a record of one’s life
“But what I have, what’s broken is inside me. No one can see it. And in reality, no one wants to see it.”
What does a record of one’s life look like? And why, and for whom do we keep one? Is it for self-importance — this loud, insistent cry that it all matters, that it’s worth pausing the course of our lives until we’ve gathered it all in writing? And why do we do it? Why cut through beautiful moments with our cameras? Why interrupt our passage, our slow falling into the deep pools of a fleeting moment? Isn’t it our longing to hold on to this for longer, our little, private wars waged against the unconquerable tide of time? As if to say, fine, take this moment, let it pass, but I have this photo, this penned entry, and those, at least, are mine.
excerpts from a traveler’s journal
—fair warning, my mind is exhausting and reading this is mostly a very unpleasant and exhausting experience—
***
I was going to make a record of each day, but it’s so uneventful here and each day feels like an unsettling replica of the one before it. So far, I’ve only sorted through drafts and did a little art, read a book (The Jacaranda Tree), took walks under the fall trees. I’m just trying to gather it all together, to start over again…
The conditions are never right for writing. Either it is too loud, too hectic, or too quiet and lonesome. There’s always something I can blame, and I hate to think of it as ‘work.’ Poetry is feeling, but what I do instead is orchestrate these elaborate and overwhelming set ups that make me think of poetry as ‘work’…the other problem is not knowing which story to begin with. They are all a part of me, and there’s so so many parts.
And I wait until I feel like it. Of course, I never do. I feel tired, a little empty . I thought today I’d simply see what comes through me instead of leaning on past drafts. I want this to come out naturally. I want to do what I did last night, for the first time as I painted, which was to ask myself, what story am I trying to tell? Is it true? Has it been told?
When I can’t write, it feels like abandon, like being left on the doorstep of my aunt’s house, my uncle’s house, my grandma’s house with another three or four month’s worth of loneliness. It’s deeply painful, because it feels just like it did when Mama left, or when my grandma would go away to Syria. Someone or something is leaving me, again, and I can’t feel it any other way. I can’t change that feeling. And I worry that these stories will stay stuck inside of me forever, like a tumor that’s grown somewhere sensitive in the mind and taking it out would be riskier and more dangerous than leaving it where it is. Maybe my story needs to stay inside. Maybe I shouldn’t try…
I can only spend so much time with my poetry. I feel creatively dry. I’m not getting any ideas anymore. I look at my past work and I get scared because I think to myself, I can’t possibly come up with something like that again…
A little more than a week has passed. I have to keep a close eye on where my energy goes, and so much of it goes. I feel calm this morning, although last night was awful, speaking with Muhannad. I cried and believed what he said, that I’d turned him into a monster. Sometimes, the feeling is so intense, so overbearing I feel as if I am going to die. But most times, I am numb and feel nothing…
All my life, whenever I have felt incompetent or insignificant, my solution has been to add more, more projects, more drafts, more art. The obsessive work tires me and numbs me and does exactly when I mean for it to do. But I am trying, this time, to empty my life, and I get upset with myself when I find it getting messy again…
I don’t want to obsessively correct my life. I also don’t want to set the boat adrift without direction. I want both, a little bit of steerless drifting, some intentional guidance…
How am I supposed to fix something that stays hidden?
The dream I had right before waking up this morning was beautiful. I was on a ferry. It was evening and the sun was setting and the mountains were dark silhouettes against the half-evening sky. Then, it got darker, and the large ferry began to slow as it approached the island. I think we were arriving at Lesbos. And it looked more beautiful than I remember, it’s mountains were larger, the city lights were lit. We were moving past a deep cliff. There was a small town built precariously along it’s sharp edge…
Sometimes, everything appears so insignificant to me. All my urgent plans are nothing and I forget where I was trying to go and why it had felt so urgent. The urgency comes but it comes in waves…
I guess it’s my fault, I don’t try hard enough to cross over my silence and get to know others truly. But I do try, sometimes, except I hold time like it’s a full cup of water and I don’t want to spill any of it. And talking to others feels like a lot of spilling. I don’t know why…
I want to wake up thinking about my poetry and film, and sleep to it too. What gets in the way? What could possibly appear to be more important? How can I think so little of something that matters so much?
I guess it was the enormity of what I had learned about myself yesterday. It exhausted me. I haven’t slept this way since I first traveled weeks ago. It was very painful to sit with what I saw yesterday, that’s why today I want to work on a poem I should have worked on a long time ago — about a monster in me that keeps me from everything and everyone, a monster that has held me from the love I’d been so close to I could almost touch. I need to speak to her, to fight her, and, ultimately, lastly, forgive her and love her back to recovery. The monster child yelling for help in the red minivan…
I’m sitting in this cage, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like an artist’s home, an artist with many tastes, indecisive, putting it all, the colors, the shapes and textures. Every crevice carries its own life, and it’s all so thrilling to lose myself in. Every time I come I stop by the lake outside and when I go in, I never sit in the same place twice. I feel as if I am stepping into a book each time I come here…
On my walk here, through that blanket of wet air, I realized something for the first time. I realized I’d never spent this much time with my poetry, which is to say, I’ve never spent this much time with myself.
But it’s only through these long, uninterrupted sessions with myself that I can gather my poetry, receive that truth, and what I want more than anything is to reach my true self, the buried, shackled essence and through her, find the freedom I yearn for, an interior freedom that completes the exterior one I’ve been holding like the last piece of bread. My freedom has always felt untrue, unfinished, like there was one foot loose and free and the other bound to a soft and sinking patch of earth. That’s why my freedom never felt real, always elusive and slipping out of my grasp, always something I had to hurry and experience before I lost it. It wasn’t anchored to anything inside me. What was inside contradicted what was outside. It makes sense now, why none of it ever felt true or lasting. This long, sleepless nights with all those silent monologues in my mind brought to me a sort of clarity I never would have imagined…
All encounters with the real world disturb me. They push me towards a severance I am not willing or ready to make…
I have gathered all my poetry into a white notebook. To have it all in one place means possibility, not an imagined one, but a real one. Keeping it all together means promise, means keeping that promise out of the far, intangible, impermeable realm of dreams, dreams that are true and beautiful so long as they don’t linger there for too long. Like the bird of time in Einstein’s Dreams, their song begins to die out and all the beauty they harbor begins to leak into the harsh weather of unused time, time lost, time gone with you standing in the shallow end of the sea, not daring, when you should have dared…
There is no possibility of failure in the world of dreams. Dreams stay like a rose afloat in a bell jar, and either you can keep it there, untouched, untried, protected from the rough and child-like hands of time, or you can remove it and experience a rose the way it’s meant to be experienced, romantically… tragically, because there is only so much time before it leans into a slow arch, before it bows to its end, having lived, having been held, having reached the limit of its beauty, having done what a rose was meant to do, and then die, with a sense of fairness, without a fight in its body. It’s how we go too, how we meet our ends, but only if we’ve lived the life of a rose, outside of its bell jar…
Sometimes, I pass through brief, fleeting moments where I get a glimpse of who I am, who lives beneath this thick blanket of sadness, all those hours of self-torture. And I love her, and maybe I love her because she never stays for as long as I want her to…
On Sunday, March 31, 2021, I spent the day cleaning the trailer I wanted to use for filming in Front Royal. The work was exhausting. The trailer had gone neglected for years. I can remember every minute of that day, every insignificant moment because after that day, everything changed. Everything. And ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened, how it all unravelled…
