Fall back

Fall back. Spring forward. These phrases encapsulate the memory of how to move the clock for daylight savings time. It's on, and then it's off. You move the hands back or you move them forward (assuming you still have a clock with hands--what a relic). We manipulate time and we end up with a barely perceptible jet lag effect.

The lag between us is mismeasured, though, because from here to there we don't quite match up on hours. Your body shook involuntarily from jet lag, exhaustion, and I don't know what else as we sat on that nondescript couch tightening the tension of a ten-year span. I couldn't reach across the missing time to smooth stillness into your limbs with the pressure of mine. (That intimacy spoke of a different kind of falling, of a possibility we wouldn't let cross our lips, let alone cross the Atlantic.)

Fall back, you wrote: "fall back in love with your life."

Read more »

our own private cinema

Some days I don't feel like I can write. It's all glued up.

Baudelaire wrote "dormir, dormir, dormir plutot que vivre", but I am no poet. This line used to offer me some consolation. I want to sleep in order to dream. Sleep in order to screen the memories I don't have of you, the stories I've never been told. A movie screen flickers above my head, but I'm awake. I must invent what I don't have; it's not easy. It's a fool's chore.

I'm dreaming of the time you didn't tell me about some incidental childhood detail that somehow manages to encapsulate a whole sliver of your present way of being.

A long train ride is needed for 40 years of telling, especially since some moments in my life seem to last years in themselves. Other memories have disappeared, unaccounted for in narrative. You stop talking, squeeze my hand and turn to look out the window when that kind of lost memory flits by, loose in the wind or stuck to a post. You can watch it go by and I can witness your watching. That would be enough.

But how would I know? I'm just a fool wakefully dreaming in writing, trying to crank out a screen play of memories left untold. All of it is impotent and hollow. You have more sad memories than if you'd lived a thousand years. I'm suffering from reminiscences. The only real thing between us is literature. I can't invent our private cinema on my own. Foolish dreamer, you can't write in the place of the other.

Rilke does it better

Oh, Rilke, what haven't you been to me?

Lovers.
Awakening desire,
make a place where pain can enter.
That's how we grow.
Along with their laughter,
lovers bring suffering
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger's arms.

From The Book of Hours II, 10

"live better stories"

It's happening again: that awful feeling of nausea. I haven't been on this end of the equation in quite some time. It's just as terrible as I remember to hurt someone who wants to love you by no longer returning that love, or at least not the in way it ought to be returned. Even if it was never a fireworks display, that love was alive and had its own kind of vibrancy. Will I extinguish it?

What is bearable? What is a story that can be lived and borne in this context? What kind of endings do the stories being written and unwritten across my heart hold? "I don't know" satisfies no one, and perhaps isn't even true.

"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay."

Read more »

living, loving (she's just a reader)

If you would let me write to you I would say such things that you would recognize as your own, once removed; re-find them through me across an ocean of discourse that pulses like the remnants of a Led Zeppelin tune still buzzing lightly through your veins an hour after you've quit jogging and resumed regular life. They'd be your own, and also our own, because we're readers in common, of a certain sort, although not entirely (you are your own unique thing, after all, and something that I want to come to know).

That night in your hotel room:

"Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre [toi]. C'est comme si j'avais des mots en guise de doigts, ou des doigts au bouts de mes mots. Mon langage tremble de desir. L'emoi vient d'un double contact : d'une part, toute une activitie de discours vient relever discretement, indirectement, un signifie unique, qui est 'je te desire', et le libere, l'alimente, le ramifie, le fait exploser[.]"

Read more »

10 years' time

I've been thinking about the things that happen in 10 years' time: degrees received, births rejoiced, deaths mourned or denied, a slew of bad movies, a nearly infinite multiplication of the real housewives franchise, tenures awarded and denied, books published and celebrated (or overlooked), weight gained and lost, and lots of cats.

In 10 years' time, in this temporality that is now both its wholeness and a loose set of blobs and fragments, in that time (but what is that time?) I see us. Now (when?) you are sitting on a bench with a memory of me spread between your hands, like a book lying in your upturned palms. Your head is bent but your gaze is not downcast.

You are weaving so many threads that you will carefully undo every night, a penelope who weaves without waiting (because there is no awaiting the future that couldn't arrive). Your firm step guides you home in another direction.

Read more »