And in here rests the dark of the light
The shadow of the bright
The refuge of the damned and the wronged –
In the lines of these walls
In the motes of dust
And faint stains of self-spilt blood;
In the hollow ringing of the stones
Giving violence to whispered
Movements of her lips
A layer of sweat on her palms –
As the skin of her cheek
Brushes against my bones.
The PDF of the booklet handed out at the awards ceremony for the 2012 Student Achievement Awards. Page 8 includes the final draft of “To Dad”.
Dear Jane.
I know I should be sleeping but I can’t. I can close my eyes and count ‘till I lose focus of what number comes next and sooner or later I’ll be dead to the world – but I can’t find myself wanting to. I can’t bear to go from sitting on the side of the bed to wrapping the sheets around me and resting my head, because, out of compulsion, or out of tradition – out of a pattern, a sick habit – I’m still waiting for you to come. So on those rare nights when I do lie down I can’t think of anything but guilt. And there’s something else, right there – I don’t feel guilt, anymore. I think it. I think about feeling guilt. I think about why I’m not feeling what I felt and should keep on feeling but I can’t. Much like how I can’t sleep. I don’t want to feel guilty. So I don’t. I don’t sleep. I don’t feel. And I think of anything but numbers.
I think of absence. Like – the absence of a sound. We’d fall asleep to waves in the air, disintegrated – torn to pieces, and put back together by clumsy hands of coil and turning into the audial representation of black and white – the dissonance of things, the whups and bams and blood and tears of the human voice – melody and music turned to noise. Static, white noise, radio shit. We’d sleep through the sound of small fissures in the earth splitting apart as old, corroded metal confining fabric and plastic and human flesh and dreams roared on through winding tracks, shaking the roof over our heads and grasping our bodies in the night but not moving to touch our hearts. Train-cars that gorge back into the underground. We’d wake – that is, either I’d wake, or you’d wake – to the violence of water striking plastic propelled by vertical distance, the colour of clarity meeting the colour white and in their merge splitting the two into separate parts, as if colour and the sight of bathwater turning gray could be conveyed by the air and the ear. As you’d say; water’s one of them things that can run without limbs. We’d be enveloped in these sounds as we were by the dark and the cloth and our sweat and skin and the taste of each other, our touch; we’d surround ourselves in it and cling to it and take it for granted and never even think of never ever wishing it to leave. And, like all things, they’d never start to leave until we started to beg them stay.
There is the absence of that tearing apart of audial flesh, that sadism of sound. There is the absence of the presence of a hundred souls carted in cramped metal cages plunging to the depths of the black. There is the absence of the wash of nighttime sweat – the parting of mind and sleep – the cleansing of bad dreams. There is absence. And there is thought – the thought that the absence of sound is, in itself, a sound; just one that can’t be replicated through headphones.
And so, with absence, I think of presence. I think of the presence of touch. Two sets of five points on the ridges formed by my protruding ribs, pressing inwards, as if to match the bondage of the organs beneath skin, sinew, and bone. It’s a feeling, a sensation, a constriction. It’s a feeling of not being able to breathe though having all the air in the world within touch by the tip of your tongue. You’d pull me into that vacuum and you wouldn’t let me out until we drowned with each other. We’d feel like we were drowning, like we were burning and drowning; we’d feel pain and we’d not give a shit about how much it hurt. We’d part battered and broken – but without a bruise. We’d feel the lacerations in our flesh, and we’d feel that wet touch of blood cover us whole – but to the eye we’d be clothed in cloth and not in red. And there’d be the presence of touch, and – just as it is now – there’d be the presence of the want of it.
So there’s the presence of you and the absence of you and the presence of what we had and the absence of what we’ve meant and there is this sense of emptiness; there’s this impact crater spread with debris but no memory of blood and bones in the ash. There is nothing but a place missing in time and I’m not sure if that place is where you are or where I am ‘cause who left who with what and when and why? Who was the one who left, and who was the one left behind? And why the fuck does that matter so much that it keeps me up at night?
