Until There's Only Me

Why do I struggle so much to start one of these? I wish I could charge with the crime a lack of time or caffeine, but it's neither of those today. I'm here, slumped inwardly on this couch. My lower back aches and I'm one bite short of a hangnail on my right pinky finger. An Indian man is making a phone call. There's a sad Ravenea at twelve o'clock that's passed on from green, each arm fanning out wide and finishing the color of toast. I study the interiors of the space that I'm in and wonder how I've become so intolerant to milk in my older age. My older age. I'm almost twenty-four.

People that I know well and don't know from Adam think that writing is the thing that just comes naturally for me, and easily. School was easy. The grades and the studying, both instinctive and cooperatively dependent on the others' being there. Professors in university esteemed me for my proper use of a comma and found it special that I could distinguish in papers between an en dash and an em dash (two seemingly similar lines in punctuation whose lengths are commonly mistaken with the hyphen). The elements of writing oozed out of my too-big pores and, to this day, walk before me lying to the masses that I know what I'm doing, but writing. Writing is not easy. Like my husband who sees a head of hair and, in a moment, shapes it away until it's beautiful - time and time again and without a hitch - it's perceived to be so as I put pen to paper. If only they could see.

My favorite misconception about the writer is that she begins at dawn, having stretched already and let the greyhound out. She sends her husband off well and chooses the same recliner in the corner of the sunroom, laying beside it a two-week-old bouquet of wheat and roses. There's a coffee fogging her glasses and a bowl of fruit that the neighbor's garden grew. The day wakes up and bows to her. She speaks silently of an autumn in Vermont and the house that shone from the lamppost.

It's a self-deprecating sort of scene that one, not by itself but compared to its truer counterpart. One that involves fewer showers and a colder version of the coffee, a hungry husband, a hot October, and a person who tries to write but instead bows to everything else on God's green earth. Each day that I go to write, I'm tasked (laboriously) with this practice of sitting, marinating in my own thoughts, ones that wield an obscene amount of power if I don't carefully and often let them breathe. Eventually, I will. But right now I'm fidgety. Anxious. Entirely aware of a world that I ought not tap into just yet.

So - I'll walk my dog a lap around the complex and start a load of darks and check our bank statement and flip through the stories online, mostly of babies and meals and other lives being lived. I'll pace in my PJ's and become undeniably irked when he walks in the door after a long, hard day at work because another one has passed and I'll have nothing to show for it besides an erasable few sentences.

I like being alone very much, but it's a lonely job, I'll say. I catch myself making faces at my animal and checking the time and resisting the irresistible itch to radio in my actual self that's breathing and alive and trying to communicate offshore. Perhaps we all behave this way, making distraction our very meaning. Babbling about, taking bathroom breaks until our contentment is jostled enough to, at last, react to it.

Ryan and I went to the Angelika theater last week, a spot that we frequent. It's a theater devoted to low-budget, independent, and specialty films typically veering the opposite way of a Hollywood feature. Historically, the endings of these movies aren't tidy and neat. The dialogue is awkward and the pauses too long, but ultimately these DIY, puppet show films display humanity in a way that just comes right out and says it. I was remembering to him how much I enjoy the irony in this type of film. Cinema serves as an escape for most, if even an hour or two. It's art but it's recreation and it's usually quite good at letting an audience forget. But not here, I said to him. These movies always seem to charm me inside, seduce me to bed, and put me plumb in the way of myself, offering me intimately what I hadn't known I'd set out to find.

I know why I struggle so much to start one of these. It's an intrinsic desire of mine, and a childhood motivation, to identify myself over and over again, for however long it takes. As Didion says, "to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." It's not scary to me to flaunt whatever terrible thing that I am as long as it's known to me, as long as it means peeling back the truth of my experience. When I am not well, I bow to the world and succumb to every mood and fear and whim, becoming unintelligible to a self that craves its own understanding. It's intimidating to delve straight into the thing (i.e. rest, relationship, God, the past) that will find you out and play you as a fool for the rest of your life. There's a reason we distract ourselves from these, because it's simpler to.

Dani Shapiro says that writing makes her well, and me too. She says that a world submerged slowly reveals itself and that we can stick our fingers in our ears and hum a merry little tune, but that what we ignore, we ignore at our own peril. She's found that "the moment you feel you want to jump up from your cushion and make sure the stove is turned off, or write something down you're sure you'll otherwise forget, or even open one eye to see how many minutes are left to go - that is precisely the moment to stay the course. To allow yourself to be pierced by whatever it is that's just beneath that impulse. What longing? What uncomfortable thought? What sorrow? What desire? The only way we can know is to be still enough to find out...beneath the translucent ice, more is thawing."

More is thawing, and whatever's submerged is likely different and better than the one you sought out to find. The urge to push back and turn away and be satisfied doesn't have concern for you and certainly not for the truth, so withstand it and stay the course. Shame and bitterness and lust and pick your Achilles heel - they lose when you decide to come right out and say it. Everything you need to know and everything that matters is contained in your willingness to go there, and do all that you can to put yourself in the way of it. I'm wondering what have we got to lose.