The Victory Lap

Getting to the bottom of all of this has been the worst time of my entire life. My hospitalization was intensive and people were so skeptical of the story I was told that I was hallucinating. This was fascinating to me given that I was clear about the fact that I’d lived in DC for 10 years and the intelligence community is massive. This story is very rare and unique, but not for this place. There are hundreds of thousands of people who work for the government in one way or another, and one way people work for the government is gathering foreign intelligence.

Being shown into this world was exhilarating and frightening for both Aada and me, because she was scared of my imagination and didn’t realize how she fed it. She ramped up what she did for a living and then told me I couldn’t talk about it anymore. The very last time, I called her out on the carpet. She’d told me that I couldn’t talk with her about why it was so important that I drop Jonna Mendez as a friend. We weren’t that close, anyway, so what did she care?

That worked for a few years, but Aada got more and more anxious as they went by. I finally told her that it was over between Jonna and me, a pity because I valued having a writer in my corner. I also could have gotten a job recommendation if I’d played my cards right. But because Aada told me to run, I did.

I thought I was protecting the path, and it was my job to make sure they never crossed over. I didn’t question Aada in the slightest because it wasn’t worth all her distress. But again, that only worked for a few years. Blocking Jonna on Facebook and not going to the spy museum anymore was all painful, and has to be water under the bridge because I don’t want to carry it.

Because it is certainly water under the bridge to Aada. She cannot undo it, she can only apologize and move on as well. She has apologized for it, and I’ve accepted it. That’s enough. But what I will not forget is the mountain of bullshit she laid on me in addition to that apology.

It started with “why are you still contacting me” and just went downhill from there.

So, I’ve stopped contacting her. I’ve rewired myself so that she’s not the first person that pops into my mind when I need to talk. You are. All of the energy that I spent writing to her is time that I could have spent perfecting my craft…. Except wait. Beautiful lines that I’ve repeated here came out of those letters, so I didn’t lose any ground.

I’m just sad that we spent so much time fighting about my blog rather than working together. But of course we couldn’t work together on it because she’d submarined a collaboration from the start. She doesn’t actually do what she told me she did, so the collaboration would be my own research and a secondhand account.

I know that I’m good enough to be a research assistant to someone like Jonna, but she’s already got people for that and she’s not hiring (I checked). I was convinced I was living the sequel to Argo. My reality cracked. It sounds nuts because it was. But me thinking I was carrying the sequel to Argo didn’t just mean witty banter.

Tony: I should have brought some books for prison. Jack: Oh, they’ll kill you long before prison.

My imagination spun out. Jonna Mendez was my touchstone because she kept me from believing spy movie magic, and taught me to get interested in what humans could actually accomplish instead.

She told me wonderful tales in books I inhaled, singing a song only I could hear. Because it’s hard to be in danger. It’s harder to know your person is. I would never presume to get answers to any of those questions more than she’s published.

We’ve talked a few times at the museum, but I’ve been too embarrassed about all this to show my face recently.

And then Aada cut me off from her because she thought we were getting too close. I thought it had to do with some rule about Jonna being out and Aada not. It never in a billion years occurred to me that Aada was trying to protect me from finding out they’d never met.

I made so many assumptions that it’s not funny, and Aada never shied away from my characterizations of her. That’s why her lie is so hard to get over. Everything I’ve written for the last 12 years has centered on a toxic relationship and the only thing I have to say for myself is that I don’t constantly have to wonder if I’m the only one to blame for the end of what was at times a very healthy, if unusual kinship.

Time wore on. Things escalated and we wouldn’t talk, then something would jog the other to respond. We couldn’t really stay away from each other because we’d made such an impression on each other early on.

Talking became habit, and a good one. But the level to which we isolated was too much, too fast. She scared me and I had no support system for it, because the way she swore me to secrecy was also bullshit.

It felt like pressure in my chest, the holding of this information when I didn’t have anyone to confide in. She’d alienated me from having Dana in that role, and flipped out when I chose one other person, Michael, to hear everything. I just didn’t know that Michael could dry my tears of frustration.

Surely neither did she, and has been afraid. She needn’t worry. No one has eyes on any of us. It’s just a screwball comedy in the end.

I have to keep reminding myself of it when I think I’m going to cry again. Eventually, I’ll run out of tears. The shock will wear off. And at that point I will know for sure that I have reached a new normal… One that doesn’t include anything but keeping my head down and hoping for success later on in life.

I do want to develop a script, but unless I get experienced screenwriters on my team, it’s going to be very slow going. I want Elliot Page to play me, and as I was telling Michael, “it’s not hard to play me. I just type fast.” I do not know Elliot Page, nor do I presume that he’d like to read my script. I just think he’s the most like me in terms of adorkable and action figure.

The action figure is the me of my imagination, where I go around fixing the whole world. I hope that I am not complacent in real life, that people do get a lot out of reading me because it makes them examine their own lives. I feel that I am best served by using my skills as a writer to convey feelings, whether I’m writing fact or fiction.

The victory lap in this is a story that’s compelling, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted my life to be. My career being so varied has allowed me to wander and attract people, painting them with words and yet not trying to, as Aada would say, “paint my feelings as fact,” but tell my story in a way that lets you into my world for the time we have together.

I have a voice, and writing my story all along has made all the difference. There’s no subterfuge because I’ve been writing what’s been happening in the moment. I just need to go back and look.

There’s a reason she wasn’t present when my mother died, and it wasn’t because I was a bad person. She was protecting something, and until now I didn’t know what.

The first is that if Aada was in any kind of operations, I would have had to sign an NDA by now. I would have been questioned on how I knew this person and my connection to them.

I thought it was kind of sweet that I was this punk ass cook and she’d been an “M” for a long time.

Well, someone was. Just not her.

I have to keep reminding myself because the repetition of it is what keeps me from going back in time. I read these entries, too, sometimes like I’m my own best stalker girlfriend, because I’m analyzing my thoughts to see if they sound sane or not.

I’ve doubted my sanity for a long time, and it’s time to stop. It no longer serves me because my intuition is restored.

The mystery is solved.

Let’s get back in the van.