I WASN’T WRITING

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I had been granted a prestigious fel-
lowship on the basis of my promise to
write a book of essays about mothers
and motherhood. Not mothers per se,
but the ways in which we (who?) mea-
sure mothers as such, represent them
to ourselves, re-enact the mother-rela-
tion on other stages--civic, cinematic,
linguistic, oneiric. My mother land was
a home I had never lived in. My mother
tongue was a language I couldn't speak.
Or barely. I found I felt I was a child
again, fumbling drawing after drawing
of my mother's jaguar-shaped pin. I
thought If I could render the wanted
thing on paper precisely, I could pos-
sess it without taking it from the world.

I thought if I could describe the ex-

act dimensions of the wound, I could
fashion a stent to fit that concavity
and thereby resolve the surface. But in
truth the wound opened; deepened. I
pried the card out by its slivered edge,
and turned it face up before the teacher.

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The Death card does
not necessarily presage
a literal death, but more
likely heralds a major
transformation at the
psychic, emotional,
or metaphysical level.
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I was returning to a country my parents
had left thirty years prior and never
moved back to for no particular reason.

I suspected as I was preparing to

leave Chicago that it was all a bit
contrived—the preposterous drama
of the diasporic daughter, tracing the
reverse arrow of their emigration.

I suspected it was in fact too late to

return--too late to recoup whatever of
the connections with language, her-
itage, narrative, ritual--I might have
found more intact had I shored up my
courage to return when I was younger.

When I was younger, I had believed

more straightforwardly in the possibil-
ity of reunion. And the certainly eternal
quality of my desire for it.

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I was thinking without thinking I had
lost my mother tongue, my first lan-
guage. But I approached departure, I
began to suspect that I was about to
lose this sense of loss itself—that what
was irretrievable was not the language
but the moment of its designation as
absence or distance or deficit, explicit.
I wanted this one moment to be im-
age, the stable emblem of the greater,
more diffuse, and dislocated sense of
missing. But there was no moment,
just a tendency elaborated over time,
gathering resonance and dimension-
ality, metabolizing my memories. The
loss was a habit that enfolded my lan-
guage, colored my choices, bolded
certain tropes for me to revisit and
analyze. The loss was diachronic,
which did not prevent it from accumu-
lating its terrifying, paralytic density.

On the moving walkway into the

terminal, backlit advertisements
streamed away from me on both
sides like a wake in a technicol-
or river of perfumes, wristwatches,
celebrities in cashmere sweaters.

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I was going back for, because, despite,
without mother. Not that she was
there and calling, or that she demand-
ed that I do so, but because the desire
to return had been hers, and then I ab-
sorbed it. I kept saying and thinking of
it as “going back”, although I’d visited
on several occasions, because I’d nev-
er lived there. What qualified as liv-
ing in a place? I lacked a sure answer.
What did I know about the effects of
setting and settlement? I knew the
transposition of fixed departures and
the shape they lent to time. I was run-
ning ragged, restaging the narrative.
But I still wanted to see the project
through, even if to failure. But in order
to arrive there I would have to begin.

I kept explaining to people whether

they had asked me or not, to hear my-
self justify it—I wanted to reconnect
with my heritage, re-build relation-
ships, above all to regain the language,
so I could better decode myself. And
because I was a writer, I wouldn’t
merely experience these things but
promised to make something of them,
something to show for it. A substrate
to prove the extraction. But all of these
legible, noble reasons started to feel,
the more and more I repeated them,
like flaking paint on the perspiring
surface of a more amorphous, anx-
ious, inscrutable drive. Still I faced
forward, and the aircraft took off.
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I wasn’t writing, but I was constantly
thinking of writing, such that life as
I lived it began to register as WRIT-
ING and NOT WRITING, but
as I wasn’t doing much of the former
in any real sense, I was constantly
NOT WRITING, and the glare of
that watermarked almost every ac-
tivity I undertook knowingly in the
stead of writing. I was skewering
time on the metric of everything that
I had failed to make of its duration.

I wasn’t writing. I was realizing that all

my anxious striving for perfect descrip-
tion, and everything I contrived in ser-
vice of that impossible desire—to arrest
and cauterize the painful ongoingness of
being—the regimentation of sleep, the
jotting of notes, ordering of old ideas,
the undertaking of return—had finally
deposited me onto the flat truth that
what remained of memory could no lon-
ger serve me as the armature of myself.

