Tomás Q. Morín - Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir

In this fearsome, beautiful memoir, Toms Q. Morn takes us on a journey exploring the limits of suffering and love. Those are the words he uses to praise a fellow poet, but the story of his upbringing is just such a wild trip. The young Toms constantly searches for the right words to say to his beloveds, his abusers. And in Let Me Count the Ways, every episode is a prose poem.

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of China Men and The Woman Warrior

Let Me Count the Ways is an origin poem wrapped in a travel essay, rocking the full wings of fiction. This means it is a memoir, a stunning memoir about the worn glory of counting up, counting down, and counting in. It is simply the layered work of a soulful magician welcoming us behind our own curtains. Genius.

Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

American Lives

Series editor: Tobias Wolff

Toms Q. Morn

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2022 by Toms Q. Morn

Cover by Brulio Amado.

Portions of the book originally appeared in Mannish Boy, Prairie Schooner 89, no. 4 (Winter 2015); Table Talk, Threepenny Review 153 (Spring 2018); and Mannish Boy: An Excerpt, Hinchas de Poesa 18 (2016).

All rights reserved

The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Publication of this volume was assisted by the School of Humanities and the Office of Research at Rice University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morn, Toms Q., author.

Title: Let me count the ways: a memoir / Toms Q. Morn.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. | Series: American lives

Identifiers: LCCN 2021033066

ISBN 9781496226495 (paperback)

ISBN 9781496231130 (epub)

ISBN 9781496231147 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Morn, Toms Q.Mental health. | Obsessive-compulsive disorderPatientsBiography. | Compulsive behavior. | BISAC : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

Classification: LCC RC 533 . M 672 2022 | DDC 616.85/2270092 [B]dc23/eng/20211001

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033066

The names and identifying details of some people have been changed. There are no composite characters in this book.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

para mi mam,

Bertha E. Quintana

y

mi abuela,

Victoria E. Quintana

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (translated by Constance Garnett)

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ( OCD ) is a common, chronic and long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over.

Obsessions are repeated thoughts, urges, or mental images that cause anxiety. Compulsions are repetitive behaviors that a person with OCD feels the urge to do in response to an obsessive thought.

National Institute of Mental Health

The green light is long and traffic is thick. My car inches forward. I count nearly everything I see. Sidewalks, stairs, cars, the tires and doors of those cars, not to mention the blocks they are parked alongside. On other days, Ive counted little things, too: books, forks, carpets, shadows, chairs, even peoples feet. Once, I even counted the soft-blue stripes of a mans shirt. I cant tell you what year it was or if I saw him in Chicago, Provincetown, Santa Cruz, or somewhere else. I cant even remember whom I was with or even what I was wearing. But the stripes, the thumbnail-thick ocean-blue stripes on white cotton, were like the bars of a fence behind which was a land of peace I had only dreamed of. In all the years my memory has carried the stripes from some random persons shirt, they have never changed.

My counting is not most peoples counting. I never drove through a city like some human adding machine, the city limits sign in my rearview and my head buzzing with numbers. What good would it be to anyone if I knew that on a certain day in a certain year, I saw twenty-six spoons moving in and out of twenty-six bowls in a restaurant youve never been to? There was no 1, 2, 3 for me. I have no desire to tangle with a string of numbers you can wind around the planet until the end of time.

Two more cars. Two more cars and I can turn left.

I blink my left eye when I line up with the ass end of a car, then blink my right eye when Im at the center, and the left again when I reach the front bumper.

Ive done this for every car on the street since I left my apartment. The slow traffic has made this block easier, a block whose start, middle, and end I also mark. And every building on this block and the windows and doors of each building. At least as many of them as I can. These patterns are something I can depend on. They are inviolable, perfect, and all my own.

The traffic is finally moving, and the palm trees I love are in the rearview. Sometimes when a certain itch creeps into my spirit and I feel misplaced, Ill scratch it by making the block and driving slow, because the palms against the wall of the white stucco Methodist church can trick you into thinking you could be on a side street of an island, instead of in the middle of Texas. My mothers grandfather used to say his family was from the Canary Islands. People say time moves slower on an island. That would be nice if it were true, but I dont believe it. Time is time, isnt it?

Going downhill now.

Ten minutes and Ill be home.

Since my eyes cant keep up with all the counting now that Im driving faster, I also tap my fingers and toes, clench and unclench my jaw, even flex the muscles of my arms and legs when the blocks are particularly crowded. While Im driving and thinking about not breaking any traffic laws and where I am going and the time of day and thus how long before the sun goes down and countless other things, I also have in my head LeftRightLeftRightLeftRightLeftRightLeftRightLeftRightLeftRightLeftRight going a mile a minute. For years, I assumed Left Right Left was in everyone elses head too. If you could measure the world and know where everything began and ended, why wouldnt you?

Another left turn and the river is to my right now, and the buildings are fewer and farther apart. I glance at the door locks again. Im driving over twenty miles an hour. I remind myself there are limits to what a human being can do.

My parents taught me early that their love had its limits. I wish I could have mapped out their love. My counting is a way for me to return the things people have made to the blueprint stage. Since people dont have blueprints, maybe when I count a part of them, like what theyre wearing, its closer to mapping.

I wish I could have set their love for one another like islands against a field of oceans and wrapped them tight with an equator.