The Chase

It has been a while since a story found me, so when an essay crawls in my head, threatening to venomize my relationships, I flirt with it, circle my fingers on its back – it is an essay about the major micros in my life: Microbiology (which I dropped out of in the middle of my PhD), Micromanagements (and what it means growing up in a family with high expectations), and Microaggressions (while navigating life as a black man in America); and I am half eager, half hesitant to explore it. My friend says I should pick my battles and my friend is usually right, so I shove this idea back down, willing it to show up again at a more convenient time.

For fiction, nothing comes either. I used to make life choices just for the stories. I’d order a Slippery Nipple over a beer while hanging with the guys: not because I liked it better, but because it reads nicer on a page. I once visited a red-light district in Lagos for the story, ending up at a dodgy brothel with a rough staircase and a red dimness, eager to announce the place’s name. A man in a too-tight pair of jeans popped his head from the balcony to tell us the police had just left, that they had taken everyone with them. I wondered then what would have happened if we had been there just a few minutes earlier, wondered if we would have been taken too? 

My cousin says stories follow me. She says her life is a boring drag until I show up and then, boom, the craziest things happen. She says it is because I am a writer, and stories, like humans, are dying to stay alive. I laugh and tell her that is ridiculous: between the two of us, I am the reserved one – unreactive as argon.

Still, I think about this a lot. About the relationship between a writer and a story. I think of Limbe, 2017, where in one of the first workshops I ever attended, the instructor asked if we chose the stories we wrote, or if the stories chose us. I think of the silence that followed, busy with pondering, and then the voice across the table from me, saying “Of course I choose my stories, how can I be a human being and a story is choosing me?” And then the laughter that followed, as if even then, even though we were unsure of what the right answer might be, even though most of us, we would later discuss, were leaning toward “the stories choose us,” we knew there was something true about it, maybe not entirely, certainly not entirely, something half-true.

I think of the times stories have followed me, literally, delivering themselves in the form of friends and strangers: walking behind me into dorms and chapels, or approaching me at the train station while everyone else focused on their journey. Excited or quiet, animated or furtive. Stories that fell into my lap or ears or fingers as the case may be, and all I had to do was listen and write. “Keep my name out of it,” they said, “Make sure it isn’t too obvious it’s me.”

I think of events that escalated quickly, right before my eyes, almost as if they could occur nowhere else. Events that seemed to have held their breath, looking around for me, before they could happen. Events that needed me to report them.

These days, however, I have been doing the chasing. Pushing conversation with random strangers I meet on a daily basis: the HEB employee who comes to check my ID as I fumble with a case of Modelo; the petite girl in the elevator at my apartment building, with her burnt orange dungaree and dirty white sneakers, and the sophomore boys at the gym who think Cameroon is somewhere in Europe. They invite me to picnics, and parties, excited to introduce me to their friends. But then I sit at Sewell Park — the go-to picnic spot for Texas State students — and after all the excited introductions, in the midst of these strangers, realize I am an intruder; and talking to one person at the store is not the same as breaking into a friend group you find charming, but are not really interested in joining.

“Oh, you teach?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m a grad student in the creative writing program.”

“That is so cool… What do you teach? I may be taking your class next year… Yes, I returned to school after I dropped out five years ago.” And I think there is an opportunity for a story there, but it is never fully formed, never given life.

I sit there watching them: the shirtless boys and girls in bikinis, lounging all around the park. I try to make up stories about them, but all of them seem one-dimensional: pretty stick figures with mouths that tell me nothing.

I think of a dinner I attended recently, where an acclaimed writer, spilling gems on writing and teaching, said there is no such thing as writer’s block; that it is the one thing he does not accept from his students. I think I knew what he meant, but I wanted to tell him that I think too, that it is a thing, real as the fork in my hand, as the glass of water in his — or maybe not entirely, maybe half-real. I wanted to tell him that the relationship between the writer and the story is a tricky one. You are either chasing a story or a story is chasing you. That no matter who is chasing, anything that stands in the middle, that prevents the writer from catching the story, or vice versa, is a block. I wanted to say it does not matter if this thing is external or internal, if it is physical or psychological. That the Red Sea is the Red Sea whether or not the crosser is Moses. I wanted to tell him he is Moses, and I am the guy still struggling to construct an essay of micros. Instead, I smiled. I nodded. He has thirty books to prove his point, so even if I couldn’t take his word for it, I had to admit I had nothing to prove mine.