On Not Writing

Essay 61.

Every sentence is spoken to somebody. Every essay is epistolary. Hit send (a hit job). I can’t write about what I want to write about, I couldn’t address it to anybody so I didn’t write; I couldn’t for a year. What was there to say? That everything fell apart, that I fell apart, that all my social contracts fell apart, that what I had thought was the deal wasn’t the deal — that I’m an idiot, a five year old, a baby, with an underdeveloped brain? That the exam (my Holy Grail) that I thought I had worked for and fought for and studied for and sacrificed for I didn’t just fully fail, but there never even was one; that I showed up for people like I promised, I dared, and nobody came and nobody cared? That for ten months I cried for hours every night, and then woke up in the morning and travelled and launched and built, feeling safe for exactly zero minute all year, just raw, red, exposed membrane (AKA a human — it’s the journey that has the hero) — that I cried so much that my eyes became allergic to my own tears (how trite) — that somehow I did the best work of my life with broken-lashed eyes, with crimson-rashed eyes, and I still don’t understand that part, I still don’t understand how I was able to? How could I write down that I found friends and comfort and warmth and victory, and it felt like a dream from which I always woke into more crying? That I mourned not just my dead, not just my Dad, but everyone that’s around only for a limited time, with limited options, with limited words, with limited love; I mourned all the limitations, the ones that are there and the ones that are made by us and the ones (the most terrible ones) that are imagined by us — and I cried on the floor, in my bed, between Zoom calls, backstage, outdoors; I cried at airports, in bookstores, in joy and in pain; I howled into my pillows in my pain; I cried and I failed and I cared and I raged and and I trusted and I missed and I didn’t — couldn’t — write? Shall I write down now how that is all over now, that I will recover now, but I will always, always remember; that I had swum across the ocean as summoned and when I arrived there was no shore?