Cliché
[Content note: contains a brief discussion of miscarriage.]
A few weeks into the first term of my first year of teaching Creative Writing in London, I asked my students for an example of a cliché. The answer they gave was: I love you.
I’d been looking forward to the class. It had become clear that of all the things I could offer first-year students, most useful would be the ability to distinguish between a turn of phrase that feels good because it is striking, original, apt, and one that feels good simply because it is familiar. I had planned to fill the whiteboard with clichés, take a photo of it and circulate it to the group for future reference: a wilting bouquet of twinkling eyes and cans of worms and half-baked ideas and far cries. I had run similar classes as an adjunct at BU, and they had always resulted in a pleasing cluster of idioms, predictable similes, and lines that, I liked to observe, were actually from Shakespeare. We had discussed clichéd language, but also clichéd characters, clichéd scenes. This time we hit I love you and got stuck there.
What about ‘uphill battle’? I said. What about, ‘perfect storm’? What about somebody taking off their glasses and suddenly becoming super hot?
OK, the students said, but they also said, I love you. I love you is a cliché. They were adamant about it.
I wrote I love you on the board, in green pen. Around it were wisps and streaks of other teachers’ notes, half-erased lessons still visible: I could make out the remnants of ‘recap’, ‘ruin’, ‘attitude’, and very clearly the word ‘consensus’ which had been there all term, in permanent marker, un-wipe-away-able. Consensus. I love you. I put a question mark after it.
This was unsettling because in the months between the job interview and that day in class, I had fallen in love. There was almost nothing else in my head. My life outside the classroom was dominated by it, was thrumming with it, was simply, I love you I love you love you and no question marks at all.
I ploughed on. I talked to the class about familiarity. I talked about the things in our lives that are so familiar to us we no longer see them: the graffiti by the train station, which I passed daily on my way to and from campus and which I only knew was there because I had checked in order to be able to make this exact point; a scratch on the wall above your bed; a sign by the door of the classroom outlining emergency evacuation procedures. We just don’t see them anymore. What happens when language becomes invisible like that, I asked the students; so familiar, so embedded in our daily lives that we stop seeing it altogether?
It dies, they said.
I asked them whether they still thought I love you was a cliché and they did.
I love you?
Falling in love was not something I had anticipated. It had happened at a time when I had given up seeking it and had set about getting on with life alone. I had moved out of the tiny boxy flat with a view of hundreds of other tiny boxy flats where I had spent the previous few years feeling morose and lonely. My new flat was even tinier but less boxy, and it had a garden. I adopted a kitten and bought a new sofa and got a little olive tree in a pot to sit by the doorstep, and I also decided to have a baby. I picked out a sperm donor and used the services of a fertility clinic on Harley Street.
I had been ten weeks pregnant when a scan revealed that there was no foetus inside the gestational sac. I wasn’t really pregnant after all. I started to cramp a few days later at the job interview, which was also when I fell in love with one of the other candidates, all of which is how I came to be standing in that classroom, not pregnant, teaching a class on cliché while light-headed with love. There was, I knew, a clichéd thing that people like to say about love: that you’ll only find it when you stop looking for it.
I’ve written elsewhere about the grief and confusion that followed that first miscarriage, but by the time of the cliché class, I was feeling clearer. I had contemplated living a life in a different shape: as a single woman with a cat (a cliché), as a single woman with a cat and a baby (less clichéd or more?). And now here was a different template: I had fallen in love with another woman, another writer, and was working as a teacher of writing, and all I wanted to do all day was say I love you. Worse, more clichéd than ever: I wanted to get married. I wanted to get down on one knee and propose. I wanted to be got-down-on-one-kneed-at and proposed to.
With Eley, I used I love you as a kind of punctuation. It tumbled out of my mouth at the end of sentences about the most ordinary things: I’m just taking the bins out. I love you. Could you put my grey t-shirt in the laundry? I love you. Do you want anything from the shop? I love you. As though we were communicating via walkie-talkie; as though I needed to make it clear when I’d finished speaking. We were still new to each other but also so dazzlingly, astonishingly familiar; I had told the students that when things are too familiar you stop seeing them, but confronted as I was with Eley, a beloved, a true familiar, what I felt was shocked and amazed and very wide awake.
Sometimes, when the words, I love you, came out of my mouth, what I was actually thinking was: Will you marry me?
The exercise I’d planned to set during the cliché class was this: pick a cliché from the board (which would, had things gone to plan, have been brimming with options) and come up with a different way to say it. Instead of butterflies in your stomach, write about the things that hope does to the body, the strange places the blood rushes to, the way fantasy manifests in the gut. Instead of the calm before the storm, write about the vertiginous feeling of standing on the cusp of your own life. But we only had one thing up on the board: Consensus. I love you? So the exercise was to find a different way of saying that.
The room went silent as the students turned to the task. They opened laptops. Some of them picked up their phones. There was no way of knowing whether they were doing the exercise or something else, texting their loved ones or each other, playing games.
I scribbled in the margins of my lesson plan: Consensus. I love you?
I tried to think of a different way to say it.
I wrote: I thought my life would be one way, and now it is another.