1. You and I
It is hard to begin to talk to you. We have grown so accustomed to our silence. We like the edge of civility, you and I. We like to walk along it, barefoot, trying not to wince or look down.
We have found ourselves in a precarious position. We are affable neighbors smiling dutifully over the fence. We have lived next door to one another for so long now, watching each other’s grass grow and exchanging polite niceties: the weather, the state of the roads, the cost of milk. But behind closed doors we nurture little hostilities. We don’t like being bound together. We resent forced company. We wish we could be intimate, not just co-inhabitants of this body. We wish we could come clean, stop being in love with our secret combat. You and I. You and I. Forever and ever and ever. Fighting over shared territory.
Sometimes, in better times, I think we are like lovers who fall asleep alone-together wishing someone would bridge the gap. You know those lovers? The ones who lie awake aching. They barely breathe as they lie there in the darkness wondering: will you be the one whose fingers stretch the millimeters that feel like a mile? Will you be the one to walk your fingers over the sheets, to reach out and touch me? I know the answer. I want to paint it in big bold letters in the sky. No. You won’t make a move. No. It won’t be you. You will always remain motionless. The distance between us is nothing. The distance between us is everything. Yes, it is hard to begin to talk to you.
The only place I can find, the only starting place for conversation, is negation. I can start by telling you what I cannot give to you. I cannot make you any promises. I cannot promise to tell you something you don’t already know. I cannot promise to be new. There may be nothing new under the sun. Besides, I don’t know what you know or what you want. We are truly, thoroughly and perfectly, disengaged.
Where does that leave us? We must converse. We must try or we will never get out of bed again. It is getting harder. Each day the white walls are easier to look at. Each day, in every slow hour that passes, the passing gets less painful and the nothingness gets more pleasant. We adapt. We don’t mind so much. We must try. Please get up. Please try with me. You refuse. You are silent. And the walls get easier and easier to look at.
I think I have a beginning. Listen to me. I will start our conversation by holding out my almost empty hands. They hold one little, glittering, shimmering thing. I call it honesty. It shines and slides around on my open palm, as I imagine mercury would do. But then I don’t know much about mercury. I don’t know how to give you what you need. I don’t know much at all. But here is a truth: when a hand holds out honesty it always shakes and quivers because you can never be sure whether it will stay or slip away. It is so shiny and uncertain.
I start our conversation with almost empty hands. I start our conversation with an uncertain gift for you.
2. Opening the Window.
Be quiet for a moment. Stop telling me life is nasty, brutish, short and cruel. When I read that thought, the one you love so dearly, I was resigned to be the kind of person that left the windows open. I lived on the ground floor. If it was hot and if I was leaving, I just left the windows open. I didn’t do it to spite you but rather because I thought: if we cannot trust one another what is left? If there is any truth to the idea that a thought can shape the world aren’t we obliged to think the best of ourselves? Aren’t we obligated to pull our windows wide? To hold our hands out open?
You are laughing again. Look at you, you say. Look at your romanticism! You are so funny. Falling up stairs, paddling up stream. You think our failings point at possibilities. You think we are better than they have written. Look at what you tell yourself in those moments of inevitable disappointment. Fool. You think that they won’t take from us, that they wouldn’t strip us down to our bare, bare bones if they could? They will take until there is nothing more to take. They will rape, pillage and destroy! Then, when you think they are done, when you think they are sated, they will take our bare, bare bones. They won’t bury them. Remember that story? She wanted to bury her brother. She didn’t want to leave him out there, out on the open soil, out in dishonor. You know it: they won’t give your bones back. Do you still believe we are capable of love? Then open your mouth. Do you still believe we are capable of forgiveness? Then ask them to open their hearts. Your belief is some sort of self-comforting, self-deception. This is your inner servility speaking. If only you could open your eyes: you are a fool bound up in intricate hand-woven dishonesties.
Are you done? Can you listen? You are wrong about one thing. I took down the lesson carefully: God is dead. It is Godlessly that I hope we are better than they have written. I don’t look up; I just keep my window open. Maybe I am a fool. I do not think of the world as essentially unrelenting. Please. I do not think there is nothing worth saying. Please. That everything has been said. Please. That there is nothing worth living for. Please can you listen? You know how hard it is for me to speak, even softly, even on paper, even like this.
