An Author’s Note From Bensonhurst
I was down in the basement last night reading for a stretch of time and came across the title of a book I wanted to write down so that I could remember to purchase it later. I had a pen of course, but no paper. So I opened up one of my storage bins. And there was a letter sitting on top. A letter I sat down and wrote to my future self. By now you know I do that a lot. It was from the Deborah of May of 2011 to — because I looked at it again for the first time last night — the Deborah of 2016 and beyond. In some respects five years feels like such a long time ago. And so far away. Hawaii is not New York, and Hilo is not Brooklyn. And Bensonhurst is not wherever it is I’ll be next when to close the distance of time I open another letter written from me now, to my future self.
In 2011 I’d wished I had a journal instead of loose pages. I looked forward to the transcription, and then to be able to put it away for a while. A long, long while. I thought about what life had been like for me and how being disconnected from so much did indeed create its own form of bliss. But it is only now, in peace and quiet that I am able to realize the magnitude of it. All of the points of the narrative that is me that needed to come together and be reconciled. I found a way, inside my own world. What was needed was the chance to stop the chatter from outside. And discipline. Somewhere in the distance, the stories I share really do take shape nicely…I figured out how to say what I have to say. Not on a soapbox or behind lecterns but in tiny rooms with peace and quiet. Just me and the page.
The objective is not to say, “I told you so,” to a whole bunch of people. It is also not to say, “How ya’ like me now?” It all boils down to the ability to look myself in the eye and maybe just a couple of other people. People who said they’d never turn their backs. Folks who can attest with absolute certainty to the fact that while time has shown I may be a lot of things, I am certainly no back stabber. When those people do look around…when they finish the revolution which amounts to their own transformation, I want to see heads held high. I can be angry as all hell in my notebooks, and have been. But it only takes is a few seconds in person to see everything I mean about trust and hope and faith in friends.
History will have it that I do not in any way adhere to twenty-four hour news cycles because art doesn’t work like that. And also perhaps that one of my biggest literary influences is indeed Ginger Rogers.
