Fic: Grace - Chapter 18 - Part 1.
Title: Grace - Chapter 18 (part 1)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
A/N: I don't normally leave authors notes, but, y’know, this is the last part so I've resigned myself to writing one. I’ve given in, but please don't take that to be a bad thing. It's not.
This, it’s really just a huge thank you to everyone who read/is reading/will read this. It still amazes me that what I write, my often retarded inner-brain-workings, that all of it was able to garner such a response from people, from you. I’d read the comments and just get to the point where all I could say was ‘Thank you so much’, but please don’t doubt that I was genuine in this, coz I really, really was. All of you just overwhelmed me, it happens.
Shout outs go to dawn_afterglow and rachelriott for doing such an awesome job beta’ing, God knows what you would’ve been reading if it wasn’t for them. To mandy_croyance, blushandrecover, woodenduck, to raye6, sarahwithanh, toxickk924, tip_painter, theworshipper, stolen_manners for their support and their comments that essentially pwned my soul.
But most of all to everyone who read this, who left a comment to just let me know that this made you feel something, it’s the greatest feeling and again, just thank you.
Chapter 18
Contrary to what a plethora of jaded critics will say, there’s a difference between writing your memoirs and writing an autobiography. In reality, or rather, in the society in which we live, there’s this vast, mammoth disparity in these two methods of chronicling your life, noting the (usually nicer) shades of your character.
I don’t know, maybe Ryan’s influenced me too much, his nagging monotone that seeps a gentle, and often contemptuous cynicism into my life, into me. I adopt too many of his traits, his styles, his ways of understanding, absorbing what goes on around him; then again, that’s what happens in a relationship. Loretta, and she always says it with a quirked eyebrow and an air of derision, she says that’s what happens when you find your soul mate.
I don’t know.
The point is, Ryan used to tell me that when someone writes their memoirs, they do it because they think they have something worth remembering, worth sharing. These people, they write and write and write to try and sort through the parts of their head that don’t make any sense. He says the point of writing memoirs, the point is, you find this key, a dirty, ancient thing, and then, maybe years later, maybe minutes, you find a door.
Your memoirs, it’s you unlocking it, it’s you finding yourself in a room with bloodstained, shit-stained floors, torn curtains, broken windows. It’s you stuck in a room where the rain pokes through the shattered glass and runs races down the walls like the tears you never cried.
Your memoirs, it’s you picking up a bucket, a mop, a broom, a rag and it’s you cleaning until your arms ache, until your heart throbs and your muscles burn and all of you is so lost in history that you can’t quite find yourself until you clean, until you write yourself back to present day.
It’s you doing this for you. It’s you doing this because you need to, not necessarily because you want to.
Ryan, he says the point of a memoir is that it’s raw. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done a million things in your life, if you’ve done none, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been to war, if you’ve spent your life as a housewife, if your rich, poor, fat or old, British, American, Middle Eastern, African. The point is it’s you and it may not be much of a life, it might be one full of regrets, full of achievements, full of shit all, what matters is that it’s yours and no one can take that away from you, not unless you let them.
Autobiography is different.
Vastly, enormously, gigantically.
Ryan still says, even as I sit writing this in the middle of our apartment, he says that when someone tries to get his life story published, tries to get his life printed, abbreviated, clean cut on the shelves of your local Borders, that’s not them chronicling their lives, that’s not them shifting through a mess in their head, it’s their ego talking. It’s them trying to make a few easy bucks. It’s not them thinking that their life is worth sharing, it’s them thinking that a few deeply embellished, exaggerated moments of their lives are gonna sell on the shelves.
And too often it does.
Tag a based on a true story onto the front cover and people are more likely to empathize, sympathize, cry and laugh and feel, because you, the author, all signs point to you being real. People will believe you when you say you fucked that person or did this or felt that, when, in reality, you could’ve done none of it. You could’ve sat behind your Apple Mac, your Windows Vista and typed about fucking Cameron Diaz that one time at Buddhist camp, about saving the lives of a million kittens suffering the bubonic plague, that, it doesn’t make it real.
That doesn’t make it your life; all that makes it, all you publishing your life story does is make your audience, your waiting public wonder what the fuck it is you aren’t publishing.
It makes people wonder who the real demons are, that person is, that one with the footnote beside their name, the part at the bottom of the page that says name changed for sake of publication.
I tell Ryan he doesn’t give people enough credit.
He tells me I give them too much.
