letters you won’t read

i remember the way you, disillusioned by our love, by how hard it was to stay with me when i was sensitive in ways that you had never encountered, and when my sadness was deeper than you could perceive, turned to hobbies, turned to lying, turned to anything outside of us that gave you brightness and levity. you used to tell me there was nothing light about me, that everything in the home we’d made together was heavy, that my inability to let you be who you were--which now i know you thought meant doing whatever you wanted to do with no consequences--was strangling you, that there was no room left over in your heart. i wonder what it was so full of that there was no room left. 

i’m walking along the river in the mornings, as the sun comes up and elongates my shadow, remembering your lithe long body, the way that your face blanked over when something you’d said or done was funny to me, the way almost everything about you seemed like it was on accident, the way i only saw you purposeful and determined was when you were lying to me, was when you were blaming me--how crafted and thoughtful were you then, as you laid out what you’d done on the table before us and assigned me responsibility to each, and how loud the static was in my mind then, and how heavy i was with grief, and guilt, and how heavy i still am, and how compressed i have let that grief become, so that it blooms sometimes inside me without my knowing, and i find myself dragging through blameless days... 

i think of you today as i crush the trail beneath me, and i think of your habit of reaching, and i know that you have loved others after you loved me, that you have looked to others to balm you, to smooth over the radiation of your own heartbreak, of the pain you’ve carried inside you since childhood, of the secrets you never did tell me because you were afraid, you’d said, that i’d break up with you if i knew, and when i met your family i thought maybe it was that you were poor, or that your father was in a wheelchair, or that your younger sister had a baby, but now that i have some distance from you i realize you’re holding onto a trauma bigger than i had ever perceived when we were together, and that everything in your philosophy, everything in your holding back, in your unwillingness to share your feelings as they happen but rather to let them percolate to the point of explosion--you hit the side of your head so hard with your fist, so mad at me, that there was a popping noise, and as i sat there scared, you said you thought i’d have been scared if you’d hit something else--all of this was not for the sake of other people, it was not to spare my feelings. you did it all to protect yourself, you’re doing it now to save yourself from the depth of the pain inside of you.

and i know. sometimes we are not ready for what is inside of us, to face our  traumas, to experience our own pain. sometimes what’s inside us can break us. i find myself thinking of you not with hatred or resentment, which i have had for you before, as i have thought in disbelief of the extent of your denial, your inability to apologize, to take responsibility for the pain you’ve caused me--i find myself thinking of you with compassion for the first time since we’ve broken up, and i find myself free from the desire or compulsion to heal you. i mourn your loss, i mourn your stubbornness, i mourn your lack of self-preserving habits, i mourn your total void of self-love and self-care. i imagine you laughing, i imagine you throwing yourself as hard as you can into the throes of love, and i hope you have learned to truly inhabit these moments, to throw yourself into your joy, however fleeting, with an abandon you have never known. 

you have always been dreaming, lashing out in the darkness and not knowing why. 

i’m trying to do it differently now, to remember my past mistakes; to be honest, but not to give too much too soon; my horoscope is right one day at a time; why don’t you have a korean name? he asks; i’m not korean, i say after a moment; he laughs, his smile is wide, easy, the sky is turning fuchsia pink behind him over the river, through the clouds. later that night i look up at the sky; it’s so cloudy, i say, and the sky is thick with cloud, sticky with cloud, and the night is not visible thorough it; no, he says. not cloudy. it’s only cloudy, i say, after a moment, and he laughs again. sometimes when he speaks he leans over and puts his hand on my leg or my arm, sometimes he leans back and stares at me longly as i allow my eyes to roam over the river before us, the passersby, the stray cats that lounge in the long grass across the walking path. while i am sitting next to him on the picnic deck, beer half-empty, my heart is calm, but now, a day later, i’m suffocating, it’s hard to breathe, i’m worried, anxious, both empty, full of air, and bursting, these dark unfoldings crowding me close to there, inside there, too, the heart, that hated word--why can i recognize, yes, it is vital to me, all that emotion it cranks out like the daily, all sensation, and my experience of--yes--love--is impossible without the memory, the actual, i think, scars of heartbreak, heartbreak and wonder i have dragged around with me for these nine months--recognize all this and yet hate the word? 

