It's all saltwater, anyway.
We were playing in the surf-MzA, Leah, and me-today, plashing merrily in the salty sandy water, when Leah looked down at a broken bit of oyster I had offered her (a luminous lavendergrey shard) and said, “My shell!”
Michelle. The mother whose name Leah never spoke, and for whom she never invented any title or endearment; the mother she will not remember because Michelle fucking died and left her here with a family cobbled together of people either too old or too young to be raising a child, with US, and we are not fucking prepared.
The sound that tore out of me when my mind caught up with my ears, when I processed what I had heard-no, no, I need the passive voice: it was *torn* from me, even if I can't say by what agency-! You have to understand how desperately hard I have worked to be practical rather than emotional here this last month, to consistently be the person who is briskly competent and quietly useful and frankly rational, because that is what was needed: all my crying I did elsewhere, to other people. But this.... This took me utterly by surprise-even now it’s an ache welling up in my chest, burning my throat and prickling behind my eyes, just from writing about it-this was like a blow to the solar plexus that steals your breath, leaving you stunned and gasping and horribly vulnerable.
[For me giving words to things, describing them, is like naming them the way Adam named the animals: there is a metaphysical weight to the act of naming that most people do not feel. Finding the right words for things helps hold them in place so I can study them further, and the words both shape and are shaped by the reality of the things themselves. And this naming is an impulse that is as basic to me as breathing: it is not only what I do (best), it is WHO I AM. I am A Namer of Things. I catalogue, I analyze, I record. It’s primarily an intellectual thing-I hardly ever experience anything, even myself, unmediated by this internal process of translation and identification (finding patterns, making connections, modifying conclusions): I am always narrating my life to an audience largely consisting of me.
And the worst moments of my life have been the ones where the words failed: where they died in my mouth or my mind would not form them, where they slipped away from me when I reached for them (scrabbling desperately for anything to help me make sense out of the chaos of incipient madness) or when the dark was so vast and formless that it took even the reaching from me (leaving me waiting, mute and immobile, backed into some corner of my own imagination, for the dark to swallow me: just waiting, alone).]
So this sound, this wordless sob that escaped me, not only hurt like something trying to eat its way out of my heart but also shocked the hell out of me. I suppose I should be glad for the honesty of it: for that moment of unmediated experience, even if it was one where I rebelled completely against the reality in which I found myself. But I'm not.
MzA and I just stood there and cried, both of us, clinging awkwardly to one another; and eventually, I turned my back and walked into the water-the inscrutable, beautiful sea that I have always loved: its great wash of sound and colour-because I was not grateful for that moment: I was desperate to escape the pain of its grief and the awful intimacy of sharing it. I was a coward, and I wanted to just STOP-trying, hurting, everything.
And all I could think as I stumbled gracelessly into the ocean, ugly with weeping, was: It's all saltwater, anyway.
Michelle. The mother whose name Leah never spoke, and for whom she never invented any title or endearment; the mother she will not remember because Michelle fucking died and left her here with a family cobbled together of people either too old or too young to be raising a child, with US, and we are not fucking prepared.
The sound that tore out of me when my mind caught up with my ears, when I processed what I had heard-no, no, I need the passive voice: it was *torn* from me, even if I can't say by what agency-! You have to understand how desperately hard I have worked to be practical rather than emotional here this last month, to consistently be the person who is briskly competent and quietly useful and frankly rational, because that is what was needed: all my crying I did elsewhere, to other people. But this.... This took me utterly by surprise-even now it’s an ache welling up in my chest, burning my throat and prickling behind my eyes, just from writing about it-this was like a blow to the solar plexus that steals your breath, leaving you stunned and gasping and horribly vulnerable.
[For me giving words to things, describing them, is like naming them the way Adam named the animals: there is a metaphysical weight to the act of naming that most people do not feel. Finding the right words for things helps hold them in place so I can study them further, and the words both shape and are shaped by the reality of the things themselves. And this naming is an impulse that is as basic to me as breathing: it is not only what I do (best), it is WHO I AM. I am A Namer of Things. I catalogue, I analyze, I record. It’s primarily an intellectual thing-I hardly ever experience anything, even myself, unmediated by this internal process of translation and identification (finding patterns, making connections, modifying conclusions): I am always narrating my life to an audience largely consisting of me.
And the worst moments of my life have been the ones where the words failed: where they died in my mouth or my mind would not form them, where they slipped away from me when I reached for them (scrabbling desperately for anything to help me make sense out of the chaos of incipient madness) or when the dark was so vast and formless that it took even the reaching from me (leaving me waiting, mute and immobile, backed into some corner of my own imagination, for the dark to swallow me: just waiting, alone).]
So this sound, this wordless sob that escaped me, not only hurt like something trying to eat its way out of my heart but also shocked the hell out of me. I suppose I should be glad for the honesty of it: for that moment of unmediated experience, even if it was one where I rebelled completely against the reality in which I found myself. But I'm not.
MzA and I just stood there and cried, both of us, clinging awkwardly to one another; and eventually, I turned my back and walked into the water-the inscrutable, beautiful sea that I have always loved: its great wash of sound and colour-because I was not grateful for that moment: I was desperate to escape the pain of its grief and the awful intimacy of sharing it. I was a coward, and I wanted to just STOP-trying, hurting, everything.
And all I could think as I stumbled gracelessly into the ocean, ugly with weeping, was: It's all saltwater, anyway.