I’ve been talking in my sleep
My grandmother asked me who I was speaking with on the phone last night at 3 am. I said I wasn’t speaking to anybody. She said, “But I heard you talking.” I asked her what I was saying. She said she didn’t know. A week later, she asked me again, who I’d been talking with. I said nobody, and I asked again what I’d been saying. She said she couldn’t tell, so I asked her if she could listen to what it is I’m saying the next time she hears me talking in my sleep. She thought that was the stupidest idea, walking up all that way in the middle of the night just to listen. But part of me was desperate to know. I felt like she, the girl talking in her sleep, was the real Aiyah, the real poet. I wanted to hear what she was trying to say in her sleep. I felt like it could be something important, something I wasn't allowing her to say in her waking hours. I wanted to hear her without the checkpoints guarding her lips, without the fear of somebody listening.
But of course, it could, after all, be something completely insignificant— just the body passing time with itself, talking about nothing at all.
I don’t know how else to say this./ Which is the greater sorrow, to feel/ you can’t live without him or to find,/ after all, that you can?
“Campo Santo” by Susan Wood
***
“When we open ourselves
you yourself to me and I myself to you,
when we submerge
you into me and I into you
when we vanish
into me you and into you I
Then
am I me
and you are you.”
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
***
“Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily..”
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
Portraits of a Lover I’ve Lost
He was there and not in the tangle of body and sleep and tragedy. I was prepared to lose him, all of him. How could I have known that you can mourn the loss of one still breathing and eating and speaking before you? It was him and not. The same scared back, the curled lashes, that face, so beautiful, and the hands, those precious hands that had, after all, two definitions, one of tenderness, one of horror, one I knew well, one I got to know later. I had to grieve the loss of what was, according to everyone else, still very much there, very much alive and thriving. Departure was not a choice I could either answer to or not. It was forced on me. He was gone. But in those last months together when he’d fall asleep each evening on the couch, worn from that awful work he gave himself to the way he used to give himself to me, I’d watch him, take photographs of him, sometimes even lie beside him, because in his sleep, if only there, he was still the boy I’d fallen in love with. I could have him as I wanted him, but for no other time except then.
