Snapshots: Sharpen Your Knife

Snapshots: A Playlist is now a collection of eleven works of literary fiction, each anchored to a song and set in Saint Petersburg, Florida — the city that made me, the city that is as much a character in this collection as anyone who lives in it.

These stories move the way music moves — arriving without warning, finding you where you actually live.

Women who know things before they say they know them. Love with no name. A city that holds you the way only the place that made you can.

Each piece stands alone. Together, they make an argument. You’ll know what it is by the end.

This is my return. This is also my debut. Both things are true.

Snapshots publishes every Sunday. A new piece arrives each week — a single compressed moment in a life, rendered in full. Each one is set here, in this city, on a Tuesday that turns out to matter.

“I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies.”

Hozier

Take Me to Church

The Good

She stays for fifteen years because there is good. You do not stay for fifteen years without good. There are the late nights talking about nothing and the familiar way Vivienne laughs when something catches her off guard, which is not often, which is part of why she guards the laugh when it comes. There are the dinners and the phone calls and the years when Vivienne was the person she called first when something broke, not because Vivienne always fixed it but because Vivienne was the person she called. Habit is its own kind of loyalty. Fifteen years of habit is its own kind of love.

There is also the good of being known. Or something that functions like being known. Vivienne knows her mother’s name and her son’s birthday and something that happened in year two of the marriage that she does not talk about with most people. Vivienne has been in the room for things. That is not nothing. Being in the room for things is a kind of intimacy that does not require the room to be safe.

She knows, somewhere underneath the knowing, that the room is not safe. She has known this for a long time. What she has also known, for a long time, is how to rationalize the knowing. Vivienne is going through something. Vivienne means well. Vivienne did the thing that time when she needed it. The good is real, she tells herself, even when the good is also not enough. The good has been not enough for years by the time she notices it is not enough.

But that comes later.

For now she is in year three or year seven or year eleven of a friendship that has the shape of a good friendship from the outside. Two women. Black. Christian. Saint Petersburg. They met through someone else, the way most friendships start, which is to say accidentally and without any particular intention to end up fifteen years later still in each other’s orbit. They have survived things together. Vivienne’s first marriage ending. Her own diagnosis. Taylor’s birth. The seasons change, as they say in church, and the two of them have been changing alongside each other for long enough that she has stopped examining whether the changing is going in the same direction.

It is not. But she is good at not examining things she has decided not to examine.

She has been told this is a virtue.

The good was real. It was not enough.

• • •

“Every Sunday’s getting more bleak,”

Hozier, Take Me to Church

The Wearing Down

It starts small. Most wearing down does.

A comment about the music she plays. Not a fight. A comment. The tone of a woman who finds something beneath her but is too polite to say so directly, so she says it indirectly, in the register of concern or gentle correction, in the way women who think they are better are very good at doing. Vivienne has a gift for the indirect. Vivienne can make you feel judged without ever being accusable of judging. This is a skill that requires practice. Vivienne has had a long time to practice.

Then it is the books she reads. Then the shows she watches. Then the way she talks about her relationships, which Vivienne receives with an expression she knows well — the expression of a woman who has decided your choices are the problem and is waiting, patiently, for you to arrive at the same conclusion. Then it is her faith. Vivienne is a Christian woman and so is she, but Vivienne’s Christianity is practiced in a particular way that Vivienne has decided is the correct way, and her way is not Vivienne’s way, and this is raised, gently, often, in the register of concern.

She does not worship properly. She does not study properly. Her understanding of scripture is not Vivienne’s understanding of scripture, which is another way of saying she is not the right kind of Christian woman, which is another way of saying she is not, in Vivienne’s private accounting, quite good enough.

What makes this particular is what she was already carrying when Vivienne said it.

She came into this friendship already in a fight with herself. Not dramatically. In the daily way of a woman who looks at her relationships and finds herself wanting, looks at her faith and finds herself insufficient, looks at her parenting and finds herself inadequate. She had looked at the choices that brought her to certain situations and called herself stupid for making them. She had a well-established internal conversation about her own lesser-ness, conducted privately, for years, before she ever met Vivienne. She was her own harshest critic long before Vivienne arrived to confirm the verdict.

