Let’s Try This Again

“People who have been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.”-Michael Cunningham — *“People who have been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.”*
-Michael Cunningham

When I read myself, I understand. I understand where so much of the self-hatred I harbor comes from, why there is the I that is me and the I that I live and why the two remain miles apart. There’s a girl who’s forever a girl, standing on the corner of an island, looking out, a mess of hair honoring her freedom with a wild dance, a neglect for beauty that is complete, true, willing…a sincere abandon that makes her all the more beautiful. Another girl who’s never really truly been a girl sits behind a desk, declares herself a serious writer, a serious artist, sees no one, bars all from her heart, never dares herself to assume there may be a place for her in the others she keeps far. She could be beautiful. She prefers, instead, to keep her body rigid, her hours silent, alone. Here, no can hurt her again. And in keeping herself far from the prospect of more hurt, she maintains an equal distance from the likelihood, however slim, of encountering all that she is badly in need of.

How could I begin to cross the miles between us? In my writing, I understand what makes those miles appear treacherous, impassable. It’s the lack of honesty, even in my private moments, which writing is, has always been, for me. It’s the chock hold of unyielding restrain, the eyes of my grandpa following through every trial of freedom, my grandma’s superior, scolding air answering every desperate act to get rid of her. It’s papa’s god in my ear, his palms pushing against my forehead, his mocking fires bordering every wild vision in my head, every effort to be bad. And I want, more than anything, to be bad.

A Quiet Sunday

It was raining this morning, which meant for the first Sunday in a long time, I wouldn’t be setting up my bookstall. Thank God for the rain, I needed this quiet moment to hush the choir of voices pulling my ear in opposite directions, and to bare myself just long enough to get a few words down. Just a little bit of writing, enough to remind me. Sometimes I forget. I don’t know what it is I’m forgetting, or what it is I’m remembering now by writing. It’s just this feeling. I can say I remember now, and if you were to ask what it is, I’d have no way of answering.

I always speak generally of Pain with a capital “P” and Loss, and Love, but I hardly every address them specifically. I never, for instance, wrote about losing my best friend back in February, when I needed him most. How he loved me, how seeing me was painful for him, how losing him was just as painful for me. I get this terrible urge, often, to reach out to him, to try, and I have, once, but he never answered. I miss those nights in his car, the soft snow falling over the streets of DC, the two of us sitting in the small, warm space, talking for hours. Since losing him, I’ve never felt truly comfortable around anybody else. But how can you express, with all honesty, with no reservations, no pretensions, your need for somebody who felt that that need was a selfish dismissal of his own feelings, his own pain. How can you beg for more time with someone who describes to you, in vivid detail, what time with you does to him?

God, Dad, & Writing

I can’t help feeling as if I’ve failed. There’s a song by Chris Stapleton called “The Devil Named Music.” There’s a verse in there that says, “Yeah I live my illusion that somebody needs me to play.” I too live this illusion that somebody needs me to make films, and, more specifically, somebody needs me to make this film about my dad. Of course, no one does. I wish I could just get rid of the guilt that has settled loudly in the place of the project I abandoned. There’s a nagging kid in me pulling at the loose hems of my mind, telling me to go back, to film him, finish it. Just one day. Maybe two, no more. But I can’t. I can’t see the man. I can’t stand him, I can’t stand remembering what he’s done. I can’t stand his crazy, his fluid, black voice that slushes around in the long drives to Front Royal and gets me all wet and angry. I can’t keep separate from him. When he is beside me, he is in me. There’s no other way. I’ve tried. The camera helps, it does, but either I’m too permeable and weak or he’s too crazy. He manages, always, to find his stubborn way through the glass lens and long tunnel separating the two of us. It’s like he leaks through the camera and enters me. With him, I can never be an observer. I am a participant in war, his war, his infinite war that goes on and on like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re too broken to stop their wars. To end them now would mean ending a part of themselves that has only ever known this war.

I’ve tried to stop praying too, though habit still tugs at me 5 times a day and sends a wild, raging current of guilt through me every time I let another call to prayer slip past me unanswered. It’s because I just can’t feel anything when I pray. I can’t help it. I’ve been forced to it and forced to it for years and years. I never had the chance to grow with it organically, to curiously explore it as an avenue to God’s ear. It’s homework. It’s always been homework to me. It’s a reminder of all the times I stood behind the hypocritical, slightly tilted figure of my father, when I’d sort through all the things I wanted to do, all the ways I hated him and all the things I’d rather be doing than standing behind a man who leads his prayers with dirty hands. How then do you turn a thing like that around? A way of praying that’s always been forced and tied to a man you hate, how do you claim it as your own? How do you separate it from the man who forced it on you? And is it really the only currency God accepts?

There is of course, writing, which is the only sincere prayer I’ve ever performed. And if I can find my way back to honesty, to self-abandon, to freedom, I could perform my prayers that way, can’t I? It’s an idea I can’t let go of now, that there is only one form of prayer that God counts and recognizes, is it true? What if you can’t, just simply can’t feel anything reciting the same words millions of others are reciting, how can I feel like I’m truly speaking to God when I’m saying the same thing everyone else is saying? Even the private prayers we make to him when we need something have been written out for us to read and memorize. But I need a private language with prayer, something messy, maybe half-English, half-Arabic, maybe a curse word here and there just to make sure I’m sounding sincere and not like the well-behaved, innocent girl I’m supposed to pretend to be. Doesn’t that mean more to him, an honest effort to speak with him rather than the memorized movements and passages that could be acted on and recited through without a single thought about God himself?

***

Sometimes, when too much time has passed and I haven’t written, orm when I’ve written in a hurry and it all sounds insincere and rigid, I panic and tell myself, again, that I’ve lost it, I’ll never write anything worthy or honest again in my life. But moments of silence, like the quiet hours I had this morning reassure me. It’s there, despite all distractions, all the slips of confidence and courage, the little girl with the battered pencil will never abandon me.

***