Losing Track
The truth would be so simple, it would look more like a lie because life is supposed to be complicated.
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Does it matter anymore?
One day, maybe while I’m still alive, maybe after, someone will come across this journal, skim through the weeks, read a few lines. If I’m lucky, my reader will think I was crazy, unstable, prone to self-pity and unreasonably long bouts of sadness. If I’m lucky, they’ll sense, as I did, that maybe with a little love, some kindness, a pair of arms to hold me, there could have been a chance, however slim, to be saved.
I feel as if I’ve been cast out, and there’s no way back in. I, willingly, left the world for love. I abandoned it all. I packed all my things, brought home a pair of love birds, a white cat, a man I loved more than anything in the world. I wrote, or tried to. I painted, or tried to. None of it was how I wanted it to be, the writing, the art, the love. I failed. What love I desperately needed I did not get. What love I desperately wanted to give I could not. And in the agony of yearning for what was not there and trying to summon what could not get out, I lost myself. I discovered a rage you cannot begin to understand, a rage so consuming, so destructive I was ready to drive a knife through my own hands, to split my head open against a wall. To need what is missing and to want to display and tell what you haven’t any language or form for—if you can understand this feeling, then you, like I, have lived through a kind of suffering that knows no boundary, no end, no respite.
And there, in this banishment (because all rage eventually pulls you to the margins of life), you live another hell. Now you know, you understand, but you are all alone, and there’s no one to start over with. You can see your errors with a sort of clarity that makes your days of blind rage seem beautiful, desirable even. You were in pain then and did not know why. Now you are in pain, and know. It’s the knowing that kills.
And what to do? How do you start over? Who gives you another chance? How do you re-enter what you left willingly, for years?
I left the real world for a fantasy that did not survive for as long as I needed it to. It was ruptured, every day, by the past. I needed to forget, to let go. I could not. The world had hurt me badly. My fantasy had failed me. And now, I have neither one. I live someplace that is neither imagined nor real. It’s a grey, miserable inlet in between.
![“[man] is the only animal stuck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”Michael Cunningham](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f261324785e5f07c60dabff/1603681675625-ELVPBAUJ4K4I1Z3O1D31/Screen+Shot+2020-10-06+at+2.43.35+PM.jpg)
“[man] is the only animal stuck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
Michael Cunningham
Past Tense
And if I still go on, still pound at the gates, it is only because I’ve heard misery being spoken of in past tense. To believe that one day I too will recall it as something that happened in the past, like a trip remembered from long ago, or a photograph I find by chance and put away without the slightest tremor to my mood — it’s a tempting idea to live for. Still, I wonder what will shift this agonizing present to the past. What God, what divine help would think me worthy of the miracle? Because that is exactly what it would take, a damn miracle.
I can’t help but look at the state of my life as a direct reflection of God’s temper with me. If all is going well, God is pleased with me. When all hell breaks loose, he’s furious. I can’t help it. I’ve gone as far as thinking once that God had sent me my period at a time I needed him most to keep me far away from him.
It was how we were taught. We were told then when it thunders, when the earth splits, when it shakes, when its trembles and kills, God is showing us he’s angry. The color of the sky, the shape of the wind, the earth’s stability, all of it is used to tell us what mood God is in. But is that fair? And is it true? And if it’s anger, have you ever seen lightening over a sea, or a thunder storm through the windows of a parked car? If all of it is anger, well, it’s the most beautiful display of it you’ll ever see.
But if we are taught to use the sky as a platform on which God displays his feelings, don’t we also end up doing it with our own lives too? When the winds of our lives are gentle, easy, then we are doing well. He is not angry with us. And then, tragedy comes, something falls out of place, that pleasant harmony falters and gives way to a loud and plunging mishap, and we rush to our prayer mats, press our foreheads harder against the ground, release a few tears, clench our fists in earnest, and mutter over and over god please, god stop it, god I’m sorry, just please, make it stop.
First the past was so awful that all I wanted was the days to come. Then they came. Then they came.
A woman asking for trouble
If you’re lucky, and you will be so long as you allow yourself the time to read, you will come across a written line somewhere in some book that seems to put together everything in your life —just like that — into one tidy sentence. If you read as much as I do, you’ve come across several of those sentences by now. And this, for me, is one of them:
“People who have been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.”
