Michael's Prism

"I don't know," Michael C. Clark, always wry, never fearful of bewilderment.

"Speakeasy is not meeting your needs," oh god forbid, not the staff who evaluate MFA curriculums, but their volunteer board moderators.

It is his memory which embodies the emotional investment of my exile from P&W, on a digital scale. Their customer service agents, in the little contact I've had with them since 2002, are perplexed by my personal indignation. Of course they would be, as creative writing is an oversold academic industry which should not be a separate and distinct subset in the study of literature, and yet it is. MFA groups polish technique, leave us with Toni Morrison roasting smores over slavery's aftermath, or Franzen, always living in a block bluster mindset.

As a published writer unable to make the transition to franchise author, I want something else? Yes, to remove the pain of loss from my memory, when Michael wasn't my husband, but was representative of the humanist soul mate I desired, believing in its happiness. I may excoriate Jerry McGuire, but Michael I rarely write about. Embarrassment, guilt for being such an imposition on his personal space. He tolerated it, that imposition, except when he told me about his diagnosis, and I did not know what to do. I ran away, me, when he was always there for me, even with my 28 year old dating troubles with a Jerry look a like who had ferrets.

I listened to Michael's son Andy play the violin, was there when his daughter Emily's birth was announced in the CAS cafeteria, and realized far too late in my life that here was the graduate student hook up I should have played for, and realized it with the anguish distinct to Jamesian novelistic antipodes: Michael was whom I should have married, this Michael divorced, with his wife's motives bewildering to me. Michael Clark was a perfect husband, father and teacher to the extent that fallibility allows--and I am not much for fallibility, my own included, always struggling for a better thesis, the vision that will give me that breakthrough, that victory particular to itself.

I did love Michael C Clark. We were not physically intimate, so the authenticity of feeling may be on the cheap: I did not have to deal with his weight that made his pudginess charming, or evaluate his capacity for sexual blandishments, but I loved him.

I weep, what else is there? He never told me he was designated my academic adviser because he took on that role for Widener's disabled student body, a demurral of recognition in the fact that I always was and will remain, a segregated element. I know what some of you would say about that. My quadriplegia isn't an excuse to hurt others. I've been told this on innumerable occasions, and yes, I have been wrong, sometimes over the top in vitriolic build up, but when the paradigms surrounding me impede equal opportunity as a fact of life, progressives like Jonathan Capehart are waxing in effusive cosmetic jewelry.

The power of those who control the connective software, this has a cumulative affect.