Please stop speaking. These things that you whisper in my ear paint the most desolate desert landscape. The terrain is full of jagged, craggy thoughts. Each thought stands starkly against the horizon. You beat us with thoughts. You use them to immobilize us. You hide pieces of them in our pockets just to weigh us down. Look here. Look at this one. Between the flinted ledge in the crevice it says: there is nothing worth doing that will not be undone . Look here, look at this one. It looks heavy. Run your fingers over it. On the smoother side it says: the reasons run out quickly, it is best to stay in bed.
You are not original, you know. Throwing rocks, breaking windows, sitting snidely in glass houses. I may be foolish but I know that skimming stones has always been an easy way to pass the time.
3. Street Corners.
It has taken me nearly twenty years to sit down and talk with you. I begin: Dear you, please shut the fuck up. Dear me, please shut the fuck up. In all that time I never once called your bluff. I never once told you to stop speaking. I let you huff and puff and blow everything solid down. Are you happy now that we are homeless? Are you satisfied standing here? Ask that man for change. Say it. Say: Please sir, please change. Now ask that man for the time. What’s the time there, Mr. Wolf? Time to change, young lady, time to grow up.
But I am not a lady. And I am not so young.
Recently we stood on a street corner somewhere in California and I reminded you that you are not the first person to have stood on a street corner and to have felt absurd. I was right. You are not the first person to have thought that everyone is partaking in a ridiculous performance. To hear the silence, to note the orchestra has been muted. To see the feathers and sequences fall from their costumes, littering the sidewalk. To wish the actors had the decency to recognize that they are acting and that their monologues are monotonous and too long. That thought once belonged to someone else. In the corner of your costume the name has been scribbled out. I presume that, about as long as there have been street corners, there have been people just like you, standing on them, feeling absurd.
Eliot knew it. He knew how it felt to be sprawling on a pin, pinned against a wall, watching so many come and go. He knew how to watch when they carelessly stubbed out all the butt ends of their endless days. I could not fault you for standing there. I felt sorry for you. You were not even able to feel absurd because you were so self-conscious about the lack of originality in your absurdity. I felt for you. I felt for us. As we stood there, waiting for someone to drop the curtain. Roll credits please. It was somewhere on that street corner that I decided we needed to leave California. But where should we go? You wanted us to head to the desert. You had a little labeled bottle that you said would pay the fare there. You set about convincing me.
I had one last hopeful idea. I remembered that Nietzsche had written about the dangers of bad air. He said: climb mountains. Look for a place to breathe. Everything I own now fits into two suitcases. My darling, I didn’t climb the mountain I flew right over it. I took my suitcases with me. I took myself up into the clean, clear air. And for one moment when I was up, I looked down. I thought I would see an abyss. Instead I saw a patchwork quilt, woven out of blue rivers, depleted patches of trees and winding black roads running up and down, over and around the hills. There were cross-stitched driveways held in check by streetlights, neat rows of little houses and kidney shaped swimming pools. And as I looked down, I could breathe again.
I had no keys to anywhere in my pockets. I had no place to be. I was just up there and up there: there was so much air. I thought about the first time I met you, about the first time I fell in love with thinking. What has it done to me? I have taken a slew of old dead men to bed. I have read them and re-read them and there is no longer any room for me to think. I am someone who can quote. You asked me to think. You told me I could not will the thought: that the thought comes when it wills. It never came to me.
We have landed. Now I have found a place to sit down and to start a conversation with you. I have a few things I have been meaning to ask for such a long time. I have been very busy keeping busy. I want to ask – what broke you?
You sentenced us to death in the desert. You condemned us to lying beneath the rocks. You would have had us watch the red sun blaze while our skin bubbled and blistered. You tried to tell me I would like it, I would love being so warm, watching the tumbleweeds hurtle on by. Now you tell me to look at the white walls. To stay inside. This is where we have landed. You tell me that you are done with getting up.
4. Fighting Windmills.
I lay in bed with a man who I thought understood me. He knew how to undress things but not how to put things back together. Understanding is a strange thing, it comes in degrees. It comes without warning. It comes unexpectedly. Maybe this man didn’t understand me, didn’t know me, but rather knew madness. He said: they are windmills that you are fighting but you think that they are knights.
We slept beneath Hieronymus Bosch. We counted to ten in French. Above our heads fish flew, contorted sinners writhed and people fell in love in bubbles. Naked in the darkness, beneath the tripartite division of the world, I told him I was leaving. He told me he already knew. He lay my armor next to the bed. He kissed my forehead gently. He said: I will stand beside you. I will wait with the horses at the bottom of the hill. I knew that I would not see him again. I looked at the black horse, at the white horse, at the charioteer. All that was left was to be leaving. They say it begins in wonder and it becomes the love of wisdom. How does it end?