This is what made Vivienne dangerous rather than merely unkind.

Unkind is common. A woman who makes you feel small in passing costs you an afternoon. A woman who speaks the familiar language of your existing self-doubt and confirms it, daily, in ways that are deniable and ways that are not, costs you something harder to recover. The judgment did not land in an empty room. It landed in a room that was already furnished with her own doubts, and the two versions — Vivienne’s and her own — became difficult to distinguish from each other. She could not always locate where her self-criticism ended and where Vivienne’s began. That is the specific damage of a friendship like this. It does not introduce a new narrative. It colonizes the one you were already living in.

Some of it she rejected. The music judgment she rejected because the music was non-negotiable and she knew it. The Christian-woman assessment she rejected intellectually while absorbing it emotionally, which is a particular kind of split that leaves a mark. The relationship commentary she tried to reject and sometimes could not, because she was already asking herself the same questions Vivienne was raising, and Vivienne’s asking them out loud made her own private asking feel like evidence.

She notices something, around year eight or nine, that she does not have language for at first. Whatever she says, Vivienne rejects it. Not always explicitly. Sometimes with a silence that is its own response. Sometimes with a redirect. Sometimes with a story about someone else that is also, somehow, about her. The actual content of what she says does not matter. It can be correct. It can be relevant. It can be exactly right. If it is coming from her, Vivienne will find a way not to receive it. She understands this, eventually, as information. Vivienne does not want her perspective. Vivienne wants her presence. These are not the same thing.

What Vivienne wants, she comes to understand, is a particular kind of audience. Someone who will listen and affirm and absorb and not challenge. Someone whose life, when placed alongside Vivienne’s life, will make Vivienne feel better about Vivienne’s life. Someone whose transparency about her own struggles can be received by Vivienne as evidence of Vivienne’s own superiority. She is that someone. She has been that someone for a long time. And for a portion of those years, a portion she does not like to measure, she thought Vivienne might be right.

She is still forgiving it when the birthday happens.

She kept coming back. She is a woman with a habit of forgiving.

• • •

“No masters or kings when the ritual begins.”

Hozier, Take Me to Church

The Birthday. The Friendsgiving. The Movie.

Vivienne turns forty.

She does not tell her there is a party. She tells her there is not a party. She says it is going to be a quiet birthday, just low-key, just a small thing, which is the kind of sentence you say to someone you are not inviting.

She sees the photographs.

The photographs are not from a quiet birthday or a small thing or anything low-key. The photographs are from a party. A real party. Decorations and a dress and the kind of photographs that require a photographer, or at least someone designated to take them, which is not a small-thing activity. There are people she does not recognize in the photographs. There are people she does recognize in the photographs. She is not in any of the photographs.

She does not say anything right away. She sits with it the way she sits with things she has decided to hold rather than discharge. She turns it over. She lets it become information.

When she finally asks, the answer is not an apology. The answer is: she did not want to have to defend her to her other friends.

She hears this sentence.

She hears it several times over the next few days. She turns it over the patient way she turns things over. She examines it from each angle.

There is nothing wrong with her to defend. This is the first thing she understands about the sentence. She is not a person who requires defense. She is not controversial or embarrassing or difficult. She is a woman who plays her music too loud and loves her son and goes to church on the Sundays she gets to church and has an opinion about things. Vivienne’s other friends have not met her. They have not formed a view. The defense Vivienne did not want to make was a defense against a judgment that did not exist yet, which means the judgment Vivienne was protecting against was Vivienne’s own.

She did not invite her because she did not want her there.

That is the sentence underneath the sentence. She holds it. It is heavier than she expected.

She forgives it. She adds it to the pile. She tells herself the good is still real.

The Friendsgiving is the following year.

