before… it was called Agamemnon… something-or-other. But if that moment was conception, than meeting you, John, was birth.
You began to speak a little more, here and there. When that girl dumped me, you were perched on my shoulder all night long, and I’d known I’d gotten something out of that catastrophe. A month later, I was finishing up the draft of a script, A Spring Storm in Paul’s computer room while it stormed outside, and then we went for a walk at 4 AM in the rain, and I was barefoot and cut my foot open on shattered glass near Mott Park. You were close then, as well. Thinking of sledding in the South Village, or preparing for your Odyssey? Or some other story that I’m not privy to? I knew that you were not in that play. I knew that you were adjacent to that play. And as soon as you introduced me to Selby, I realized that she must be a neighbor to Chastity and Ryan. I realized that they lived in the same place! It was mid summer, though, before you really trusted me enough to start writing your story.
Look where your trust has gotten you…
A part of me is too sorry to express my emotion in coherant words, but a part of me is not sorry at all.
A part of me wants to blame you. How dare you solder me with this and then hold me up to such high expectations. You bitch and moan, but do you know how this has wrung me out these past eight years? Sometimes, I feel like a victim of vampirism, trying to render everything for you in your parallel universe, while mine spins on… winds down.
But of course, any blame against you is really a front I suppose. I realize that you are completely dependent upon me. I realize that, being so, every choice is mine, and so all blame should be directed at myself.
It was too ambitious… that was the problem.
You asked me back then if I could do it, and I was flush from reading Les Misèrables and writing at Denison. Of course I thought I could do anything! Let me render, render, render.
But I couldn’t and you know why. You wanted me to write a romance for today. You wanted math. You wanted it from your perspective, and you wanted to come across with all of your anti-messianic flair, contempt and compassion. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for me to render contempt and compassion? I’ve tried. I’ve sufficed in moments, brief spasms.
I cannot do it, John.
Maybe someday, and I can see you already shaking your head in rage and disgust.
If you can find somebody else, I urge you to do so.
If you cannot, then come back when I am ready, and I’ll do my best.
I promise you I will.
I have something invested in this too.
And perhaps you will be surprised at what I say now, but what I regret the most isn’t the loss of the story or the loss of Arkaic. It’s the loss of May. I really wish I had gotten far enough for people to meet her. I really wish…
“May has appeared.”
Yes, she has. In the planetarium. It may be better than nothing, but at best it’s still only a glimpse. Please give her my best. Give all of your friends and family my best, but May in particular. I might have never gotten along with you, John, but May and I could have been close friends, I believe. If I was telling her story instead of yours, perhaps this would be turning out very differently. But May would never ask such a thing of me. No… it has to be an asshole. I understand why it had to be you.
And while I cannot honestly say that I like you, I can and must say that I admire you greatly. Working with you has been one of the most humbling experiences I can think of, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
Your story was too bright, too shining, too far for someone like me to write at such an age and with so little experience.
I am not a bad writer, and I am an exceptionally loyal friend.
I do not know where you might have turned to have asked for more.
I understand that you had recourse to much greater experience, but I also understand why you bypassed that to choose me.
And I think I even understand why such a risk seemed worthwhile at the time.
I hope that someday, somehow, I may honor my commitment to you.
I hope that someday, somehow, you may tell me that you are thankful, and that you pleased with the work I have done on your behalf.
In the meantime, you and I both know how it all turned out.
In the words of Tori Amos: “Won’t you just hold down?”
In a paraphrase of Outkast: “We missed a lot of church, so the words are our confessional.”
Take care of them, John.
Please.
Take care of yourself.
Your friend always,
Connor Coyne