I set about my journey. I took my sword with me and headed for the road. I soon discovered the problem with fighting windmills is that you can never know your enemies. You can never size them up. You forget to remember that they are windmills. You can’t take that kind of reminder with you on your walk through the world. When you climb the hill, when you wipe the sweat from your brow, when they tower on the horizon, no matter how carefully you look you cannot catch glimpses of the wood. When you look up, their mighty rotating arms become armored; they raise their swords and come out swinging. Battle cries ring violently in the air. And it is only when the sun is at that perfect angle, (everything remember is geometry), that you can see beneath the armor, splinters of wood.
To see the wood, you have to want to let go of the illusion. Yet the sweat from the battle makes you feel alive. The sweat says you are not dead yet, you are salty, you are new. All the aches in your muscles remind you: I can still move . So you are in a bind. On the one hand, fighting keeps you on the field. When fighting the good fight you try. You stay upright. You stay on your toes. On the other hand, there is no good fight to be fought for you. There is no real enemy. You may be swinging, you may be swearing, but you are wearing yourself down.
Is this better than the alternative?
5. Glass Forest
I was trying to stop spending time with you. You and your incessant natter, your chitter-chatter, your pull-us-down-by-the-ankles-
We visited a forest inside a glass building. He built the stairs there. Together we looked at ecosystems behind glass. There were rivers and trees. There were stick insects that couldn’t be differentiated from branches. They were masters of disguise. I marveled at their clever little adaptive tricks. We should learn some of those. I asked him what it was that we were supposed to take away from this visit. He said: the lesson is there for the children. Between the lines, between the trees, they are supposed to see what we are destroying. That is why we put the world inside a glass building, so that we can name it, frame it, understand it. This is an endeavor to preserve.
I was filled with bitterness and with a sinking realization. There will be an ever-increasing amount of glass boxes. Label makers will be running on overtime. They will run out of tape. And someday, small hands and wide eyes will touch the glass. They will wonder: what is this? They will hover and breathe all over the display cases. This doesn’t exist anymore, we will say. We will have to explain that back in the old days there were spaces, wide-open spaces, places where secret birds told little worms not to get up so early. Open plains. Places where rivers met streams and made their way together to the sea. Where things scurried in warm soil and we didn’t know what to call them. Places we couldn’t see. Places without borders. Places beyond maps. Where creatures made of strange material cast unusual shadows and we didn’t know how to catch them.
The wide eyes will have to imagine those places. They will just be stories. They will be make-believe. I stood there, sorry. Sorry that I had not done more, that I could not do enough. Sorry that someone will have to tell the story of how beauty left the world. The moral is: it was our fault. It was my fault. I am sorry.
We went into the next room. I looked into the eyes of a taxidermy owl. I looked at all the animals, sitting on the ledges looking down at me: teeth barred, wings outstretched, tails and trunks raised. There were patches and pieces missing. Beneath the fins and furs and feathers there were scratches and bits of paint showing. Preserved, but imperfectly. Underneath their bodies lay Latin names. Their plastic eyes resented the naming. Kingdom. Genus. Species. You don’t know me, the pairs of plastic eyes said.
He told me that he wanted to build an arc. Two of every creature, made of wood. He could see it fitting together. He could see how to measure it. We imagined that there must have been a system. That there must have been some rules. Plants for everyone and nobody can eat anybody else. Tigers and lions and bears, oh my. Tigers and lions and bears. Everyone: get along, settle down, wait out the rain. Inside, all together, wait for the tide to go down, then we can all march out and begin again. He thought that there might be a niche market for Christian toys. I liked his mind. I liked the puppets in his closet. You said I should never see him again. Attachment, you said, is a dangerous thing. Getting in is easier than getting out. This is the tipping point. This is your warning call. Thank Archimedes for the lesson and say good night. Notice: he kisses softly, like he means it. The bath will overflow. You said: I had to say goodbye.
6. How Do You Say: I Can’t Love You Anymore?
There are too many wires that connect us. I am no explosives expert. I don’t know what happens if I cut the red one. I don’t know what happens if I cut the black one. This connection looks important. This wire looks to be keeping both our engines running. See how it curls around that spring and winds around those cogs. See how it forms the central connection between two beating machines. But what is this ticking thing? What is it, this pulsating metal thing? And there next to it, is that a detonation device? All right. I see. Well, let the numbers roll.
