Your love story? You can write the beginning. You can write the beginning and the middle, but not the ending. You can write the early-beginning and the late-beginning and the early-middle and even the middle-middle—but never the ending. There’s no end in sight, and besides, if you were at the end, you wouldn’t think to tell it because you’d be living it instead. But the beginning and the middle: You can type it. Revise it. Go over it the way water shapes rock, smoothing its jagged edges, polishing it in the sun.
How people feel about second-person perspective depends on who they are. Some readers say it’s tedious and some English teachers ban it from classrooms. Writers on Twitter say it’s an amateur move, too limiting—a claim to which other writers respond with successful examples: Here, here, here. Scholars publish essays with columns and diagrams to illustrate the different variations of second person because not every you is the same you—some yous are meant to be the reader, while other yous are clearly a narrator talking about herself through a thin disguise. Regardless, there’s always caution. Don’t let it make your writing lazy. Don’t let it get claustrophobic. Tread lightly.
But before second person, it’s first person, all I and me. You’re solo in a way that makes you pine for a you. You imagine this person as a jewel. You picture the gleaming facets: a nightstand stacked with books, the cracked, colorful spines beside a glass of overnight tap water with its cluster of tiny bubbles. You conjure another’s eyes, how they flicker with light as this person steps in from the storm, snowflakes melting into a dark wool collar. The feel of the other’s hip in your palm as you sleep, your chest against another’s back: you can imagine that, too. Even the clutter doesn’t bother you: the socks tossed near the hamper or the moisturizer in the bathroom, its cap left off in a rush. Still, the person remains abstract like that one Rothko painting, a gradation of reds—raspberry to persimmon to plum—that put an embarrassing lump in your throat when you visited a museum with an old friend, a reaction you couldn’t explain, except it’s the same feeling that swells when you cradle your dozing infant niece or hear Nat King Cole’s “O Holy Night” over grocery store speakers at Christmas. Wonder, maybe. In those moments, your body becomes an exclamation point.
When you fly from Nevada to Louisville to visit him on a windy day in your pale-yellow tank top, it’s because he said, “I think we could have fun together.” It seemed so breezy and light, playful like a dare. And you were up for it, up for arriving at his side just to see—to take the calculated risk, knowing that you’d regret not buying the discounted ticket with the long Phoenix layover more than you’d regret a five-day trip that fizzled or didn’t amount to much. At the very least, you’d have a story to tell your best friend or a future love, evidence of some tiny spontaneous bone in your body.
He picks you up. You rumble around in the dark as he drives his red Isuzu Hombre, a little truck with crank windows and a stubborn stick shift, through Highlands side streets and Cherokee Park shortcuts. You still know this part of town so well, but he knows it better than you do. When you relax against the seat—or try to appear relaxed, at least—you aren’t yet aware that this truck will become your truck, too, and that you’ll memorize its glitches and quirks along Southern California freeways, or that it’ll break down on a steep hill near Acton, California, causing your hearts to stutter, and, on a different summer road trip, that the AC won’t work in the Mojave and that you two, together for years by then, will laugh about it, speeding with the windows down. You can’t guess that in this small cab with its weathered Kentucky state map and fat, black books of CDs that you’ll discuss love, music, writing, sex, marriage, God, puns, drinks, dogs, dinner plans, fears, ambitions, books, movies, politics, old friends, new friends, job prospects, job losses, parents, siblings, childhood, beauty, grief, mortality, how you’ve changed, how he’s changed, too, as you morph across the years, faster than the truck can keep up. When, during that Louisville trip, you push the door open and step out on your first date to a concert his friends are playing at Headliners and the spring evening is so crisp that he offers you his black jacket in what feels like an organically kind gesture, you’d never know that you’d log years much like this moment, walking beside him as seasons, geographies, priorities flip like pages in a book. Because the beginning doesn’t announce itself. You never think, This is the start.
