Ongoing | Flow.
The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself
–Boot Camp, Robert Olen Butler.
Her fingertips pinched with glue. She was home working, trailing glitter that she then shook loose, so stars seemed to tilt as I bent over her handheld lake.
She acted as if no one were there. Not to see her, hear her, not to say Sister I love you while her sobs dragged Sirius, then Castor off the lake. I watched her shrug. My twin that has learned to say Thank you.
Have you been AMAZED by something this weekend? Francis asked. The second half of his letter, a bulleted series of question marks. Or was last week when it happened? A moment, a facial expression, someone dancing by the sea, a voice in flight for you. Anything. He left all this space and at the bottom wrote These are personal. Maybe you can’t lose hold of them. But I would like to hear you divulge, help you explore. It’s your choice. Keep on writing, though. Please.
I’m so tired, that while I do want to talk about that day, it’s better I wait and watch the fog lean in, so close to kiss a window wide. And should that be hard on me, accepting that my mind often isn’t consistently lit, or am I too much a female, having to achieve a record of its hues when taking my hand we watch the sky?
Maybe I’m not the only one that’s all caught in the remembering. Not the only one that scribbles shit, head bent, passing on the opportunity to internalize my importance. In many ways I should be the lightest person in the room. Last night, I took two and half vicodin, wrote a six-word memoir, listened to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and while waiting to hear them select my story, finally finished a book, just to fall asleep proud. When I woke Rose was on my mind. Carole Maso’s mother and daughter. The Room Lit by Roses was a newborn, a change. Her first happy book. Her first memoir. She promised her mom.
The first word on page 158 is Mother.
This was meant to be a happy book. Then, The “I” dissolves.
She wrote about effort, how the baby reaches out onto open air—empty space. She wrote about how all the old feelings come streaming back. Maybe I’m not the only one. Carole wanted Roses to be a record. To know afterward who existed, how that person sounded before she, before everything, irrevocably changed. She, should be the lightest person in the room. She, a white rose. She and Rose, on the very verge.
My water breaks and I am heartbroken.
She wrote that. And I had a nightmare about Rose, how they felt.