She is invited and then uninvited. The reason given is that Vivienne thought another friend would be there, a friend who is what Vivienne would call controversial, and Vivienne did not want the situation. The controversial friend did not come. The Friendsgiving happened without her and without the controversial friend, which means the reason for her uninviting was not the reason. The reason was something else that Vivienne did not say and she did not ask about because she already knew the shape of it and she was tired of the shape.

She adds this to the pile.

She is running out of ways to describe the pile to herself.

The movie is the one she is not going to explain at length.

They were supposed to see it together. She had been looking forward to it. Vivienne saw it with someone else and told her afterward. Not an emergency. Not a conflict. A choice. A small, thoughtless, Vivienne choice.

She heard about it and something in her chest went quiet in a specific way. Not the flatness in the sternum she has for grief. A different quiet. The quiet of a decision being made.

Fuck her.

Not out loud. In the interior register of a woman who has finally, after fifteen years, allowed herself to be done. She did not type it. She did not say it to anyone. She said it to herself and it was the most honest thing she had said about Vivienne in years.

She did not call Vivienne to end it. She did not write a letter. She did not have the conversation that would have made her the bigger person. She simply stopped. She did not return the next call at the usual speed. She did not initiate. She let the friendship recede the way water recedes when you stop pouring it, which is quietly and without announcement and without anyone being able to point to the exact moment it was gone.

This made her the bad guy.

She is fine with that.

She was tired of the ride and she wanted to get off.

• • •

“If I’m a pagan of the good times,”

Hozier, Take Me to Church

What Vivienne Did Not Say Out Loud

Here is the thing about Vivienne.

Vivienne had a life that looked, from the outside, like a life that was working. The right clothes. The right church. The right vocabulary for talking about the right things. The carefully curated quality of a woman who has decided that her surface is her best argument and has invested accordingly. Vivienne’s presentation was very good. Vivienne had been working on it for a long time.

What was underneath the surface was a different accounting.

The secrets came out gradually, over years, in the accumulated detail of the things Vivienne shared and the things she did not share and the spaces in between where the truth lived. And then, at some point in the middle years, there was a conversation. A real one. The kind that comes out of nowhere on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, the kind where a woman has been holding something for too long and it simply comes out, less because she trusts you and more because she cannot hold it anymore and you happen to be there.

The marriage was failing before it started. The husband had not been faithful. Vivienne had not been faithful. The daughter was struggling in ways that Vivienne discussed in the minimizing language of a woman who does not want to fully say what she is saying. More sleeping around, after. More of the very things Vivienne had spent years raising her eyebrow at in other women’s lives. She sat with all of it. She did not flinch. She held it the way she held things.

And then she thought: what the fuck.

Not out loud. Not at Vivienne. At the whole architecture of what she had been inside. The anger arrived first. The hot anger of a woman who has been judged by a person who had no standing to judge her, who had used the language of faith and propriety and right-living as a weapon while conducting a private life that would not have survived the same scrutiny. The Christian-woman assessment. The relationship commentary. The sitting in judgment of how she lived, delivered by a woman who was, the whole time, living a version of the same life she was supposedly failing at and just not saying so. The anger was hot and it was justified and she let herself have it.

Then the sadness came. A quieter thing. The sadness of fifteen years. The sadness of having brought this woman into her life, into her son’s life, into the rooms where she kept the things she loved, and discovering that the exchange had never been equal. That she had given the real version of herself and received a constructed version of Vivienne. That she had been transparent and been punished for it. That the transparency she thought was connection had been, for Vivienne, a resource.

And then, eventually, the flat recognition. The quiet of a thing clicking into place. She understood, with the clarity that only distance provides, why Vivienne had told her. She told her because she thought she was safe. And safe, in Vivienne’s understanding of the word, meant small. Meant a woman who would receive the information and hold it and not do anything destabilizing with it. Meant someone who, in Vivienne’s internal ranking, was below the line of the people whose opinions of her mattered.

