Reader Response on “We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek

             The beginning of this piece is absolutely stunning. It reads more like a poem, which of course is always appealing to me. The reiteration of “we didn’t” didn’t drag on because the images kept flowing from one to the next. It was one good sentence after another. And that didn’t stop. It would be hard for me to discuss this poem without primarily pointing out lines I loved.      

            The line “Only the bodies of lovers remained behind, visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield, a few of them moaning, waiting for the gulls to pick them clean.” Normally that many images in one sentence would confuse me, but it flowed well, making it easy to distinct each fragment from the next. The “gulls” picking them in maintains a romantic quality that would normally be gruesome. I like how the narrator goes off onto this worldly tangent about people “doing it” only to come back to “They did it because it was Friday night” (459). It shows the myriad of reasons that people do “it” and that there is none too small, none too important than the next. When the narrator thinks he is doing it but realizes he isn’t (which was too funny) and says “still in the Here groping for an Eternity that was only a fine adjustment away” (460), it makes you forget we are talking about sex. A lot of the things he says can be applied to multiple acts because of how beautiful the language is. The idea of “here” being a place that is only some distance away from eternity is interesting. It is presented in a way that makes it seem equal to eternity. I think it’s interesting that the narrator expresses himself so well even though he is talking about sex. It’s impressive to say the least.

            Of course, the story can’t be a story unless something does happen. Everything is almost too perfectly timed with the body washing up on the shore. I would have thought “oh, what a coincidence” in the most sarcastic way, but the humor the narrator incorporates right before brought me out from the seriousness of it and let me believe in what was happening. The line “I was trying to calm you with reassuring phrases such as ‘Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this” had me balling. This might be morbid of me but it was also funny to see the narrator’s partner, Jules, try and make some connection to the tragic mother and her child. She even describes it as an “omen”. The dialogue from that point is a good example of what dialogue should be. The sarcastic tone Jules uses in her frustration and the humor the narrator tries to compensate with is exactly what couples do, at least from my own experience. I could see these two having that argument over that woman.

            The attentiveness to the woman and her child was odd to me, but when they “had acquired the habit of arguing about everything else” (463), it made sense to me. The woman and her child were a reason, a catalyst for what the relationship was meant to turn out to be. On the breaking point, the narrator says “I’d been so intent on becoming lovers that I’d overlooked how close we’d been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again” (464). I completely relate to this feeling because I’ve been there (not to get all personal on everyone). There is a point in some relationships where you want it to be over but you want that person to look at you the way you did in the beginning and that’s what this conveys so well. The ending confused me because I keep second guessing myself as to what the couple didn’t do. It seems obvious but I’m not sure. Perhaps someone else has an answer to this. Maybe that’s just a silly question to ask. The ending, “we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did” (466) stuck with me because the whole time I felt the desperation and longing for a lover. Whether it was a lover or love that he wanted, I feel that he tried so hard and never got either.