It’s just electricity. That’s what I tell myself. You have to think like a bird on a wire. As long as you are not touching the ground you’ll be ok. But I am earth bound. Essentially. I am no good at saying no. Saying it is over. Saying goodbye. You think that I am lying. You think that I am insincere. Just because I always have one hand on the door handle and one eye pointed up at the sky. You know Picasso painted whores and no one minds. If I look up, sometimes I can see blue period birds singing tuneless songs for me. They can’t help me make decisions. They wonder why I have to look for answers in other people’s eyes.
I tell them that yesterday I saw a sparrow made of metal lying on its back. It was small and it was noble. It had left this place behind. I understood why someone would want to take the time to commemorate the passing. We never notice. I want to notice. I want to notice the passing.
It is hard because I know you. You are a record player, a typewriter, a cassette tape. You are from an era when things were simpler. Or at least that is what nostalgia whispers in my ear in those moments just before sleep. I look at all the photos. I look just to pull the heartstrings again and to make them sing. Look at us, in front of the temple. We are relics from a different time. We were so young then. I believed it was enough. That was the time of “you and I.” A time of us. Of together against the odds. Of looking out in the same direction. Of dancing on each other’s feet in the kitchen. Of knowing glances across crowded rooms. Of yes, I know, I feel it too. I am happy. I am going home with you. I am happy.
You cannot go backwards, even if you would trade all the earth and all the oceans to do so. Time exists in this present only as a who-we-were and a where-we-have-been. I wonder: do you see the fragile strings? Do you ever pluck them, when you are alone, when it is quiet, just to see if they still sing?
There was safety in our agreement: I am yours and you are mine. Do you remember the day we held hands and drew neat lines in the sand? Is it true, do I miss the days of clear delineations? Do I miss being circumscribed? Trespass against those who trespass against themselves. We stayed safely within the circle. We stayed indoors. They call it commitment. I think we were afraid. Now there are no rules. There are just connections. Turn the machine on. Turn the machine off. Turn the machine on again.
I am not good at saying goodbye.
All things must pass.
George Harrison always reminds me of you.
7. DIG!
All I ever wanted you to do was wait for me. We grew up together. We should go down together. There are too many you’s and there are too many I’s in this story. Who are you? You are that little voice that sits inside me, sits beside me on the bus. I look out the window and the paddocks roll by effortlessly. We just keep moving. I count the gates and jump the fences with my imaginary line. With my fingers pressed against the dusty windows. Always sitting on the backseat. What should I write in the dust? You say: you have nothing to say.
You say: you will never be good enough. You say: give up. But the truth is, no one cares whether we get up anymore. We could just get off the bus here. We could lay down in that field, on the grass, in the sunshine and never go home. Can you feel the little blades in our back? Do you wish they were harder? Do you wish they pressed deeper? You’re a grown up now. Do you wish they pressed beneath those wing bones you want to keep hidden? I do. I do. I do. I wish they were sharper, that they would be swifter – that they would be just. I wish I could see the little swords shine in the sun and feel the white-hot heat as they enter our skin. I don’t want to flinch. Pull the wishbone. We are supposed to grow up.
The only way to shut you up today is to dig. Dig until our fingernails are black. Till we don’t know up from down. Dig right through the earth and keep on going. Hit the very center, hit the hot melting core and keep going. You can’t push me down if I will it first. I want to dig. Dig till my muscles ache and I don’t know whose daughter I am anymore. Whose lover I was. Whose sister. Employee. Whose dirty secret. Whose secret enemy. Till I forget how to be. She wanted to feel anything. She is talking to herself again but she wants to talk to anyone but herself. She is alone. She is stuck. Dig. Dig. Dig.
I am going to dig through the earth and come out on the other side. I will say hello to every worm and every creature in my dark little tunnel. I will make them make me feel at home in the rich and fetid underground. And I will come out so much the better for my dark earthly visit.
8. It Opens in the Light
It is closed in the early hours of the morning, petals curled and furled inside itself. It only opens with the light. It knows how to crouch, how to hide, when to grow. It knows the right way to endure darkness. When it opens, there on the big green leaves in the pond in the backyard, it is brilliant and yellow and white. I watch it while my father worries. There are not enough bees in the garden. Everything needs to be pollinated. The passion fruit will be all flowers and no fruit. I am a burden, this year. Even though it is summer. Even though I have not spoken. I can’t bring the bees. I can’t grow up.
