“So You Know It’s Me” by Brian Oliu

Published by Tiny Hardcore Press

I love the quiet mornings at Lake Michigan where there’s nothing to do but listen to the sound of waves crashing against the pier. It’s a cloudy morning today, with dismal rain lightly falling. There’s hardly a soul on the beach. It’s just me and the seagulls enjoying the early dawn with a couple of South Haven residents. The kind who wake up and say, this is what I need in the morning; the water, the smell of the Great Lakes, the breeze. I need to see the humanity in the world that exists when no one else is around. There are others like us. But for now there is only us.

I just finished reading Brian Oliu’s book, So You Know It’s Me, and it was quite honestly one of the best books to read on a morning like today. You see, Brian Oliu is the kind of writer who has words linger in your head long after you’ve finished the last chapter. I read this book for the first time a week ago but days after it continued to haunt me and so here I am as the only customer in a lone coffee shop drinking chamomile tea looking out at the water trying to put this book into my own words.

Originally posted in Tuscaloosa’s Craiglist Missed Connections page the short essays that make up the book have elements of sincerity and grace that flow through each line quick and urgent like a vein. In “First day – UA Campus m4w” Oliu writes,

“If I were the painter of the painting painted, I would have colors on the tips of my fingers —reds and oranges would be caught in between the whorls and arcs, the valleys of the ridges flooded. I would lick my finger and drag it across your cheek. It would leave a mark —a beautiful one.”

Oliu has a sense of vulnerability in his writing, whether it’s tapping into his own or making the reader acutely aware of everything they never wanted anyone else to know about them.

I want to say Oliu’s writing reminds of Miranda July’s short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You with the heartbreaking honesty, the slight hand of humor in certain parts. No, this book does more than present honesty. It learns who your character truly is with all of your flaws and imperfections. The emotional depth of the prose envelops you and turns you inside out. You soon realize you’ve never wanted anything more than for someone, anyone to notice these things about you, to see you in the clear vision that Oliu can so effortlessly write with. The last time a writer cut into the core of me and could see me—the reader, for who I truly am, was a long time ago.

This is the kind of book you hope to be able to quote from in the future to prove to your significant other or your best friend there’s someone else out there who sees the world as you do. But even as you quoted from the essay Reading – Barnes & Noble m4:

“I would’ve come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink —it would’ve  left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents’ bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like —they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a back pocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don’t want

you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.”

You’ll see even then your listeners will have yet to understand the beautiful simplicity of a book like this. It will have been a missed connection, your own missed connection you’ll realize, similar to one of the very moments Oliu writes about.

Koty Neelis is a writer, traveler, and magazine editor born and raised in Michigan. She is the Editor in Chief of WHOA Magazine and a co-founder and fiction editor for Revolution House Magazine.