Stet: On Cutting—but Keeping—Everything

The first time I tell Rachelle that I love her, she answers “Five reasons.”

“What?”

“Five reasons. Give me five reasons why.”

“Five?” I say.

“Five.”

I look to the ceiling, mouth open, still as a corpse, and remain this way for a minute, maybe more. At some point, I let out a low, unpromising “um.” I’m not waiting for inspiration. I’m eliminating options—trying to get down to 20, then 10, then five, the five best.

I’ve always struggled with revision that reduces. I’m a natural maximalist, partial to parentheticals, always tilting into tangents. More is more is more. I don’t care about a blackbird that I can look at only once.

For the speaker this can feel like flying, defying the gravity of the period. But for the listener it feels like fishing with hand grenades: a long, uncomfortable process that renders whatever it yields not worth keeping. You have to pay for your tangents, either in the currency of trust or patience. I can’t, for example, tell you about my great uncle Pat, who fished with hand grenades in German lakes during the Second World War, who died last spring, leaving me this and other images. I haven’t earned it. In my experience—in love and writing—you can earn patience with your voice, the way you say something, but you only earn trust by keeping your promises.

“Five … reasons …” I repeat.

My voice isn’t earning much.

In this moment, I wish I could say everything. But to say everything would be to stress nothing, to give the profound and the trivial equal weight. It would be boring. “I love you” is an inherited sequence. In this moment, she’s asking only to be known. For that I need the right words in the right order.

I don’t remember what I said all those years ago, and I don’t mind that now. I’ve never had much interest in the finished utterance, the