Michael Cunningham — A Home at the End of the World
It says everything that I wanted to explain to others, to myself. I didn't know it could be said like that. I didn’t even know it could be said at all.
And that sort of freedom the well cared for will never feel it. Unless you’ve felt your freedom in the hands of another man, unless you’ve known what it is like to stare out a window and say over and over, one day one day one day, you won’t even know you are free, and in not knowing, you can’t feel it either. And that’s the thing that makes it all bearable for me, that conscious feeling of something that others have and are entirely unaware of. And although I’ve taken every crumb of that freedom out of the hands of those who once held it against my will, I still feel as I haven’t reclaimed it yet. It’s the sadness that’s holding it now, and holding me, like sticky black ink, pulling me towards the same ground it rose from.
I am not free, not yet. I want to believe I will be someday. I insist on it. I can’t live without it. What I am running from still has me well within its grip, and I’ll stay within that grip for as long as I run. It must be the running that makes her extend her arm towards me and take me back in.
And amidst all this, I feel an embarrassing, consuming desire to be seen, to be noticed. And I guess I find it easiest to get it from men. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was a little girl. It’s a habit that racks me with guilt, and I can’t make it stop. I'm a girl with the brown boots sitting in a terminal, waiting on somebody, no, waiting for somebody to find me. I want to be found, and it doesn’t make any sense to me.
Probably one of life’s cruelest and most unfair and confusing cycle is that the individual that gets so little love and tenderness as a child grows up to become so difficult, so undesirable, so unloveable, that the prospect of receiving what they lacked so badly as a child becomes almost impossible to attain in their adulthood. So now, not only are they deprived, but they are unlikely to ever find a way to answer that deprivation. It’s the ones who have been loved that are easy to love. The ones who haven’t been loved act so strangely when love comes their way that they almost always bring about what they spent the better portion of that relationship so terrified of. If and when love finds them, they can never convince themselves that they may be —after all this time of wanting it and not having it —worthy of it. And you can never enjoy what you feel you are completely unworthy of, and what feels like someone else’s borrowed right.
Trouble hearing myself
I can’t hear my thoughts anymore, I mean the ones that matter. I hear that familiar, self-tormenting, cruel, masochistic voice, but the other, softer one. I can’t hear her anymore.
That voice used to be very loud once—the one I can no longer hear I mean. I can recall a time in my life when that Aiyah, the artist, the rebel, the anarchist, the writer, spoke so loudly in me it would cancel all the others, outside and in. But now, she’s nothing more than a murmur, a bird’s cry in the middle of a storm. Nothing you can hear, even if you tried, and man, do I try.
I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I am really feeling. And because I can’t know, I can only follow the same destructive habits that have led me to the very place that I am so desperate to get out of. My morning pages have become so repetitive, it’s the same mourning for what has been lost, the same long list of regrets, the same failures, the same impossible efforts to rise, the agony, always the agony, and then, a call for help. And if only for one hour every week, I receive an answer; I hear myself. When I speak with my therapist, who is a man with a capacity for kindness, for listening, for understanding that is unlike anything I’ve seen in any other person, I can hear her, rising in the comfort of someone who sees her, and who, in seeing her, takes her out of the rubble and the rubbish inside me and places her someplace safe and warm where she could speak freely.
I want to cry for her. I’ve been so violent with her. I’ve torn her apart. I’ve done to her what was done to me. I am sorry. I am so so sorry.
WINDOWS
I can’t seem to get enough of it. The more I travel, the more I see, the more I want to see. I spent so many years behind a window, and I swore that if I ever made it out, I would go everywhere, see everything I’ve missed all that time. And I feel like I am always tugged in two opposing directions. I want to stay on the road forever, speak to every stranger I cross paths with, do everything I was never allowed to do. Then, the other part of me, the part that knows life is too short and you only get so much time to do what it is you always meant to do, begs me to stay inside, to finish that poem, that painting, that script, that project. I don’t know if I will ever find a balance between the two. For now, it feels like I continue to be pulled into those opposing fields forever.