But you can replay the beginning after the fact: the yellow tank, raw silk with beige flowers and minuscule cutouts along the neckline, a shirt you paid too much for at a Reno department store with your mom on your twenty-fifth birthday when you were mostly broke. But because you wore it that whole first summer you fell in love with him, it seems now like it paid for itself. The moment you hold hands as you walk toward the concert despite not having been in each other’s physical presence much, you’re already a team somehow, moving through the dark to the small venue, shoes crunching the parking lot gravel, and your fingers laced in that steadying, private way. He was so skinny taking Adderall to finish school and you were skinny, too, from coffee and insomnia, working at a gym where you’d coach kids and teenagers all day, moving nonstop, plus the stress of a recent divorce and its attendant upheaval, and now the shivery thrill of this, whatever this was. Yes, when you picture the beginning, the two of you—his shoulder blades through the thin vintage cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, your leather sandals with the short heel that you could still walk fast in—there it is, water smoothing rock, all the signs that you’d assemble a life together, even though, in that moment, you probably wondered if your hand was sweating and why you never painted your nails and if you should go back to his place later that night if he asked you to, and you hoped he would.
You replay that summer soundtrack, the sound of Louisville, of Pavement and the Silver Jews and Wax Fang and Built to Spill and the Mountain Goats and Spoon, you passenger side, bumming his fruit-punch nicotine gum. How you’d sit on his Baringer Avenue porch swing while cicadas chirped or how you lounged in friends’ Germantown lawn chairs to share beers, Kentucky feeling more Kentucky than ever since you returned from the desert, which is to say green-on-green, lush and tipsy, drenched in honey-colored evening light that makes your day jobs seem incidental because, like the Ohio River, the future spills out in front of you, anything possible.
In the second person, in the editing and revision, you polish and shine up even the dumb, embarrassing times, like your most overblown argument in the beginning-beginning, those days when you were delirious for each other but also intense and disagreeable. The fight happened in front of a small art gallery, and it wasn’t sparked by some substantial issue like trust or where the relationship was headed, but by the fact that you wanted to look in the window longer and he wanted to make it across the intersection before the light changed. You’d never been angrier about something so trivial and you’re pretty sure your voices rose and that you both stayed mad for hours, maybe days, the fight a blaring sign of everything uncaring and oblivious about the other person, of how this must be a rebound on your part, a bad decision on his, and you were clearly incompatible so why not call it off now, cut your losses, move on? But as you revisit and revise, what comes into focus from that moment is the brick storefront and the wind chimes tinkling in the open door and how it was an early fall day, it must’ve been, because you remember those yellow blade-shaped leaves blanketing the sidewalks and gutters, and it was chilly—which was maybe part of his hurry, come to think of it—and you wonder now about the glazed ceramic vases in the window, indigos and blood reds, whether they’ve survived fourteen years. So much can happen in that time.
Maybe because your love occurred in a headlong rush, it’s hard to pin down the moment when so much I fell away. Maybe it was on that yellow tank top day or the first-date concert where you clinked glasses and said cheers beneath the bar lights. Or when, eighteen months later, he helped you relocate to Syracuse for grad school before heading west for his own program and you sat on the bumper of an open moving truck outside your new apartment and cried because you didn’t know if you could weather another change without failing. Or maybe it’s when, after months apart, you materialize in California with an enormous black suitcase by your side and he picks you up at LAX and you spend that contented, bare-bones summer in his Irvine graduate student housing with its industrial carpet and the wetlands three stories below his bedroom window, subsisting on iced black tea and late-night dinners and walks beneath purple jacarandas. Or maybe it’s when you move out to California and live together for the first time: you buy champagne and explore your new neighborhood beneath rows of swaying palms before losing your clothes across the kitchen, the living room, the bare bedroom with its box fan and naked bed, the place filled with your belongings divided for the last time into yours and his.
“You need to let in a little light,” he says about this book. This is it, this essay, as best as you can tell. But what’s the brightness without shadow? Because the shadows were an element, too. And maybe the reason why something that started as a dare has endured. You’ve never given hard-won happiness enough credit, always chalking it up to luck.