And – I think, I think of what’s here and what’s not, of who’s here and who’s not – I think but not feel, or think I don’t feel, or don’t feel out of the thought of unfeeling, unthinking, unbeing. I think of that question – that question of matter – and I ask why and I answer myself with the only answer I can give:
‘Cause I don’t know if I should wait or if I should go.
I don’t know if I should wait for the double-chime of the doorbell, and open a front door to a new place – a new old place, a place we both knew – walk out to or from a space missing in time to be enveloped in the sound and the dark again; to find sanctuary in that sense of you, that touch of you. Or if I shouldn’t wait anymore, and press out through this semblance of the dark and this absence of sound and this presence of this want; if I should end the waiting and come home because where I am isn’t home – home’s where you are.
And, Jane – I don’t know if I want to know. I don’t know if I want to know whether you left me or I left you. I don’t know if I want to know what I should do. ‘Cause really, there’s a simple way to find out, though it would break me. And this touch of metal is cold as ice, even with my sweat and the heat of the air – the friction from the dissonance of a room set for two, meant for one. I could end all that, and get my answer. All I’d have to do is pull my finger.
Love,
M.
I’m a ghost pressed in the layers of an eggshell.
I’m cracked against a wall -
I’m thrice-drowned in white and yellow and yoke and blood.
I have substance, but I feel hollow.
I have sight and light and touch and sound -
I cannot feel touch smell taste be.
I can know. I can believe.
I can’t want to believe.
I can’t want to be.
(I’m me.)
[…]
Sometimes, I know exactly where I am and where I’ve been – I’m in Room 302 of the hotel cross the street from the Starbucks where I first met my date for the night, or I’m in the basement of Claude’s house after swiping Dad’s liquor and taking turns with a bottle of gin, or I’m in my bedroom feeling Ben’s fingers around my throat and watching my Mom cry in her own way, half-standing, almost kneeling, silent in the other side of my room. Sometimes, I’m in places I’ve been, and my dream-self shares my history. Other times, I’m in places I’ve wished either to be or to never be, and my dream-self has the past of a hoodlum, a saint, a beggar, or even a normal girl. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell.
Sometimes, I’m younger than I should be. But I’m never older than I am. Maybe that’s something important. But I don’t put much stock in dreams.
This time, I’m sixteen. I’m standing in my bathroom, in front of my mirror. I’m looking at my reflection. My hands go up, and cup my cheeks. My fingers slide up, and I feel them tickle and trace the edges of my cheekbones. My hands and face are both pale, my body paler. I think my skin stands out too much, with my black hair, cut short for a girl, long for a boy.
I’m wearing one of Mom’s old dresses – I found it in one of the boxes in the storage room in the basement. She must have been my age, when she got it – it fits me perfectly. It’s a ‘80s style navy blue sundress. It fits me. I found it in the basement. I wonder why she packed it away, if it fit; if it didn’t, I wonder why she still had it. Back then, she’d have given those sorts of things away, shipping them off to a friend, or to a stranger through Goodwill. She might have given some of those sorts of things to me.
I look at my eyes, and wish my grays had a touch of blue.
I’m in my bathroom, in my house – my home at age sixteen. If I turn my head left I’d be able to see out the small window. If I walk towards it and stand on my tip-toes I’d be able to see down from the second floor to the small walk between my home and my neighbours’. If I turn to the right, I’d be able to reach out to my bathroom door and into my hallway – and if I walk down that hallway I’d be able to see my mother’s pictures in plain wood frames adorn the walls, splotches of colour atop a cool beige. I’d be able to see into my mother’s room, and mine.
Instead, I find myself sitting on the side of my bathtub. I have a bright green toothbrush in my left hand. Atop and between its bristles, there are spots of wet foam. I feel my tongue flick back and forth in my mouth, barely brushing the inside of my teeth. I’m thinking of a boy. I can’t remember which boy I had a crush on at sixteen; my dream self is thinking of a boy, and that boy is faceless. I know what kissing feels like; I wonder how kissing back would feel. I wonder if my first kiss, my first boy, would be able to taste my breath. I wonder if I’d be able to taste his. I think of the taste of peppermints.
