I originally wrote this piece in 2006 while taking a class at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. The class focused on hybrid fiction and poetry, and I felt particularly enamored with the idea of experimenting with form. I have always written both poetry and fiction, and as a young writer, I still had not encountered cross-genre or hybrid pieces, so this opened up all kinds of new writing opportunities for me. While I was in love with the writing styles that I was encountering, I was also going through a breakup of sorts. After two years in college, I found myself in the middle of a complicated and confusing love affair with a boy I had dated in high school. We managed to be both friends and lovers through the first two years of college; however, I could feel my own infatuation with him inhibiting me from meeting anyone else. So after much thought, lots of dramatic conversations, phone calls that were far too long and heady, I ended our friendship. I still feel a deep, although necessary, loss at the thought of having let four years of friendship and our romantic relationship simply cease to exist, but I also know that with his exit came other opportunities to move beyond what we had shared.
As a way of processing my friendship with this former lover, I kept coming back to how we came together and how we came apart. At the same time, I kept coming back to a conversation that I had with my mother while I was still in high school. I had just been dumped for the first time, and as an angst ridden seventeen-year-old, I had no idea how to make sense of what had happened. My mother offered condolences in many forms, but what I remember the most was when she said, “In many ways, you’ve experienced a death.” Between my obsession with fragmentation and this simple idea given to me by my mother, I thought of structuring this story based on a life. What does a relationship look like from beginning to end? What had mine looked like with this man? As I started to tell this particular story, I paused to think about where the relationship was most fragile, birth; when it was most immature, adolescence; when it was at its height of maturity, adulthood; and when exactly it had come to a close, death. So as I mined the memories of this relationship, I used the structure of a life to choose the moments that mattered most to this story. While the story is fiction, much of what’s written is based off the experiences and feelings I had with that boy ten years ago.
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The Story Behind the Story: “Ribber”
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“Six Necessities for a Writing Life”
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- The Story Behind the Story: “Pulse” - July 6, 2017
- “Pulse” - June 26, 2017
- Why I Write: Erin Armstrong - June 8, 2017