I let the anxious smile, there for no one,

ebb from my face. I let myself feel my ex-
pressionless face. I felt myself a stranger

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I had wanted to get somewhere under-
neath language. Or was it underneath.
Between? Straight through: like a
needle through folds of cloth. Or high
above enough to frame between fingers
held out. Or entirely without. Frag-
ments—life excerpted, then those ex-
cerpts framed—spoke to me differently
than the mute enveloping ongoingness
did, so I also sought to live in discon-
nected intensities, wanting to iden-
tify myself with that apparent truth.

For weeks I couldn’t finish a sentence.

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TO J...

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J, there is a deception organizing this writing as I do it,
which I will make explicit, so as to clarify my intentions.
The deception is that I am writing this as a letter to you,
in second person address, while I do not really intend
to, or believe I could bear to, show this to you. I am not
sure if this means that I am trying to aestheticize these
feelings by giving them the form of writing intended for a
general audience, or if it means that I’m only interested
in prolonging the pleasurable and awful psychological
torment of keeping them to myself. Or neither, or both.
I need to tell you these things, or I apprehend the idea
of telling you these things and relate to it as a need.
I experience this need as a physical sensation, I feel
it somatically. It’s a clutching that travels throughout
my body--if I detect it, it moves elsewhere, like a bub-
ble of air trapped under plastic. Maybe it actually is a
bubble of air. I feel it in pushing my knees, locking my
shoulders and the hinges of my jaw, pressing my throat
from behind. In writing this I extrude this secret aw-
ful pleasure into a more sustainable form. Something
I can have, in lieu of you. Something I can live with.

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I met you at a party.

I had seen you over the weekend

floating in and out of the group,
but we hadn’t directly spoken.

At some point, on the dancefloor,

I turned around and there you
were.

I put out my hand without thinking.

You told me your name.

I said we formed a minimal pair:

our names differed by one pho-
neme.

I said it was a concept in linguistics.

and felt embarrassed.

And that was it for the moment.

(And then there was: the museum,

the Ganzfeld, the warm cham-
pagne, the broken footbridge, all
the coincidences, the kiss...)

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I drove six hours to see you again.
I left Boston on a humid afternoon
in June.
The sky looked darker than it was
late.
A lethargic summer storm rained
on and off as I drove west in my
green Prius.
The city gave way to suburbs and
forest.
The GPS counted down the hours
and miles.
The exits and towns and trickled
on and offscreen.
I was a green dot on the map over-
taking the line of the road.
I gripped the wheel and cruised at
72.
A dark dense feeling gathered in
my chest as if I were condensing
into my own body.
I put on an audiobook called Radi-
cal Acceptance.
I said to myself
I accept I accept I accept.
I stopped for gas at the last service
station in Massachusetts.
In the McDonald’s I ate a salad I
had packed at home.
The leaves had wilted in their juices.
I sat in front of a window that faced
the rainwet lot.
Cars and people parked and disem-
barked in the usual fashion.
Their motions appeared slowed
down but not by intention.
My heart was pounding.
I thought: I won’t recall the spe-
cifics, but I will remember this
moment
As a quaint mundane interlude.
Then I got up, washed my hands in
the bathroom, and walked back
to my car
To resume my doomed journey.
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You treasured memories, you said, more than anything
seen or unseen in this world. Part of this love was a
complete acceptance of their evanescence by forget-
ting, which photography prevents, or otherwise fucks
with. The time I spent with you, which went complete-
ly unrecorded, still remains utterly crystal in my mind,
though know it must be eroding, the way pictures fade,
the way the data mass that makes up an image file de-
grades each time it’s opened. And in your room, on a
morning after you had left, I took a picture for myself.

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 Is anything, any effort, ever truly wasted?

Do you not wish to be reached?

Do we ever write to real people, or only approximate targets?

I don’t think in poetry at all, lately. I think only of what to say to you.

Letters, sent or meant, are like projectiles—arrows, bullets—intended to

land, pierce, break open their targets.

Let there be no uncertainty as far as I can assume that what none of this
does is bring me any closer to what I really want—bodily proximity.

Not that you yourself hold me hostage, but that in our meeting I glimpsed
my own desire to be captive, to give you my freedom.

After you placed my wrists in the holds and checked the tension, you
turned back to your desk and opened your laptop just a fraction.

You turned to me in its blue light of no signal.

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