 Her work has appeared in Actually People Quarterly, which is a fantastic zine. The 2015 San Francisco Booth Reader and McSweeney's, her first collection, it hasn't stopped being California here, was published by Carvel and Express in 2014. Please welcome Jordan Karns. Okay, so something you need to know about this essay that I'm going to read, personal essay, is that there's a lot of song lyrics in it, which will make sense later, but just in the beginning so that you're not confused. So this is called You Loose Some, You Feel Me. I want to tell you something, something you will never forget. You can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold, you can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold. How does it feel to be alone in love when you weren't for a while? Who is the one animal? My love was a red flag kind of love. Now you don't talk so loud. Now you don't act so, so proud. It was a bad idea. Well that's not entirely true. It was either going to be a bad idea or a very fortunate one, a communicative and passionate relationship, a success. It was a bad idea because we shared an ex who was for both of us a tough love, an important but complicated relationship, but I was in love and she was in love and what else is there? We went for it. People called said, beware all you're bound to fall. You thought they were all kidding you. Is all love born in a blind spot? Is love blind? People say that. What does blind love mean? That you're blind to the problematic things in your lover? That you're blind to the red flags flapping in the storm swirling at the horizon? All the honest things we told each other no matter how good the beginning and here I am. All by yourself, all of us. I should know better. After we broke up, I couldn't stop thinking about my ex's narrative of our love story. Who is she talking to? What is she telling them? What are they telling her? Are they affirming her narrative? When we finally met up almost a month after breaking up, we fell into the same split level conversation that we'd fallen into so many times before and she said something like, I don't want this to be your narrative which surprised me because what else could there be? I'm obsessed with blind spots. I'm trying so hard not to have any. This is true for my life in general but especially true for the narrative of this love story each of us is telling. It's said that the blind develop other heightened senses in response to losing their vision but do those heightened senses help in perceiving that which they miss from vision? To know something's there even if you can't see it. To know it from experience. To sense or anticipate it. Maybe we'd call this intuition. I did the dumb thing of asking a mutual friend how my ex was doing a few weeks after we'd broken up and still hadn't spoken. I asked her what she thought my ex was thinking and she told me what she might be thinking but then asked, have you considered it from her perspective? To which I died a million deaths because of course I've done this and on repeat for weeks. My ability to hold many perspectives is a big part of my narrative. I saw her point but she couldn't see mine because she couldn't see something in herself that I can see from here. But it still gets me down when I see you around. At times I worry that my narrative is wrong and that I'm overlooking something crucial within this love story, that my ex is actually right, that her narrative is more true and that she holds the power of this truth. This makes me feel like I'm going crazy, going crazy over you. What is the consequence of her narrative being more true? If I'm wrong I've created a whole system of logic around something I'm only partially seeing. If I'm wrong I'm blind to something I don't know and I want to be the one who knows. Well knowing all the angles set me free, maybe. Well it makes me feel better, I hope so. But most of all I don't want to be free. I just want to go back baby, back to the way it was. I think this has something to do with trusting myself, that I'm struggling with trusting my narrative of this love story. You're still standing in my way. Call me superstitious, I've become suspicious of myself, afraid to know what I know. Maybe this is because I invested so much in a person that I'd rather doubt my own intuition than accept that I made a bad investment or that I invested too much. It's a difficult thing to give someone your whole self and have it returned. All by yourself, all of us. How does someone hold power over another person? I want to say truth, that the person with the most truth wins. But I don't think this is true. I don't think holding or giving power has anything to do with truth. It's something else, something already latent and existing long before any love story, before any lover. Something within yourself that's activated by all that's gone wrong. Something closer to fear. Because I'm working to the bone and you know, you know. What's the consequence of my ex's narrative being more true? That I'm too much, that I was too much, that I asked too much, that no one will ever love me, that I'm too much for a person to love. Who is the one, animal? Give me all of your love. If my narrative of this love story is wrong, I worry I'm a stagnant person. I'm stuck. I'm the disillusioned lover singing a disillusioned love song. But what's wrong with singing a disillusioned love song? Is it so stagnant or pathetic? How does it feel? It feels good, actually. It's a certain relief to stop worrying about the possibilities of truth and perspective within my own love story and indulge in the righteousness of somebody else's. I'm talking about sad songs. Me against the world songs. Something deep down in my soul said, cry girl. So I made a mix. These songs aren't trying to be generous. They're not trying to do anything but put things in a place, in a restraint for a few minutes. And it's in this place that these songs own the narrative of their experiences. Because it's true to them, true to their lives. Because this is a mean world to try to live in. Nobody knows all the trouble I've seen. My days are lonely. Night's getting lonely, too. I tried to please you, baby. I was always true. Give me all of your love. In this way, I began to trust myself again. Turn around, see me running. To indulge, to project my narrative upon these songs has validated my own. It also fictionalized it in the process. I'm aware of the irony that fictionalizing my narrative of this love story brings. As it was my fear of overlooking truth or telling a false story that brought me here in the first place. Traveling at the speed of light and then, at the same time, I'm in the same spot, too. There are other ironies. One being that I teach creative nonfiction to high school students three days a week. In three days a week, I'm breathless trying to explain that no matter how broad the scope of our narratives, we're always leaving something out. We are always curating our experiences and the stories we tell. Emphasizing some truths while omitting others because they don't fit within the desired range. It's funny that in order for me to own the narrative of my experience, I had to fictionalize it. Making a mix took the heaviness of my love story and aired it out with a long line of heartache. It's somebody else's sad song, I'm just singing it. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you. Love is the blind spot. Or maybe it's just being so close to having the thing you want the most. I think this is called desire, but either way for me this is love. Here I can't see anything else. Here I can't see the other reality of the situation that I don't want to invest in a person who won't invest in return. Blind spots are the nature of consciousness. We keep having them, seeing them, getting new ones. I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me. So I begin not to love you. What we once had is dead and gone. I want more than to know. I want to have learned to be a growing person. And only here is it over. The narratives continue to be told from where the love story ends. But they change so often. I'm willing to forget I still got no regrets. For all the reasons I believe to be true, for her reasons too, it's over. Nobody, nobody, nobody. I've got eyes to see, ears to hear. Just look away and say glory. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. I really appreciate that. Having just written a narrative about an ax and had to process about it in one month. That was great. Thank you. The next reader up here is Faith Adile. She's the author of the Nigerian Nordic Girls Guide to Lady Problems.