I see myself falling back, I feel a blow to the back of my head – I think of pain but I don’t feel pain, as if pain is beyond me, as if pain’s something I can only feel in a dreamer’s dream, in a fantasy. I see blood congeal around what’s left of my dream-self’s face, what’s left of my face – I can’t tell if the spots of red on my mom’s dress are polka-dots or blood, and neither can I tell the difference between blood and freckles, splattered on both cheeks, like an inkblot, like a painting my mother might have made when she was still young and loved her brush and canvas as she did. She was a painter, I remember – back before her brushstrokes turned to shutter-clicks and strips of film in darkrooms.
And – as if on cue – at the thought of film strips, reels of translucent black seemed to cover my mother’s sundress, wrapping around me, binding me tight. I don’t know if my dream-self can breathe underwater. I find out I can’t. I drown - but with thoughts, and not feelings, of drowning. I drown, and die, or at least my dream-self dies, because I’m still watching, and I think I must be moving. I think I must be invisible, and incapable of feeling touch that isn’t my dream-self’s touch, because invisible hands grasp my visible legs and pull them out of the mess of bathwater and film and blood; I feel the grip of the hands on my legs, I feel the cold of the air on my wet skin; all I am is a pair of legs in a bathtub.
[…]
There’s the dew-drop of the morning in the night and the candle-flame;
There’s the warmth of the first rays of sun in the cusp of your palms;
There’s the sight of blue-on-white as far deep as can be seen -
In your eyes, in your hands, in your heart -
As your light dims, so too, does mine.
Your skin hangs to your bones more tightly than Mum’s hands cling to your shoulders. I’d like to say that’s just ‘cause Mum’s grown tired with you over the years and she’s practically lifeless now but I can tell by how her knuckles seem to grate against each other that she’s still as strong as she ever was. So it’s your skin and your bones that are at fault. They make you look like a pauper girl’s ragdoll post-surgery. They make you look like a caricature of a dying man reaching out for his missing catheter. Poor. Desperate. Near death – yet past the end of life. One does seem to come before the other.
Read moreand maybe you are the moment in-between the passage of time / as told by the drumbeats of blood against the walls of the heart;
and maybe you are in the severed-split-seconds that make all the waiting in the world a misery / told by the traces of ash in melted candle-wax;
and maybe you are the moment after the plunge into the deep of the sky
/ above a constellation of glass and steel;
or maybe you are the moment I hit the ground
and i say that all acts of creation are intimate
and i say that impulse is driven by sex and desire
and i say that making love is like putting words on a page that you mean
words that you sing until your ribs ache and your lungs break
and i say that true art is an act of desperation
the dying cry of your soul
as you crucify it on display to the world
I remember
How you pulled out the cords that drew life into your arms
I remember
How you bled on hair and cloth and battered flesh
I remember
How you breathed for life but screamed for death to come
I remember
How you pleaded with God after having found Him in an alleyway soaked with blood and rain
I remember
How you cried out and clutched the blankets with fists as pale as the bedsheets
I remember
How you clutched your legs together to fight off the advances of ghosts
I remember
How you bore your claws at the men that drew too close to your bedside
I remember
How the doctor tried to brush away the blood on your lips from a bitten tongue
I remember
How you shook and how I felt the clattering of your bones as you slept
I remember
How the hopelessness and the fear felt under the guise of fluorescent lights
I remember
The shattered aperture and the broken shutters of the windows and the blinds; the lack of sight in your eyes -
I remember how you looked and sounded for the first few days when your voice was silent and all life was gone but for the fear of sex and death
I remember the smell of sweat and blood and come; how I told myself aloud and feigned conversation with an unconscious soul that the smells and the sights and the sounds were but the stuff of nightmares in the day
I remember clutching at your hands in hopeless desperation praying for god to exist, praying for a life you no longer wished to live, hating myself for my selfishness, hating the faceless men that took you and crushed your spirit against the rocks
I remember all that your empty eyes said to mine.
