excerpt from my book

Depending how you were raised and how much money your family had, the proper pronunciation of the city’s name is either "Greensburr," with a clipped, harsh end, or "Greensburrah," with a genteel fade. The genderless Greensboro that I enunciated is a compromise between the two cities, between Lee Street and Fisher Park, bars on windows and boats in the driveway. It is the immigrant’s Greensboro, claimed as an astronaut puts a flag on the moon. The book I was writing followed the geographical patterns of its patron city, starting with a few well-planned streets and moving thusly outward, criscrossing and looping without regard for parallelism. The medium is the metaphor, the theorists would argue, and a book looks like the city it is trying to replicate. Married couples begin to resemble each other. Imitation is the sincerest sign of flattery. How else to show you the intersection of Spring and Bellemeade, where either a right or left turn brings you to a different one-way street, when even a photograph has difficulty explaining the conceit? That is the sort of thing that you learn from constant driving, from searching for shortcuts. I was so deeply in love with my city that I even had a favorite intersection.

I wrote the book like mountain climbers scale Everest: you go up and back down, zigzagging your way to the top. Going straight up would make you sick, unable to adjust to the thinning air. I think that Greensboro is a hill becoming a mountain just like I am a girl becoming a woman. Sometimes it was difficult to breathe. That night when Seth tried to break down the front door of my apartment, drunk and remorseful, I breathed haltingly in case he could hear me getting up and sneaking into the bathroom to call the police. By the time the officers arrived Seth was gone. At a classic film screening I once ran into his roommate and for a moment relived a lonely siren on a quiet street where no one had ever been robbed. Even if it is impossible to ‘find yourself,’ it is possible to find your way. I erased pages after writing new ones. A ninety page manuscript was briefly one hundred and then eighty-nine. Paragraphs jumped from one section to another. I wrote the book like I lived my life, dancing between cities and love affairs and favorite authors. Some days it had a title, most days it was "my Greensboro thing." I had a goal to get to one hundred and twenty but never seemed to get past eighty-five. What could I say about Greensboro that would fill a book? Everything had to be said twice, restated under the guise of reflection. Really it was filling space. Greensboro, the book, the boys I could not yet call men, the friends, the bars, and all the new homes, all just filling space.