I feel ashamed for having written this, for the emotion, which prompted the writing. I only want to be rid of these lines, to hide them, and all of my life, this fragment will haunt me—me casting it into the wind, the wind returning it. It will get caught in my hair, find its way into my purses and pockets.
When I think of growing older, I am made so happy, consoled, imagining the swarm of paper butterflies that will have accumulated over the years, reminding me perpetually of those things that cannot be so easily discarded.
My consolation
After an occurrence of X, after a great deletion, one which span stanzas, paragraphs, months, pages, years, I change location and opt for experiments in form, in hopes of discovering something new, in hopes of discarding the old. If I am a rough draft of myself, then I am always forgetting; I am always adding; I am always ripping apart; I am always confusing, leaving out some important detail, which would fuse and clear up matters. But, alas, I am a mere rough draft. Why did X and X and X expect so much?
After deleting one X in particular, I lived in a small cabin in the coldest place I had ever known. Arranging my books on the bookshelf, I picked one up that I began but never finished; on the bookmark, in my handwriting, although I had forgotten the occasion, was written:
I taped it to the window facing east. Through the blizzards, it was this fragment that kept me company. And never did I utter a sound. Never did I see another soul until the spring bulbs were yearning. My writing became sparse, a few words lost in a land of whiteness. Whatever transpires, whatever words arise, whatever is put on the page, it is never my fault, but the weather’s; it is always the fault of the weather.
The postcard
Why should I be the one responsible for explanations? X accused me of speaking in cryptic codes and waxing poetic. But why should I waste language, which has never done X and I any good? Why should I waste language, when one sentence says all that needs to be said, says where I’ve been, who I’ve seen, what I’m doing, who I’m missing, and who I wish were there? On a postcard, I wrote:
Two years later, the postcard was returned to me, covered with a multitude of postmarks, some from as far as Japan and Madagascar. Apparently, it had gotten lost all over the world before reaching me. The original inscription was hardly legible; however, I could still make out X’s handwriting underneath my own. It said: What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Thus, the last words of our relationship; thus, once more, the crossing of oceans and years to reach, once more, the closure of confusion.
The abandoned ones
Some mornings, I attempt beginnings, but that is all. Some mornings, my only consolations are the weather and clouds. I keep trying to make a story arise from whatever transpired between X and me, the big Xs, but there were, along the way, many xs, small xs. These small xs could have been big, but they came at the wrong time, when my plot was still entangled with an X, when my devotion was still focused on an X. And so, I experimented with the small xs to see how they would affect the plot, but they proved to be little more than distractions, and besides, they were so kind, lacked conflict, and promised endings, which were so cliché in their happiness that I, as a rough draft, had to abandon them for the sake of good writing. These small xs clutter my drawers:
x1.
x2.
x3.
x4.
x5.
I forget my intentions, but I keep them tucked away, in the dark, in case I should need them again someday. The small xs are always waiting; like saints and martyrs, they will wait until the end, in hope that you will find a way to use them, somehow, in your draft, but when you do, they will always manage to make you feel guilty for loving them so little, love with a small l.
The one I could have done without
I remember, after a long session of revising, struggling, deciding what to keep and what to discard, X made the decision for me: he came over, demanding the return of a hat, dumping a box containing my belongings to the floor. I remember the lilacs and the wisteria and the sky were all purple, and the bumblebees made their way through the crack under my door. The buds on the weeping willows were only beginning to show themselves, and here was X demanding his hat, and I gave it to him even though I wanted to keep it because it smelled faintly of him. And here I was in April, nested in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my most tragic self empathizing with T. S. Eliot, myself transformed into a creature of memory and desire, past and future, my present state nothing more but reflection and longing.
When X left, I looked through the items scattered about the floor: tweezers, a book of matches, a pearl earring missing its backing, my blue bath towel, a few rough drafts, and a scrap of paper, which said:
What a sick-o, I thought, and all this stuff that I don’t need and don’t want and have been doing without for so long. I thought of visiting the butcher for a pint of blood with which to seek my revenge.
The following morning, I watched the fog lift and then the clouds dispersing ever outward and thought that perhaps X hadn’t returned the paper scrap out of malice. It was, after all, written in my handwriting; it
