Okay, okay, I practice out loud on the way home, making the wrong turns within a half-mile radius of my apartment. I’m lost in my own distraction and the slightest transformation of streets: it is night and snow-showering. The particles alight mid-air, more ephemeral than rain, coiling up by the street lights, streaming out toward me, dissolving on my hot face— teardrop, teardrop— almost. I want my okays to sound more self-assured and intimidating, so I’m trying to iron out my natural tremble. I’m rehearsing this for the next time I need to sound brave in my submission.
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It almost comes after sex in the middle of the afternoon, on top, with sun through the shutters patterning my hair, my lip, my right ear. Just one tear. Irresolute in the crease of my face.
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So far I’ve written many, many scenes about crying. When I rifle through my spotty little memory, I find in these scenes the bleary demarcations of sentiment, lines tracing towards something important or transformative. Not so much to do with desire, but more to do with weakness. I used to think I could locate certain instances in my life where some presupposition in me gave out so that I would never be the same: I thought that losing my composure signaled recomposition, a sort of rewiring. In those moments I believed that crying so much, so hard, so concentratedly, that I would expel everything I had within me and emerge new and blank.
Yet I almost never cry now. I think that my avoidance or inability to do so correlates with the efficiency-maximizing habits of living in this city. To cry is to consume valuable time, and perhaps the same goes for thinking and feeling much at all.
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Ol’ Hem at the end of A Moveable Feast:
this book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart—even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.
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But I used to have a meltdown every time you almost left. So many times I’d thought one scene or another would be the last, but inevitably some disaster or inconvenience would sweep in so that you couldn’t leave quite yet: your van would literally break down on the side of the road on your way out of my hometown and I’d have to quickly compose myself to come pick you up. Just in the way that as soon as I came anywhere close to forgetting you, I’d receive an email or a Facebook message—some signal from the elsewhere-dark. Almost three years went on this way. This was our rhythm. I was a doting hostage: I both craved and feared finality, but most of all I liked how things always felt entirely out of my hands.
Eventually, as you know, I would become resolute in my own departure.
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