miss him? he asked, watching me carefully. not sure i heard him right, i turned my head and searched his face. do you miss him? he asked again. 

sometimes, i said. 

he nodded, looking out at the river. 

my horoscope is right one day at a time; i thought it was choice, whether i let myself, but don’t some people cross our paths at inexplicable timing out of our control? so why should my feelings, not in keeping with this, be up to me? i want to think that i’ve learned from last time, that my big first love and first heartbreak can help me now, but i have been so afraid of being afraid; he calls me. lily, he says. tomorrow is wednesday? today is monday. we’ve agreed to meet on wednesday. he texted me earlier; if wednesday would come quickly, it’d be nice. i have carefully measured my sincerity into each reply. when he calls he’s at dinner with his senior coworkers. he tells me he’ll call me when he gets home. he calls again. we speak for a while. then, again, lily. tomorrow is wednesday? i tell him no, tomorrow can only be tuesday. it’s sad, he says, so sad. i’m still afraid. i know what he’s saying. let’s meet sooner than that, he’s saying, and i know it, but i don’t act on it. after we hang up i regret this. i text him. you want to meet quickly that badly? tomorrow is wednesday? he replies: emoticon, emoticon, i don’t want to eat with my coworkers tomorrow. his language has changed, but he’s saying the same thing. i ask, will you have to do that? no, he says, i won’t do that. i want to see you quickly. 

this week, he says in his last text before telling me he’s going to sleep, let’s meet tuesday, wednesday, and saturday. 

yesterday at the river, without knowing what it would lead to, after having worried that it’d be too difficult to communicate and we’d part after a short while without intention of speaking much anymore, and relieved to find him outgoing, warm, funny, and comfortable--i translated his korean to english at his request--i wish i had met you sooner

sometimes, i remember that i’m not good, and it’s a relief; the delusions i’ve had lately, the nightmares that rack my body at night and the sadness that weighs me in the day, seem to break down the closer i get to remembering, i don’t have a good thing in me, i wasn’t given a chance for a good thing, and i can’t ask anybody to be with this, with me, who learned from people who shouldn’t have done it in the first place, whose blood is their blood, whose childhood is punctuated in short phrases of their flareups and dotted by the shrapnel of their sporadic warring--we’re not happy at home. my room is suffocating. i’m afraid to tell them when i’m sad, afraid of the same things they said to me last year, afraid of the way they’d think about me if i told them that things i already went through are coming back to me and are just as scary and debilitating as they were before. i don’t want to be told again how selfish i am and how weak, i don’t want to be made more sad because i’m sad, i learned last time i can’t go to them with these things. what kind of family is this? and where did i learn grace and patience, where did those ideas come from if i’ve never had them extended to me--

my childhood is simply a presence in my memory. people always say they want to go back to their childhood, those were good times. even my dad. i didn’t have to think about anything else. so blessed, then, that’s what you were. happiness, the ability to be carefree, those aren’t just built in. pills had to carve those things into me, and since i’ve abandoned the pills, since it’s been almost five months since i took myself off those, happiness is an effort, something i exert myself to find again, a high i can remember but can’t reproduce, my body having forgotten the sharp pen that traced those patterns into my body and left me numb and senseless

i’m not happy here. we’re not happy. i’d forgotten that leaving how i’m going to, it’s not just a step towards a future i want. it’s an escape from something insidious and painful, from the poison of my household’s selfish needs and tempestuousness. at this time i reach out to certain ones of the people outside because i feel i need them, but it’s not like i don’t know i don’t deserve them, that they’re better, that their futures are brighter and that any bit of me in those futures is a threat to that brightness. i don’t know if i can learn how to be good. i want, so badly, without knowing why, to be good, but i’m not made of it, i think. 

