read at Wise Words ‘23
no exes were harmed in the making of this piece
The houses in this place are not built for people to live in. They hold heat long into the night, the window frames swollen, waiting for cooler days ahead.
In the middle of this heatwave my window does not close, letting in the barely perceptible glow of the night sky. The song that repeats in my ear names darkness as a site of loneliness. The dark does not have to be a lonely place. It is slower, quieter, and cooler, holding rather than sparking. These shadows are the shadows of everyone I have ever known. It is a kind of closeness that your skin can stand. I reach out the window into the empty, before my eyes adjust. On an impulse, I grip the frame and pull myself through.
My phone clatters on the concrete below.
On the bottom of my phone’s lock screen is a blue text bubble: “The inevitability of writing about writing and the ubiquity of erotica.” I have saved this snippet of conversation as though the memory of a few late night texts could anchor me in this halfway point between the person I am and the person I might want to be.
Back when I was first trying to write, my characters sunk into the pages, hoping to merge into formless scenes through the vaguest of dialogue. They kept tallies on their skin of the mistakes I made. The stronger my attraction to these half-formed creatures, the further they were from me. I would practice their mannerisms until I got it right, training myself to be the right kind of sad.
The distance between these murky half-characters and myself grew, strangely, when I used one of their names. I hadn’t meant to. I was in an unfamiliar place with nowhere better to be, arguing the merits of prose that I knew next to nothing about. The girl across the table said she hadn’t caught my name, and I blurted it out. She repeated it warmly, and I looked down so I wouldn’t be caught smiling. Smiling didn’t fit who I was trying to be. The person I was trying to be read anthologies on the beach curled up against the rocks and slept on the train back in the morning. The person I was trying to be wouldn’t have broken this solitude. I read her Maxim Jakubowski. The next night, she read me Jean Roberta.
I see shades of her in everyone I meet. More so, now that we have stopped speaking again. I am tempted to again melt into words on a screen. Perhaps, if it wanted to, the shadow could absorb me and I would not be gone. On nights like these, I build worlds in my head, more half-people whose lives I could slide in and out of more freely than my own. They begin and end in the mundane.
Look.
I returned to work in the middle of a crisis. I told everyone that I had been sick and was better. I took cuttings from other peoples’ plants and encouraged them to root in jars on my desk. They became friends shared between me and my colleague. I found them soil, but she raised them. Our tiny, dependent friends became representative of hope. I shifted from thinking of being raised harvesting and collecting, to thinking of being raised as part of a vibrant, ever-changing biome. I began to see my stress as my friends’ stress. Of course I was self absorbed. Pain is a signal to look inward, and mine didn’t recede as much as it had before. This was also, perhaps, another missed signal. I was missing a lot. Time would slip, and people weren’t where they were before. The sun came up, and the sun went down, and a different part of me was numb in between those times. The world does not care for your broken body. We barely know how to care for our own while they still work.
Searching outward can be an escape. It’s also a path to healing, as we’ve been told many times. I guess it depends on what you need healing from. Much of what has been called healing, in my life, has been some manifestation of grief. Grief doesn’t need fixing. It demands observation, drives reflection, highlights and numbs loss at the same time. It is seductive, even possible, to run from all that noise. The people in my life do it over and over again in different ways. If I am tempted to turn them into snippets of themselves for ease of consumption, they turn into tropes. The truth is an obfuscation; their actions support who I need them to be.
I knew my grandmother in a peripheral way. Her brothers and sisters each carried something about her within them, but the woman they passed on in story and gossip was wholly unavailable to me and to my cousins. We represented a pain so close to the surface that the decades could not bring the distance she needed. Despite this distance, I do have something in common with her. Neither of us can talk about our dead. It feels like a violation to still love someone who has changed so much in form that they cannot be reached. The reverse doesn’t feel true. We claim the pieces that we knew of the people that we loved. They become part of our stories.
I do not know how to claim the woman that taught me to pin my hair back to project the sense of an untouched landscape. “When you are young,” she said, “all they will see is your innocence.” We broke bread on Friday nights and split a parma as the sun rose on Saturday mornings. The same night across two years is losing its defined edges as more time creeps in between what was then and what is now. I am not just forgetting the edges of her. I am forgetting the things that I took from her – a laugh, a blink. I am forgetting the person I was with her. She once defined grieving as mourning the people we could have been with the person we have lost. This has made grief both containable and boundless, as it becomes definable only by you, to you. Her philosophy on mourning is the smallest part of her that I carry, and I will carry it on until it, too, loses definition.
The haze feels familiar. I hate it. It feels a bit too close to a hangover in a studio apartment. The smell of onions squeezes my burdened stomach, and my skin chips and peels onto the pillow. She listened to the type of radio where the host places descriptions of suburban life in between tracks that are largely instrumental. She’d tell me about my life, of the family I could choose. I called them sad and flawed. When she agreed, the boldness held me in place for seconds, and she stared me down with the same blank face she taught me to hold. You think you’re better than them. You still think love is something divine, above this humanity you’re trapped in. Her stare reminds me that divinity is as unknowable as the woman behind it.
I did not know how to mourn a woman that never knew me. They said she forgot things at the end. They said she had a hard life. They thought I should have been a part of it, as if either of us had a choice. I hated what she did to the people whose lives they said I should have been part of. Those people broke. Some of them broke all the way. I’m not better than them. I fell into the same hole they did, and pretend I’m not lucky to make it out.
My feet are sensitive to the dips and peaks in temperature beneath them. They flinch from a badly placed pebble. I stumble again and again. There is something funny about the action of catching myself falling forward or even sideways on such a flat path. Hearing myself laugh makes me think of old messageboard posts warning would-be denizens of shadowy corners to stay inside when they hear laughter in the dark. I am also told that to hear whistling after sundown is dangerous. I fill the empty streets with the sounds that shouldn’t be. Howling is so thin, by comparison. Your neighbours must hate me. I haven’t seen mine in years. They are eating dinner when I wake up, in bed by the time I am out of mine. Someone braver than me once asked, and they said that they hear me leaving but not coming back. I do not hear them. I hear only what I want to, hence the music that follows me everywhere. I cannot imagine having been born with a sense of sound as multidimensional as I know touch to be. When feeling becomes too complicated, too overwhelming, I slide my fingers over the cracked touchscreen. The vacant spaces inside me reach out for the pure, uncomplicated fullness of thought that comes with following a single voice rising from the bass and drums, and the heart-racing drop when a howl plunges into a moan, nearly cracking, and builds again. My body stutters. My chest tightens. I hit the inhaler.
The track in my ear becomes pleading, hopeful. I switch it off and slip the earpiece out. I don’t ever know where I’m going. I don’t need to. The paths will limit themselves where the roads take over. These roads are the pride and joy of three successive state governments. They stand for connection between places. These roads are a pointless allusion to a unified state. They stand for the commerce that is killing us. They are endless ways out. The person I wanted to be might have, but I cannot stand to take them.
I turn back again.