a letter to myself
I’ll tell you why you’re sad. Sometimes the reasons are clearer than day. Sometimes, it alludes me, and in the place of all those reasons is a vague but powerful feeling of rage that is anchored to nothing, as if these feelings are orphans who don’t know where they came from. I want to scream and break things, but I’m too conscious of these paper thin walls, and the judgements of the stranger living next to me. I don’t go off to far away places to release it either. I’m embarrassed to witness that kind of anger. Even on my own. Two things scare me. One is I don’t know how much anger is really in there. If I open it, what if what comes out is a lot more than I thought had been in there. Not that it matters anymore. I feel it pouring out on its own everyday now, as if it got sick of waiting on me to do it in some healthy way. I can feel it in the middle of my chest throughout the day. One slam against the thick bone and a rough wave of tears shoved against my eye. And when it comes, when all of it comes, can I go back and look at the faces that caused it all without wanting to hurt them?
No. I wouldn’t be able to go back at all.
And the reasons for my sadness, for this anger is that I want to be her, that woman I carry in my mind, the one I write about all the time, the one I remember being briefly. I watch her. When she walks, I walk in parallel. Where she runs fearlessly, I follow with fear. Where she commands, I answer, in whisper. In her certainty is a mirror for my own uncertainness, my confusions, my doubts, my regrets. Every happy woman I know is her; they are the image of the woman they carry, not something they’ve tapped onto their mirrors, camouflaged into the features of another woman they are drawn to but can’t tell you exactly why. On my wall are images of women, twins of the woman I carry. I know few things about her, not much. I know she doesn’t want to be here, that part of finding her is finding where she wants to be, who she wants to be with, what she loves, how she loves what she loves.
She loves art. She hates the way I do it. She loves poetry. She can’t stand the way I write. She loves people. She screams at the way I perform in front of them…
And everyday, I say, tomorrow, you will change. It’ll all be different. Next month. Next year. With this man. Away from this man. In this city. Away from this city...
I try. I’ve been writing these letters to God in my journal. Trying to speak with him. Sometimes, I can feel him listening. Most times, I feel nothing at all. Last night, I was sitting in bed, writing a list of questions. What makes me sad? What makes me so scared? What gives me life? What takes it away? Then I began: God, if you see me writing tonight, I think of you. All the time. I am writing to you because I don’t know how to pray anymore. I never learned how to speak to you sincerely…I can’t speak to myself truthfully. I can’t make honest art. I want you to help me learn how. I’m asking you to help me leave, to find my way to the sea…I’ve sinned. But was it sin? When a woman feels such a burning need for touch…to be held. I didn’t mean to do more. I don’t mean for my search for happiness to make you mad. And being touched makes me feel safe. I have no love. There’s no family. Just a void. If not from a man, then from where? …
I think my happiness is with men and I go to them. And when I am stuck with them, I think my happiness is elsewhere and I leave. And everytime I leave, I’m embarrassed to find out that my unhappiness had nothing to do with them. When I lived in Florida, with him, I kept thinking, just as I do every hour here in Virginia, if I can just leave him! If I can leave this rascist Trump-loving city, if I can just get away from the image of him sleeping on the couch, exhausted, the boy in him gone and forever gone…. Then I leave, and the memory of him follows me everywhere and I say, I’ll be happy when the memory of him fades away. And it fades, and I think, I’ll be happy when someone else comes along to fill the void he left behind. And someone does, and I want it emptied. I want my time to be mine again and my space to be mine and my plans to be mine, un-roped to someone else’s life, their plans, their leaving… always, their leaving.
Sometimes, I get tired of asking where I should go. I just want to know. I want to be there.
The desire for more exhausts me. I begin everything. I quite everything. I’m never been good enough. Maybe I’ve never stuck with something long enough to find out.
I’ve been thinking of the woman I watched dying in Beirut. That closeness to death, rather than rushing me, has slowed me down to a point of nearly nothing. It led me to the red sands in Sinai, where I’d lay for hours and hours, my hands in the sand, lifting and falling, the sea still and watchful before me. It led me back here where there was nothing for me, to a city I’d already regretted coming to the year before. It sends me off to quiet places by the river, just to sit alone, to think, to plan an escape. What’s life without the running? What would it be like to unpack for the last time, to hold something steady and warm in my hands and be good with it. To open my door and think, here’s fine. Here’s perfect. To measure the hours, the days, the months not by when I’ve come and when I’ll leave, but by how much I’ve built and what I’ve grown in my being here. I want all of me to be someplace. I want my thoughts, my art, the love I want, the future, my dreams, my drafts, my happiness to be all in one place. The past can settle down someplace else. That’d be fine by me.
Until then, all I can do is plan for another escape, one I hope is permanent this time. But I’ve never been much of a planner. I know someday at the end of summer, I’ll just get into my camper one morning and start driving west, the same way I started driving north two summers ago. It’s just another migration for me. I am lucky to have no goodbyes that will be hard for me, not much to miss, nothing to feel sorry for leaving. There are few I’ve loved deeply while living here, but they’ve kept me far, and I’ve loved them quietly, powerfully, then, more calmer and safely, for me. Sometimes the feeling of being out there on the road gets so strong I can leave tomorrow. And when I do, what happens then? What will it be like to drive out of Virginia for the very last time?
