Oh, Great.

love stories, and how they ruined love for me

Almost every summer, I reread The Great Gatsby.

Fully aware that it’s dated, rife with first world (and white privilege) problems, and holding strong on most eighth grade reading lists - it still thrills me and it breaks my heart. Every time.

Yesterday, Gatsby was reunited with Daisy while I was on the 80 bus headed west to babysit my niece and nephew for the evening.

I got to thinking about this scene: exactly halfway through the book, full of so many looks of “bewilderment” and “wonder.” And how the next page, which chronologically (or maybe just logically) should be the blossoming of their affair, is instead the reveal of James Gatz, and therefore the beginning of his great fall.

At 3am here in Chicago, I woke up inexplicably, obsessing over something not original but nonetheless new to me, reaching out my arm for the journal I had left in the other room, foolish.

Gatsby, this story I’ve read a dozen times since falling in love at fifteen (knowing it so well is without question what earned me a 5 on that AP Lit exam), is, perhaps, the origin of those stories my body defines as not just Great Love, but the Only Way to Love, True Love, if you will. As if love doesn’t count unless it kills you. Bonus points if it only almost kills you, but then you should be on the lookout for problems, because something’s probably going to bust (i.e. The Graduate). Other tragic or semi-tragic love stories, some I don’t even like, have permeated my notions of romance: Moulin Rouge, The (insert groan here) Notebook, Anna Karenina, The Princess Bride (forget pirates, poverty, and the Fire Swamp; what happens when he dies FIFTY years before Buttercup?!). I’ve been trained that love doesn’t count unless it feels like dying. For years, my unconscious romantic has entered into new relationships thinking: this doesn’t hurt enough, it must not be Great.

But it wasn’t Gatsby and Daisy that woke me up at 3am. I woke up stuck on Nick Carraway. Nick. Care-away. Raised with money, goes into bond sales in NYC on a whim, abandons a fiancée, has a number of affairs on the east coast (including at least one drunken evening in the bedroom of a “feminine” male photographer in his underwear when several hours go missing from the narrative…replaced with the most elegantly correct use of ellipses that will ever exist); he tells his own story in rushed clips, tossed up in front of our eyes innocuously, knowing we will think it inconsequential and distracting from the Real Story. But Nick, he is my Real Story. If for most of my life, I’ve looked for Gatsby — I have always found, have always loved Nick.

He slips in and out of relationships with women he can’t care about, marking his timeline in terms of other lives, narrating the outside to avoid looking in — and blaming the fascinating subjects and his incurable honesty… there is something about him this time that I can’t let go of. Care-away, Care-away, Carraway. Who suffers at your hand? Who, though you can’t admit it, considers you The Great Carraway: obsesses over your actions and shakes their head in bewilderment… Who do you leave in your wake?

…high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

But of course I am no Daisy, nor am I a Jordan Baker, not even a Myrtle. Currently I most identify with the “defunct mantlepiece clock” that Gatsby rests his head precariously against when feigning cool during his over-planned tea time with Daisy. Time. The ultimate misunderstood antagonist.

I know not to look for myself or an ideal match in these stories, with their saccharine paragraphs and obvious metaphors and blatant foreshadowing (but oh, how I love it so). As an adult, I understand why it makes a good teaching tool for students new to rhetorical devices. But I want to unlearn the real lesson I absorbed: that what makes a love story worthy of note is its damage, its fatality. Yes, I will inevitably catch myself reading about Jay’s dumb yellow car next summer, but now I’m curious: what would have happened if Nick hadn’t run away from his own life? Would he have married that girl he didn’t want to be “rumored into” marrying? Would he have acknowledged his homosexual curiosity? Would he have become, accidentally, satisfied with telling his own story?

“We’re all Nick,” my friend Hampton told me, tongue in cheek, at the height of my 3am Carraway Crisis. A joke, but I refuse. I’d rather sit here on my mantle, belonging at the same moment that I don’t, and pause the bizarre need to mark time’s brutality. Gatsby wanted to freeze time. I just want to stop measuring it, and myself against it. And to allow for the possibilty that greatness can be when something thrives, not just survives, and can be, perhaps, remarkably mundane. It can be mortal, but not necessarily fatal.

It’s time to let go of trying to live a story that Nick would want to tell.

‘It’s an old clock,’ I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.