it’s better to go on my own. i knew that then, i remember it now. there’s so much i can do on my own. i think i love teaching because kids are so selfless; i don’t feel judgement from them, just trust and willingness to learn. when they ask me things i couldn’t possibly know, they still look at me like i’m going to tell them something new and true; they think i know. even the high schoolers ask me things, and i want to say are you high, could i know this. trust in me, faith in my strongest points. my students have this for me even when my family don’t. my students don’t see the things i learned from and the place i came from. they remind me that i can do what i want to on my own.

i’ve been looking closely at details and admissions processes for an MPhil in Medieval Period English Studies from Oxford. maybe i’ll live in korea a few years, then apply to a bunch of schools with fingers crossed. school always believed in me. let me be curious and let me be sad and let me be a recluse and let me be with art and books and other people hungry to learn. school reminds me that i can do what i want on my own. 

as a child, i wasn’t happy, but i never imagined that this was how families were. i had some blind faith instilled in me by the same church that called it a sin to be depressed or to think the way i did. my parents stay together because they think they should, not, i think, because they want to. i don’t want that. i don’t want that but i think it’s what i’m set up to have. i couldn’t tie somebody to me. 

i remember this before i moved back from england, too, walking through the streets and roads and popping in at pubs i’d grown to love and seeing familiar strangers on the bus route from city centre back to uni and i remember feeling like i didn’t belong to me. everything was precious because i knew it would end soon. is my life a series of beginnings and endings? i wonder why it’s so hard when i’ve chosen to live this way. it was easier before, before i knew what certain things felt like, when i was happy to be my lonely, solemn self, laughing at my own jokes, smiling to myself only. these days my heart grabs harder and faster; greedier sooner; sadder harder--

i. talking about it–someone said to me once that talk seems so small about things like this. talking about it today i felt guilty all over again, like becoming whom ive become was doing something wrong. i know it’s not. but it doesn’t stop the guilt from taking root sometimes and squeezing my heart into a timid and tender frenzy.

ii. it used to be hard to even cook myself a meal. why does this body get to eat? id ask myself. i was afraid of the kitchen. fire on the stove, knives in the drawers. a freezer big enough to sleep in.

iii. she said, it’s nice that something you like is the thing you need. that you like to write and that happens to be what saves you, time and again.

and i thought about how to say, but it hurts me, too. it’s the only thing i know how to love and it can’t love me back. it doesn’t know how to show me grace or cut me slack, it doesn’t know how to say i think you’re going in the right direction or thank you for spending time with me. writing is not a one-way exchange–it still speaks, but it is only incidentally kind

iv. lily, did you hear that? he called from the dining room.

she had to repeat herself.

just think to yourself–STOP. and then picture a colored square, and nothing else.

but that night i was so tired i didn’t have time to help my own self fall asleep. my heart is getting soft again, though.

v. she keeps telling me that im unusual, special. there’s something about me that is not about other people. things like this are often only felt, not described. i occasionally feel it myself, that im burdened, somehow don’t belong to me only. that other people are in on something i don’t know, that i wasn’t born for.

then i remember: i don’t get to have it all. i make the decision to be myself rather than to be happy, or rather than to have something else i grew up thinking i might want.

adults say things like this: you’re different. don’t do what others do, but go ahead and blaze a trail. she says things like, you are precious, different and special, unusual. you have something else.

here is what i know: that sometimes i have trouble sleeping. people disappear without a trace. sometimes i too disappear. other times my heart feels raw and hurts for days on end. the colored square is always blue. i still often feel sorry. i would like to be close to people but im afraid of what i know i can do. i will never, i think, not really, be able to talk about it.

vi.

I wish I could say some things, like that I’ve made up my mind just to be for you what I can and to not want anything else; that I shouldn’t have guarded myself so much but that I’m not sorry for anything either; that I’m happy with what I’ve received so far and that it would always make me happy and that that’s okay and you’re always okay with me, and you could pretty much do anything and I’d still be okay with you, I’d still be happy to hear from you whenever and if I never hear from you again, I’m happy that at least I heard from you at all.

