My dissatisfaction ever stemming from William - he the one bringing me close, delivering me to the point of almost identifying myself; this after the cataclysm, after the craving death and oblivion. When circumstances finally allowed me to turn inward, to pick up and examine me, the part made up of words. Labelling myself finally. Always afraid to do it in the past, fear born out of the many perceived inadequacies, shortcomings when measured against the visible accomplishments of others.
Yet when I began to write again, these utterances assumed guided by William - each sentence taking me further into myself - I took the first new steps. A writer? Yeah I could call myself this now, rather easily and even with some measure of pride. Thousands of pages created these past few years, never mind I still presumed most of them inadequate, writing, re-writing, and ever unsatisfied. Never mind I acknowledged too, mass creation these days was manufactured, a process adhering to a script - a proscribed formula. Mine ever haphazard, chaotic, dark; reflecting my interpretation of living. What mattered was the acceptance. What mattered was the act of writing, the knowing I was capableof putting words down - good words.
In the space of a month recently, two men uttered the same phrase:
"You were always good with words."
Recalling perhaps the bombardment, the bundles of pages offered up as compensation for lacking the ability to feel, to verbally or physically respond in real time. My offerings always an afterthought - always handed over on paper.
William boasting to my boys when we visited: "Your mother was always good with words!"
I never questioned why he volunteered this observation. The accompanying smile meant only for me, the message within not homage to my talent, rather a warning to take away. William afraid? Had he kept those pages in his memory, detecting in the remembering a persisting relevance? Had he perhaps in the recall admitted, "This is me, this hero, this wise man, this untiring battler? And she saw me and cared enough to tell me so, despite all the odds?"
When I returned from seeing him? God even the brief time spent in his city, the fire reignited unregulated, unopposed. I wrote like some fucking maniac, twenty-something again and he at the peak of his influence. The brief conversation and the too-long embrace sending my mind careening towards conception, seeking some concrete manifestation, desperate to create something new, re-create something old.
Amid this chaos of inception, I neglected to click the 'save' icon. Of course the computer crashed and on resumption revealed only the initial save. Most of my writing gone; the pages ending abruptly, as though words had never further occupied their white space beyond the current one.
"It's your fault," my son said, and launched into a lecture on prevention. Yelling, screaming, I shrieked, "Too late! What if I can never get them back? William needs them!"
"Then tell him!"
"I can't. You don't get it. He'll be expecting these words. On paper."
Yeah. On paper. He'd be expecting to read what the visit had meant, what the unspoken words passing back and forth between us had been translated into by my mind. This handing over repeated so often in the past, it was still assumed a natural consequence.
We tried for hours to recover my emotions. I paced, I cried, I did. Tried to explain to my son how laying down words was everything. Just crashing keys in heated patterns till the sentences built yet another monument. For that's what I had been doing see. Transported to a time and place where only he, I and the words existed, and I built, word after word, another testament, another timeless monument.
Twice now, all the best gone, once in a landfill, once in that foreign place where things deleted by accident live but cannot be retrieved from.
My son spoke of future hard drives, backing up and storing in the cloud.
I said, "You don't understand, too young damn it, too young to appreciate the loss!"
He wondering who this stranger was; pacing, mouthing obscenities at each failed try.
Sure I mourned. All that I am determined always by the muse of One and never to be seen again. Again?"
The ache continuing... Even this moment, I'd abandon everything, crawl to him if I had to - if he asked me... Aware all the while he never will. The mockery persisting: Giving me his mobile number, instantaneous access. I deleted the number after a few constrained sentences, brief exchanges promising vague future get-together instances. Suspecting this was maybe an impromptu defence. He didn't want to immerse himself in this untested version of me? He didn't want the intimations to begin again?
The giving over of his number confusing me, nonetheless. Myriad "why... why...why..." swirling and intruding into every alone moment. Why? I felt oddly misplaced. Once I'd have been dangling on the waiting - him to make contact. Now speculating how this feeling had evolved from needing to existing without feeding? Message in the smile received William?
Yet what of the thousands of words waiting to be printed and posted? These pages I visit with compulsion, adjusting here and there a few times weekly, only to return them to their original form - yet never printing out, something disallowing this final giving over. Within them my journey. Within them too, the letting go? A heartrending farewell ravaging me each time I scroll through the writing. So absolute I don't dare even print a copy for myself, fearing clutching the tangible, the holding in the hands of this goodbye.
Stunning words - even by my own strict standards - astounding phrases. Evidence of the writer, the label finally and justifiably attached. Only I hold off, day after day, the anger barging in: At him, at me, time passing. Where did it go, this great chunk of time? It's in the writing sure, I can follow the journey not unlike reading a stepping stone chronology. Precision in the language, each group of words describing another phase, another milestone arrived at. Yet there is no doing in any of it, only recounting, theorizing. Only retrospection arrived at through correlation to something currently capturing my attention. The loneliness and distemper ever glaring:
"The anger. It begins sometimes deep in the gut, rising, expanding till overgrown, bloated, it spills over the keyboard as I try vainly to contain it. Keys succumb to being struck and sentences collide creating vile, verbal messes. Like this one. Suck it up Princess. Or else go screw the nearest antidote and get life as they know it. Self-created, you let the demons take control and now you bitch about it? Surely."
The other one too, the one who had me exploring my sensuality. Reading about it afterwards, reliving my impressions: "Good stuff this..." At my brother's birthday I approached him, seeking some re-connection, a brief holding on to someone familiar in the midst of those I had no relevance to. He denied me. Despite knowing me intimately, instigating the journey into my physical self, he presented a removed, aloof exterior. Only the phrase "You were always good with words eh?" offered up as acknowledgement of a shared time, some merged history.
They are both afraid? What the hell? My two designated keepers both equally reluctant? Fuck, now I understood perfect aloneness. Without even the imagined crutch they provided. I always assumed of all the rest, these two would withstand... Until I faced them and saw how far I'd come - where I was now visible to them yet unattainable - untrusted this latest me, maybe unwarranted.
My sons also at odds - sure, they assume me sequestered in my room, typing, typing, oblivious to the world outside. Yet they never ask to read. They display no curiosity or perhaps they too fear the reading? What they will find there; knowing my propensity for gloom, my ever spouting melancholy.
Yet they witnessed, ever so briefly, this me who was, a glimpse into a self foreign to them. The being with William, the melting into William, the merging of two bodies-
They've never seen me attached to another. An attachment so tenacious, so drawn-out... How to tell them, the meaning within that embrace, this telling negating their father's importance, cancelling out any and all assumed love ever existing between us. The telling revealing they were not the products of love, rather unintended circumstances... To know they were not borne of love - much as I wasn't. To carry this knowledge forward, as I have? My mother, all over again?
Would they one day too say to their children: "Before your grandfather, your grandmother had loved someone else... Someone who perhaps had loved her too... Someone who had been kind to her..."