2004-01-11 at 8:54 p.m.
The first step is the new place. The second step is finding how to use my voice again. I grieve for what i've lost, for the words that aren't coming even though i long for them, for the vigilance i feel necessary even typing these into a small box.I am here in the unswept room which is, at least for now, a space that is entirely my own.
I didn't expect it would come. I didn't think this would end like this. I shake as i open the envelope, scan the ridiculous grammar of your insanity.For the first time in weeks, i feel something lifted off of me.
You tell me it's back. And you slip under the covers and beneath silence. It's familiar to us now, this thing that has seeped into our lives like a stain.
Interpreting your sleep, sensing your sadness before you speak it.
I don't tell you that I am weary with experience. I don't tell you that the thought of the long winter of your exhaustion tires me. I don't tell you that this worry sits on me, that it's what I carry with me as I move through the day.
I tell you today that I've had a block for days now, that someone has been here and has changed this for me, that the words aren't coming now, that the only thing that I feel rising from my core is a vast silence. You ask me if it will come back and I quickly say yes because I don't know how to say I'm not sure, I don't know how to tell you that I've forgotten how to court them, how to lure them to this place. I want to tell you that this is the door around which I move now, the space that i wrap my body around, I want to tell you that I fear this silence isn't a temporary matter but a permanent condition.
Now I have forgotten your voice and the heaviness of that silence, the clumsyness of those moments, the borrowed words of enthusiasm. Your absence is barely even noticed.
I sit on the lip of the sofa and tell you I'm afraid, frightened by the prospect of honesty.
I'm not sure what it is to sit in the honesty room with someone else. I'm not sure what it will be like to tell someone else the things that I see every day. I'm not sure which would be the bigger betrayal: my silence or my honesty.
I need a chance to change.
I learned to be honest
the way I learned to swim
dropped into the inevitable
my father's thumbs in my hairless armpits
about to give way
I am trying
to surface carefully
remembering
the water's shadow-legged musk
cannons of salt exploding
my nostrils' rage
and for years
my powerful breast stroke
was a declaration of war.
We call this recovery and we marvel at your progress. We talk about a place we call "then" and this place we call "now" and we measure the difference with carefully chosen adjectives. We have books and formulas, quotations and underlined passages, we can call it melancholy and contextualize it in just about anything. We have learned to speak this language of sadness.
Your words are my resurrection for a moment, i am your madonna of tears,surrender your quicks to my rind,tongue moving fast as if working over vowels, the moment before everything opens up.
I don't know what I'm supposed to be getting from this. I'm trudging through the consonants of a language I don't know like walking through an unfamiliar city and hearing the cadences of voices, the laughter of people you don't know, the echos of something you wish you understood. Today I feel lost here.
Tell me it's all in my head. Because I know I have the capacity to invent things. I know that with enough time and enough space, I can create my own strange calculus. I just want you to say it. And to say it over and over again until we divide away this distance.
Even though it's in a language i have to decode, the message is clear. weaving guilt underneath manipulation, your voice halts in all the right places.
"when i die, my biggest regret will be that you've never allowed me to know you."
You pause there. I can actually taste my disgust. I feel the bubbles of anger rising underneath my skin, palpable.
"I know you're nice," You say, "but you just refuse to let me in any further."
I practically spit the words, "Maybe that's all you can have for right now. I have to go."
I've learned to prepare myself for this. No surprises anymore, just the arithmetic of guilt.
I wonder what you are thinking right now, how your eyes move over these words, what the contours of your imagination are like as you stumble over my sloppy almost-midnight diction.
I try to explain that there are places that are familiar to me only in my dreams,I visit them in sleep and travel down the corridors of consciousness in the morning digging them out of the recesses of the dark spaces.
(But I rely on words whose syllables are jagged, ones whose clumsy configurations don't explain the comfort of returning to these places that are no-place.)
I think about my surprise at the sound that came from somewhere visceral, something like a hiss, "let me finish," about the difference between what I wanted to say and what I said, trying to imagine how to subtract away the excess words and add the right ones. I imagine what it would have been like to have picked the right words, to be able to bare myself in the moment of feeling, not now, not this exercise of retrospective sense-making.
(The feelings are in parentheses now, bracketed. I want to explain to you that always lurks the fear that my feelings will be exposed, revealed, the heiroglyphics of emotion bare. Now this place is borrowed.)
You slip into it like a whisper or sheets, it lures you away from the living room, from the sofa, borrowed like a language, it is yours again.
I am merely a visitor here.
I sense I'm giving in to something painful because it is easier to yield than to find the words that won't be heard easily. I wish i could will the words from my mouth, move them to the middle of the room like furniture, nouns to be reckoned with.
I need a chance to change.
I haven't had it in years but it comes in waves, almost like nausea. I am looking through pictures and feeling the slow pang of absence.
You have to claim your entitlement to sadness, learn to move your tongue over the heavy syllables of grief, imagine a language for articulating frustration. I want the consonants and vowels of your melancholy and I want you to know that you are deserving both of the feelings and the words.
There. It is done.