I went driving today without knowing where I’d end up. I parked on Highway 1 at Capo Beach; there was already a blanket in the back seat. I walked up the overpass and down to the beach, passing bonfires and stroller-pushing jogging moms and bike-riders and rv trailers. 

The sun was already almost down. I walked far enough down the coast to be far away from the fire pits where high schoolers were congregating like algae. I sat alone in the sand with both short legs stuck out in front of me, staring at my sneakers as the light faded, and the ocean turned from darkness, into light for a brief moment, then into darkness again.

I sat and watched a boat sail from the curve of coast on my right to a spot directly before me across a great amount of water. For a while it shone a bright colorless light in my direction. I smiled and waved. It was as dark in the sky now as it was on the water. I couldn’t find the moon. Lights from down the coast on the left wavered like candlelights, occasionally leaping frenetically and desisting all at once. Lights from up the coast on the right cast beams out to sea a ways. Not knowing if I’d ever return to that place didn’t change it. The ocean refutes all attempts to make sense of it or make meaning of it; it simply is. Why can’t we stop thinking about the ocean? Why can’t the ocean take its eyes off us? When I first knew I’d leave--over a year ago--and I’d leave probably forever, I walked along the pier and looked down at the water and I thought, can I really do it, can I really leave this, but tonight when I looked out at the water and the burgeoning dark I didn’t think anything. I watched salt blow off the water into the air and felt it settle onto me and thought nothing. 

I sat for twenty or thirty minutes; I would have stayed longer, but it was thoroughly dark by now, and I was a young woman on the beach alone. I walked up to the overpass as a train passed under, lit from inside, shadowy with passengers. 

I have a lot of paperwork to do this week. The first thing on my to-do list is make a to-do list. I’ve been taking sleeping pills every night. When I fall asleep, I sleep so deeply. When I was first born the doctors thought something was wrong with me--my heart rate drops so much while I sleep. When I wake up I feel like I might have just been born again. My dad told me last summer, shortly after I’d been suicidal in secret--he still doesn’t know--that when I was born, when I opened my eyes, I looked like I knew things, things about the other world, the place I came from... (I wondered then, wonder now--was I built for this world? I’m so frightened and determined.) I don’t feel anything all day these days, but when I think of my childhood at this moment, at two a.m., I feel sorry to that little self, who fought so hard to stay in the womb that she was born more than half a month late and sick with fever. Sometimes I feel so sorry to how hard my newborn self had to fight to be alive... only to become... this... 

i’ve done this for years: after i send a text that’s hard for me to write, i either turn off my phone and hide under my blankets or i leave the house, my phone in my room, and go for a walk in the dark. last night i went to sit in my car with the moonroof open and i looked up at the starless layer of cloud stuck like soap suds to the sky. i’ve done this four times in two years. i’ve received a response only once. 

there’re a lot of trees in the neighborhood. trees with big leafy crowns that touch. for a moment, looking across the street to two intersecting thickets of darkness they felt quite small, something i could mould with my hands. the sensation was extremely fleeting. water through a sieve.

i said a few words to the night; a bat flew quickly across the square of purple and orange cloud i could see from inside the car, chasing insects. i thought--the common insists. from here i wave to you like polishing the air. 

maybe to close something that rent open, but i ate half a can of sweet corn today. and then i thought, why can’t i be sick in normal ways? 

for the last four days my heart, relentlessly, has hurt. i can’t pinpoint a reason why. and i can’t sleep. so i lie awake, uncomfortable, kind of mindless. the second day i thought i’d go crazy. now i’m just ... kind of awed. why is it so persistent? even when i used to get low, for weeks at a time, i didn’t hurt like this. i’ve been thinking about stuff lately that isn’t like me, so i wondered yesterday when i had been lying in bed for three hours unable to fall asleep, if i was just casting about for things that had bothered me lately and then using them to try and substantiate this weird and unremitting feeling. sometimes i get sad in my head, but this is my actual body. i feel more tired than anything. 

