Some knots help–keeping your shoes on, tethering the dingy to the dock. Some are downright delicious, like garlic knots. Then there are the majorly irksome, like hair knots or infernal earpod wires. This June, we’re looking at Gordian knots–and the ingenious work-arounds that free us from those seemingly impossible snarls.
This week in particular, we’re focusing on one of the most impossible and perplexing snarls of all–love. Danielle Trussoni, writing as her alter ego, Dani Tru, shares some excerpts from True Romantic, a weekly column featured in The Rumpus. For the full True Romantic story, visit Dani Tru’s column here.
***
I used to have an old red suitcase where I kept my journals, about fifty or so notebooks, each filled with 
stories and poems, travel notes, bits of this and that I’d glued onto the pages: A note from my first boyfriend, failed short stories, a rejection letter from the New Yorker, a receipt from the coffee shop where I’d written my first poem. The pages were filled with disfigured self-portraits, twisted and half-real reflections of me at sixteen, at twenty, at twenty-three. Much of what was inside these notebooks was badly written, and some of it was even abysmally written, but I felt too attached to the efforts—the deformed beauty of my ungainly sixteen-year-old handwriting—to throw them out. As a result, I’d lugged these notebooks with me from apartment to apartment for years. I never opened the red suitcase, but slipped it under the bed or into a closet of whatever apartment I was renting.
One day, not long after we moved in together, The Magician saw the suitcase and asked what was inside. I opened the brass clasps and showed him the rows of neatly arrayed notebooks. He picked one up and turned over the cover. I eased it from his fingers and replaced it in the suitcase,
snapping the clasps closed.
See more of Trussoni’s Featured Creative posts on our Ideablog
***
~~~Danielle Trussoni is the author of four books: Falling Through the Earth (2006), Angelology (2010), Angelopolis (2013) and the forthcoming memoir The Fortress (2016). In addition to being published in The New York Times, The Guardian and Tin House, her writings have been widely anthologized.
Falling Through the Earth, a memoir about her relationship with her father, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2006. Falling Through the Earth was recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, Elle Magazine‘s Reader’s Choice Award for April 2006 and was chosen as a Book Sense Pick for March 2006. Her novels Angelology and Angelopolis were New York Times Bestsellers and have been translated into thirty-two languages. You can learn more about Danielle at www.danielletrussoni.com and follow her on Twitter @DaniTrussoni