She was Vivienne’s confession booth. She was the person Vivienne came to when Vivienne needed to say something true, not because Vivienne respected her, but because Vivienne was confident she could afford to be honest with someone she did not entirely respect.

She held Vivienne’s secrets. She did not use them. She does not intend to. This is not a tell-all. This is a reckoning — a woman who spent fifteen years being told she was less than, by a woman who was fighting the exact same battle and just refusing to admit it.

That is the thing nobody tells you about the women who make you feel small. They are not large. They are afraid. Vivienne’s judgment was never about her. It was about Vivienne. A woman who needed someone to be less than so she could feel like more than. A woman who sharpened herself on her for fifteen years and called it friendship. A woman whose knife was very sharp by the end.

So was hers.

She was not less than. She was the threat Vivienne never named.

• • •

“We were born sick, you heard them say it.”

Hozier, Take Me to Church

After

The thing about getting off the ride is that the ride does not stop. Vivienne’s life continues. Vivienne’s surface continues. Vivienne is probably, right now, somewhere in Saint Petersburg, working on the presentation with the industriousness of a woman who has decided the surface is the whole of the argument.

This is not her problem anymore.

What is hers is the after. The after is, as it turns out, considerably better than the during. This is not something she expected with the clarity that it arrived. She had expected the absence to feel like a loss. There is some loss in it. Fifteen years of anything leaves a shape behind, and she can feel the shape of Vivienne’s absence the way you feel the shape of a tooth after it has been pulled — not painfully, mostly, but with an awareness of a space that was filled and now is not.

What she did not expect is how much quieter the room became.

The background noise of monitoring herself around Vivienne — of tracking her words before she said them, of bracing for the indirect assessment, of steeling herself against the Christian-woman judgment, of managing the labor of being in a room with a woman who found her useful rather than worthy — all of that noise went quiet when she stopped returning the calls. She had not known how loud it was until it stopped.

She found new friends. This sounds simple and it was not simple and it also was, the way that the right things are simple once you have cleared the space for them. She found women who did not require her to be smaller. Women who received what she said. Women in whose company she was not, as she had once described it, out of formation. Women who laughed at the things she found funny and did not curate the laughter. Women who invited her to their parties.

She went to the parties.

She played her music in rooms where people let her play her music.

She said things and they landed. She had opinions and the opinions were received as opinions rather than problems. She was, in these new rooms, a person rather than a function, and the difference between those two things is not small and she does not intend to take it for granted.

She thinks about Vivienne sometimes. Not often. When she does it is not with anger, which surprised her, and not with the grief that wants resolution, which also surprised her. It is something flatter and more complete. A finished thing. A chapter with its last sentence written and its cover closed.

She does not regret the fifteen years. She does not regret the fuck her either.

The good was real and the good was not enough and she finally told herself the truth about both of those things at the same time, and the telling was what the ending actually was. Not the movie. Not the ride. The moment she let herself hold both truths at once without rationalizing one of them away.

What she understands now, from the distance of the after, is something she could not have understood from inside the friendship. Everyone is fighting a battle. Vivienne was fighting one the entire time. She was just unwilling to say so, because saying so would have cost her the surface, and the performance was all she had. She, on the other hand, had been transparent. She had shown her battle. She had said “this is hard” and “I am struggling” and “I don’t know” in rooms where Vivienne had said nothing of the kind. She was penalized for the transparency. Vivienne was protected by the silence.

She is not ashamed of the transparency anymore. The transparency was not weakness. The transparency was the whole of what made her the person Vivienne needed to keep close and could not afford to respect. The transparency was the threat.

Everyone is fighting a battle. Some of us are just more transparent about it.

Vivienne had been sharpening her knife against her for fifteen years. Vivienne didn’t know it would be her undoing.

She walked away from Vivienne razor sharp. She hadn’t planned it that way. But she understood now — some knives you have to sharpen yourself.

• • •

This is Snapshots: A Playlist.

A new piece arrives every Sunday.

You’ll know what it is by the end.

This story is part of Snapshots: A Playlist.

***Read the full collection here.***