someone asked me recently how to give compliments--and i was startled--do i look like someone who goes around handing out compliments? but when he explained that i’d said something to him once that he’d never forgotten, i understood. so i said it’s not hard to compliment somebody, first you just have to notice things about them. and i said if you have to think about it, that’s okay, but don’t say things that you could say to someone else. you’re pretty, you’re smart, you’re funny. that’s not satisfying. i like the way you talk about music, i like the way you study so hard, i think about the things you said to me all the time... your sense of humor isn’t like any i’ve seen before... things that make people interesting or different from other people. 

why am i having such a hard time? i’ve always known this, that turning off the heart’s tap is the same as being asked to push a boulder up a hill -- but boulders are meant to fall down, that’s what they do when they’re up high -- but the heart’s tap is meant to drain, that’s what taps do when left open -- 

I bought new notebooks recently. Last year around this time, maybe a little earlier, I bought a leather-bound Moleskine, the full-sized one with pages as big as sheets of paper. I'm almost out of pages in it, now; I liked to spread it out on the table in front of me and take meticulously tiny notes in class with a .25pt pen. I liked how safe that felt, and how nice it was to spread the paper out as far as it would go. I like blank paper. My writing is too tiny for ruled lines. I like to make charts with a lot of connective tissue, sinews and joints, across the entire spread. I have a preoccupation with the fear of my journals being found and read, stemming from, maybe, a time when as a child my sister read my diary after breaking the lock with her own, different diary's key, and then spouting off quotes from its contents to my softball team; another time when I found my mom sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, my diary open in her hands. I said mom, what are you doing? And she said I'm your mom, I'm allowed. 

Nobody is allowed. I know I'm kind of hard to know. A classic cancer, I have a hard shell with scary pincers and I cry too much. I get moody and go away for long periods of time. But nobody is allowed to read what I didn't say they could. So I have a preoccupation with keeping my words safe. I understand nobody wants to read my journals anymore. My family have found better sources of entertainment; or I've made it clear that there's a rift we can't close between us. Because I'm irrationally afraid of my diary being read I start my journals from the back page first, and I write right-page-first, left-page-second, sometimes for pages and pages and pages. I keep charts this way, too. It's stupid because anybody can figure it out, if they really want to. But that's very like me; do something stupid to keep myself safe in the ways that I feel that I can. 

I look at my new notebooks and want to spread them open in front of me, run the palms of my hands over the smooth yellow pages, and start from the first page. But I've been writing for so many years. I don't know if I know how to write front-to-back anymore, or if I'll be the keeper of backwards journals forever. I talked to a friend about this, the way that we look back at our writing and think, well that's shit. And I said, sometimes I decide, I'm gonna do ten times better than that today. It's hard for a writer to come to this conclusion, but sometimes a diary is only, and just that--a daily record. I kept a sketchbook for a while recently. I drew a series of the same face for five days in a row and only two of the sketches looked at all like the actual product. In post-modern thinking, there is no original, only copies. But I know that's not true, because my copies don't look anything like the original. 

The ineffable--the untouchable--exists. As it is. And I think sometimes everything I do might be an attempt to put the ineffable down on paper. Sometimes I get close. The same friend mentioned something else to me. It's funny, she said, how much technology can do, but that there's nothing in the world that can reproduce an exact feeling, and that we can't ever re-experience a feeling that we had before. Memory is a distortion. Even a recording is a distortion There is a pure moment of experience, and everything after that falls short. I wonder, as a writer--does everything after fall short, or does it make experience closer to art? Can it? Sometimes I live feeling like it can...

If there are only copies, and we can't even fully touch the original...aren't we silly, aren't we kind of funny in that we just continue, and continue, and continue, that we amass, and hoard, and hoard, but we never even get close to the real thing? There's something else I think. That everything is real. There are no copies. Everything is real, the things that come first and the things that come after. 

When I start the new notebooks, I always think about the ones before, and notebooks are proof, aren't they, that everything is real, nothing is a copy, I can write the same poem out in the same way every day and I still did it new each time, I still spent time I hadn't spent before