I’m not scared of being alone today; I’m supposed to write about morality. I have a calendar full of crossed out days. It’s funny, the ways we try to pin time down. I want to throw out all the clocks. Hit them with mallets. Set them back. Save the daylight. When I wasn’t writing, what did I say to you instead? Did we talk about morality? What can I say about it now?
Well, sometimes my truths wrap themselves up in falsities because they long for the company. Sometimes I try to tell them it’s better off to be lonely and honest than to have false companionship. I try to catch those truths in butterfly nets and unravel them. I pull their wings off. I scold them for dressing up. For trying to impress other people with fancy colored clothes. I tell them to strip and speak barefoot, plain, and broken. That is the way we like to see the truth. I tell them it is worth it, to endure.
You can’t hide from yourself, I say. And no one else is concerned enough to take a second look. No one else is double-checking. That’s the source of justification. That is the wellspring of morality. It is inside. The internal observer. The judge, jury and executioner. The weighing of your heart doesn’t wait until the underworld. You don’t walk past rivers made of lapis lazuli, run your hands along walls covered in hieroglyphics, watch scarabs scurry on the sand. No, it is now. It is always here-now. It is one eye looking up at the sky, one eye looking down inside. Yes. That’s what you did. Yes. That’s your regret. It has your name on it. Pick it up and hold it close to your chest, it’s all yours.
9. I Spy The Moon
He misted up his glasses in the steam while he boiled water for my tea. Then he got out his telescope. He assembled brackets and tightened screws. He said he wanted to show me the moon. Up close. We went into the backyard. I stood on my tippy toes and looked into the eyepiece. There she was, full of holes and crevices. She didn’t seem so far away. I remembered her. I remembered late night walks down by the beach, sea breeze and salt. I was a child asking why the moon always followed me. My mother couldn’t explain it. It’s something about gravity. Her voice was tentative. It’s something about perspective. I looked up. No one had the answers. I turned the corner. She turned too. I stepped forward on the pavement. She smiled. She winked. She knew all about unanswerable questions. Everyone else went home. I was alone. Poets speak in darkness. Regard the moon …
He tries to explain astronomy to me. Every time he tries to explain things I need a new diagram. Please map the constellations for me in your suburban backyard. Please make it make sense to me. He has rough hands, hands that know how, but he can’t say how he feels. Sometimes he can’t speak to me. But his rough hands on my stockings make static sounds. Maybe he doesn’t feel. Or maybe he just doesn’t feel for me. Maybe I feel nothing too. I wouldn’t put it past my bloodless veins and arteries. They never have been able to carry what a heart needs. We look up in silence. We don’t say anything that might give us away. He can’t say: stay.
Words are tricky traps sometimes. No one wants to be a fool for words. No one wants to admit to being seduced by rhetoric. To having had an ego stroked by phrases tried and tested. To having put on well-worn compliments, tailored only by the tiniest of increments to fit neat and snug around one’s sense of self. You can forgive yourself for suspending belief in some circumstances. I never believe, just to be on the safe side.
There were no words when we looked at the moon.
I just stood on my tippy toes and tried to focus. Up. Look up and keep those morning thoughts at bay.
Maybe that night there was something left worth inventing. He asked if he could kiss me. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no. I felt the stones sinking inside me. It was like I had swallowed pieces of the moon. Secretly, I think I liked the thought that the pieces would be there, when it was all over, little bits of the moon, full of cracks, lodged inside me.
I knew it must be over. I knew I wouldn’t know how to leave. There is never any right way to say it.
10. The Last Thought.
I don’t want the last word. I will put this little reminder on my wall. I will remember not to forget. I will learn to shut you up.
The true voyagers are only those who leave.
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality,
And without knowing why they always say: “Let’s go!”
Let’s go. Let’s go and I will do my best not to listen to you when you speak in tongues. I will not respond to war cries. You can wound me all you want. You can give them my bones. I will do my best to love you.
I know I can find a way to carry you safely. Perhaps I can put you in a box and label it ‘hazardous material’. I can put air holes in the lid so the sunlight can get in. So the light can filter slowly. We can wait until the sunlight is at the right angle. Then I can climb with you, in your box, to the top of that mountain. The high air will help. We can watch the eagle circle on the current and narrow in on unassuming prey. We can throw ourselves away. We can fail and we can try.
I cannot make you any promises, but up there I can finally say what I wanted to say.
I am done fighting windmills.