And, yes, luck—that’s part of this, too. Because, really, the whole prospect seemed ill-advised at the outset, the quickness and timing, but also the simple fact of letting some of the I, I, I slip from your fist, especially when you’d worked so hard to find it in the first place, as a daughter and granddaughter, as a mostly good girl who sensed that the gender game is rigged, and as a grown woman who came to know it. And then to have regained the I after filing divorce papers on a winter day in the courthouse that faces a small-town casino where people win sometimes but mostly walk away with less than they brought and sometimes more than they can afford to lose. The aftermath means untangling one life from another, means confessing to family and friends and banks and the DMV that you have your old name again (and who knew you’d have missed it?). So, it seems like a gamble to give up some of the I for you. But then you come to understand the paradox that was probably illuminated in your friends’ more traditional marriage vows that you only half heard while you waited for the violins and cake: that you can become more of yourself beside a second person. And that, from the other person’s perspective, you’re their second person—the accomplice, the sidekick, the secondary character in the story told from their point of view as they become more of themselves across a lifetime, too.
The middle-middle? It’s this moment. In his pink chair across the room, he doesn’t look different except for the silver stripe in his beard, something that seemed to manifest overnight two years ago when you both woke up and there it was: a straight line of white to match the single white eyelash he’s had since you met him. But surely he must have changed more than that. You have—so much so that the woman in the yellow tank top seems like someone you dreamed. Last week, when you applied mascara in the passenger-side mirror as he drove through your neighborhood, you said aloud almost by accident, “When did we get older?” to which he replied, “We’re fine.” Because it’s a trick how you think you’re making a life only to see that you’ve already made it.
What’ve you made? In the middle-middle, the weight of it feels heavy and precious. In the middle-middle, it’s things like this: he calls you from the hospital across the country where his dad is terminally ill and you’re in a blizzard walking the dog across a frozen bridge, heavy tree boughs arcing above your head and the only sounds along the miraculously untouched paths are of snow settling and the dog’s soft pant and his voice through the phone. You’re the only people remaining in the world: Holy shit, this is love, you think and you can practically feel the big clock ticking, which means this might be as good as it gets and, finally, what more could you need? But it’s also this: the other night, in total darkness, 2:00 a.m., he woke you up to offer a glass of cold water because he said you looked thirsty in your sleep, and you were thirsty, actually, and so you sat up to drink it, to talk nonsense inside the dark for a moment you’ll barely remember before placing the half-full glass on the nightstand.
One time, because you talk about writing as much as you talk about anything else, he tells you that second person is his least favorite point of view. You tell him it’s one of your favorites. You’re not just being contrary: it’s intimate somehow, despite the lack of I, like a pact you’re making with a reader, a whisper in their ear. So you wonder if, when you tell him you’re writing this essay in second person—this one with the light—he’ll say it’s a bad idea, too annoying or over-the-top. When you mention it, you say it from the sofa where you’re typing on your ancient laptop with the frayed cord and he’s walking around, playing his bass, lines that will get stuck in your head for days. “Oh,” he says, “like in the love poems. The I/you address.” You tell him that this isn’t that kind of essay, though, that there really isn’t any I in it.
Except, of course, it’s all I. The second person just makes it easier to turn the bright jewel around in your palm. And although this essay isn’t a love poem, a direct address to the you, maybe you did mean to talk to readers all along. You know that the particulars of this story—red truck, scorched Mojave, cowboy shirt with the frayed hem—aren’t their love-story particulars: they have their own weathered maps and soundtracks and moving boxes and beds in which they breathe and curve against another in the dark. You suppose that, for some, a beginning waits just beyond their sightline. For others, you’re pretty sure they’ve come to the end, that the clock stopped and now their phone remains silent as they walk their dog through frozen woods. You think, they’re in the early-middle or middle-middle or late-middle. Not writing down each day but living it instead. Love so ordinary that it’s extraordinary. I see it, you want to say to them, your common, rare thing. 
Ashley Marie Farmer is the author of the essay collection Dear Damage (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 Series in Kentucky Literature, as well as three other books. Her work has been published Gay Magazine, TriQuarterly, The Progressive, Santa Monica Review, Buzzfeed, Flaunt, Nerve, Gigantic, Salt Hill Journal, and DIAGRAM, among others. Farmer is the recipient of a 2019 Best American Essays notable distinction, the 2018 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2017 Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award, and fellowships from Syracuse University and the Baltic Writing Residency. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the writer Ryan Ridge.
“Second Person” is an excerpt from the new essay collection, Dear Damage.