The point is, he tells me this whilst I’m writing, pouring my soul into the keypad of a too old laptop.
This whole thing, it’s neither, it’s both.
It’s true, for the record, the shit I’ve written about: every painstaking emotion, every name, every person. I wrote this because I felt I had something worth remembering, worth sharing, I wrote this, but it wasn’t because I found a fucking key.
I wrote this with the intention of publishing it, I wrote it with the intention of seeing it on the shelves of Borders, I wrote it so I could do book tours and answer questions and have people look at me as something other than that guy who won that Oscar, that guy who was in that cultflick, that Build God thing.
I wrote this coz I think it’s a good story.
I wrote this because I had to.
I have cleaned rotten floorboards and I have embellished raw fact with pretty metaphors.
People don’t want to read anything skin deep.
People don’t want to read anything that penetrates the bone, the heart, the vital organs.
People don’t want to read, but they do it so they can say that they do, so they feel smart, so they can forget their own lives.
People probably shouldn’t invest themselves in other people’s lives.
They do it anyway.
*
I started this thing too long ago.
I started it with too many beginnings and I brushed over things, people that were important. People that probably won’t be too impressed at their lackluster mention. These people, they’re footnotes in what I’m trying to say, PeteWilliamAudreyKatySpencerClareJonDad.
The problem was that starting this was really hard to do. I didn’t know where to start or who to start with or how to say it, any of it. I started this by saying that there were too many beginnings, that it took me a while to sift through them all, and it did, just, for every beginning, there are a million endings.
I started with Catherine, and she, her part in this is over. Catherine committed suicide. Catherine drowned herself in a rehab clinic. Catherine died too many years ago.
Then I start with me.
Memememememe. There’s a lot more to that story, not over yet coz fuck off, I’m not dead. stillgoingstilllivingstillhere.
Then maybe Mum gets a mention. Grace Urie. I’ll finish her off by the end of this, so don’t worry too much about that.
Then I start with Ryan.
Indifferencecuriousitylikehatelovehatelovehatelovelovelovelove. Love.
There’s more to him too, enough that I should probably do it now, finish that off because he’s been reading bits of this over my shoulder as I’ve been writing it, hovering like some lost bird. He thinks I make him sound like an asshole.
He thinks I make it sound like there’s no happily ever after.
*
Continue to part 2.
Soundtrack.
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
A/N: I don't normally leave authors notes, but, y’know, this is the last part so I've resigned myself to writing one. I’ve given in, but please don't take that to be a bad thing. It's not.
This, it’s really just a huge thank you to everyone who read/is reading/will read this. It still amazes me that what I write, my often retarded inner-brain-workings, that all of it was able to garner such a response from people, from you. I’d read the comments and just get to the point where all I could say was ‘Thank you so much’, but please don’t doubt that I was genuine in this, coz I really, really was. All of you just overwhelmed me, it happens.
Shout outs go to dawn_afterglow and rachelriott for doing such an awesome job beta’ing, God knows what you would’ve been reading if it wasn’t for them. To mandy_croyance, blushandrecover, woodenduck, to raye6, sarahwithanh, toxickk924, tip_painter, theworshipper, stolen_manners for their support and their comments that essentially pwned my soul.
But most of all to everyone who read this, who left a comment to just let me know that this made you feel something, it’s the greatest feeling and again, just thank you.
Chapter 18
Contrary to what a plethora of jaded critics will say, there’s a difference between writing your memoirs and writing an autobiography. In reality, or rather, in the society in which we live, there’s this vast, mammoth disparity in these two methods of chronicling your life, noting the (usually nicer) shades of your character.
I don’t know, maybe Ryan’s influenced me too much, his nagging monotone that seeps a gentle, and often contemptuous cynicism into my life, into me. I adopt too many of his traits, his styles, his ways of understanding, absorbing what goes on around him; then again, that’s what happens in a relationship. Loretta, and she always says it with a quirked eyebrow and an air of derision, she says that’s what happens when you find your soul mate.
I don’t know.
The point is, Ryan used to tell me that when someone writes their memoirs, they do it because they think they have something worth remembering, worth sharing. These people, they write and write and write to try and sort through the parts of their head that don’t make any sense. He says the point of writing memoirs, the point is, you find this key, a dirty, ancient thing, and then, maybe years later, maybe minutes, you find a door.
Your memoirs, it’s you unlocking it, it’s you finding yourself in a room with bloodstained, shit-stained floors, torn curtains, broken windows. It’s you stuck in a room where the rain pokes through the shattered glass and runs races down the walls like the tears you never cried.
