Interlude

filling the first pages of a pocket notebook, pandora's box of peonies, stray desires, broken objects

May 25 — I bought a new notebook today. This is usually a good thing. I will begin with images and follow them toward the hurt. I will give you this: our hands holding either side of the vase, looking down at those short-lived peonies we'd arranged in pale pink and magenta, falling in all directions and so gigantic with blooming. Or the boulder in the park, seeming so out of place— as if it was a meteor that gently struck the earth— until a living, breathing human came to perch in its recess, altering the image of it somehow. She came and went; I watched the boulder change with the light, its dimples and pocks deepening with orange lamps as the evening came on. I stared straight ahead while we talked on the bench, unmoving, my own flat voice coming from somewhere far-off. But I felt more honest then. No posturing anymore, it is the blindness of the confession booth. I still do not understand myself, I cannot see all the way back or all the way down; I have betrayed myself. There is a part, perhaps there are multiple parts, turning angles and colliding wills. There is the manic, hubristic drunk— rebellious as a teenager, without forethought (Epimetheus), consequential thinking, impulse control. And further down, the death-driven self-saboteur, the fearful masochist who believes I am unworthy of what I have been given (a life, a body, love, all of it), meanwhile the inebriated hedonist daringly pushing me close to this precipice to see what it would be like to fall. Something else murky too, the opposite drive that never believes I am deserving but still, arbitrarily, wants to live. The only trace of it being that I have not starved myself to death or suicided by now, that at some point I located myself away from the precipice, with this willpower that prevents me from giving up wholly, something like stability for these past few months. They are all selfish. They have all betrayed one another. There is an awful, dissonant music of straying desires, pushing out from the center and away like stems in gravity or in growth or incompatible electrons. The betrayed willpower is a mirror of you, and here I empathize with you, I see myself reeling in pain, awe, confusion and distrust, away from whatever in me has done this. The other part, subdued now and turned away, imagines a life outside of this one— its freeing trajectory of chaos, madness, an image of youth that chases stray desires, with the right to life or death in their fullest and most feel-able forms. But the other is married and has all the rosebushes in the world. All of them, I suppose, are writing something worthwhile. I suppose they all are imaginary. I am possessed by these things splitting off into some aimless and invisible future. What I need to do is understand myself— find a tangible way to be better and in control. But I do not know how, or the way, what that looks like, what I want. I seem to know nothing and that is not enough to produce for other people. I am a projectionist and I don’t know what’s on the reel, or maybe the reel is empty, or I don’t have one at all. Perhaps other people are filmmakers. I want —, or to be happy, but I do not know what that looks like and I’m not convinced that it’s real. I don’t know how to delude myself or rather I am afraid of deluding myself. I try to be closer to the earth, so I push myself down, to the bottom which is also untouchable. I move through a space with random decisions. I am flighty and blind and restless. The fantasy is vision and certainty, a sureness that what I’m seeing is truth— touchable— real. The certainty that Didion had when she turned twenty-eight and knew to leave New York. There are certain things that have filled me with sudden, unnamable emotion: “Goodbye To All That” is one of them. Another is a Catherine Murphy painting of a bed, empty, with yellow creased sheets and disheveled pillows. Another is your face, all of the time. It is not enough to say that these things make me sad. Sometimes I feel so little, but unexpected pain sharpens images and words to a point— peeking out from so much bluntless, they suddenly draw the world tight and I know I live for these moments because they are write-able. They are livable in memory, markers of time/place/feeling. I am obsessed with tactility and its impossible— or near-impossible— relationship to language. Maybe one day I will make something of this. It is writing a poem on a red lightbulb to make that object felt. It is words in a handmade book. An object is a metaphor. I live for them as correlatives. When we die, it is objects and words that live on. They are not as decomposable as a human body because they are composure, made of a different composition, manufactured with gentle intent. They are the mechanism placed in our brief hands with a choice, whispered, of how to use them.