Your memoirs, it’s you picking up a bucket, a mop, a broom, a rag and it’s you cleaning until your arms ache, until your heart throbs and your muscles burn and all of you is so lost in history that you can’t quite find yourself until you clean, until you write yourself back to present day.
It’s you doing this for you. It’s you doing this because you need to, not necessarily because you want to.
Ryan, he says the point of a memoir is that it’s raw. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done a million things in your life, if you’ve done none, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been to war, if you’ve spent your life as a housewife, if your rich, poor, fat or old, British, American, Middle Eastern, African. The point is it’s you and it may not be much of a life, it might be one full of regrets, full of achievements, full of shit all, what matters is that it’s yours and no one can take that away from you, not unless you let them.
Autobiography is different.
Vastly, enormously, gigantically.
Ryan still says, even as I sit writing this in the middle of our apartment, he says that when someone tries to get his life story published, tries to get his life printed, abbreviated, clean cut on the shelves of your local Borders, that’s not them chronicling their lives, that’s not them shifting through a mess in their head, it’s their ego talking. It’s them trying to make a few easy bucks. It’s not them thinking that their life is worth sharing, it’s them thinking that a few deeply embellished, exaggerated moments of their lives are gonna sell on the shelves.
And too often it does.
Tag a based on a true story onto the front cover and people are more likely to empathize, sympathize, cry and laugh and feel, because you, the author, all signs point to you being real. People will believe you when you say you fucked that person or did this or felt that, when, in reality, you could’ve done none of it. You could’ve sat behind your Apple Mac, your Windows Vista and typed about fucking Cameron Diaz that one time at Buddhist camp, about saving the lives of a million kittens suffering the bubonic plague, that, it doesn’t make it real.
That doesn’t make it your life; all that makes it, all you publishing your life story does is make your audience, your waiting public wonder what the fuck it is you aren’t publishing.
It makes people wonder who the real demons are, that person is, that one with the footnote beside their name, the part at the bottom of the page that says name changed for sake of publication.
I tell Ryan he doesn’t give people enough credit.
He tells me I give them too much.
The point is, he tells me this whilst I’m writing, pouring my soul into the keypad of a too old laptop.
This whole thing, it’s neither, it’s both.
It’s true, for the record, the shit I’ve written about: every painstaking emotion, every name, every person. I wrote this because I felt I had something worth remembering, worth sharing, I wrote this, but it wasn’t because I found a fucking key.
I wrote this with the intention of publishing it, I wrote it with the intention of seeing it on the shelves of Borders, I wrote it so I could do book tours and answer questions and have people look at me as something other than that guy who won that Oscar, that guy who was in that cultflick, that Build God thing.
I wrote this coz I think it’s a good story.
I wrote this because I had to.
I have cleaned rotten floorboards and I have embellished raw fact with pretty metaphors.
People don’t want to read anything skin deep.
People don’t want to read anything that penetrates the bone, the heart, the vital organs.
People don’t want to read, but they do it so they can say that they do, so they feel smart, so they can forget their own lives.
People probably shouldn’t invest themselves in other people’s lives.
They do it anyway.
*
I started this thing too long ago.
I started it with too many beginnings and I brushed over things, people that were important. People that probably won’t be too impressed at their lackluster mention. These people, they’re footnotes in what I’m trying to say, PeteWilliamAudreyKatySpencerClareJonDad.
The problem was that starting this was really hard to do. I didn’t know where to start or who to start with or how to say it, any of it. I started this by saying that there were too many beginnings, that it took me a while to sift through them all, and it did, just, for every beginning, there are a million endings.
I started with Catherine, and she, her part in this is over. Catherine committed suicide. Catherine drowned herself in a rehab clinic. Catherine died too many years ago.
Then I start with me.
Memememememe. There’s a lot more to that story, not over yet coz fuck off, I’m not dead. stillgoingstilllivingstillhere.
Then maybe Mum gets a mention. Grace Urie. I’ll finish her off by the end of this, so don’t worry too much about that.
Then I start with Ryan.
Indifferencecuriousitylikehatelovehatelovehatelovelovelovelove. Love.
There’s more to him too, enough that I should probably do it now, finish that off because he’s been reading bits of this over my shoulder as I’ve been writing it, hovering like some lost bird. He thinks I make him sound like an asshole.
He thinks I make it sound like there’s no happily ever after.
*
Continue to part 2.
Soundtrack.