Worthiness and directionality

What's it worth, I wonder, Willard, trust, a life, the sort of life I thought I'd lead, the sort of life I get to lead if I so choose. Beset by a specific longing, I--or maybe beset is not the word: perhaps this longing is a gift. It is a gift, a powerful one. The more I say it the more it seems the truth. The more I say anything the more it seems the truth. For a while at least. In another light the world is turned about and I think a different thing. Then reverse. We are biologized for it, the switch the flick the reset button and then we're righted. Or was that right? We might be blighted by a distant love, not know just how distant love is and what it means. Of course you should recognize love when it comes, you'll say, Willard. I can hear you now. But how to know? How to trust the self and its weird desires? It's as if there is no point in thinking because nothing is permeable, or all things are equally permeable, so that I have no frame of reference. It is like a blizzard, Willard, the sort I enter into willingly, or if not willingly then at least with some secret knowledge that I carry with me like a gift for whoever opens the door I might find my way to.

Every way I look is white. A room of it a heart of it a home of it a frozen toad. Each minute my feet feel cooler, the way you start to lose all feeling in a toe, as if it was a stone. Is it that I feel lost, or am I just not recognizing the way the light hits, the way to read the wind, the outline of the weathervane from a week ago yesterday? I see no doors. I am a boor, indelicate, undecided. I no longer know these weather patterns: nothing is clear. The sun is rare. All is drear and bleary haze. In dreams I never feel my agency. This is not so far from that.

Of course that is too a lie, I know you'd say. I'd say it too. Is it that I know but cannot bring myself to say or act? Is it that the truth I once believed about myself will not hold? These fantasies--these ghosts I summon up--are they just that, driven by impossibility? Or are they keys to another life, a brighter side, a glimmer in the storm? They could as easily be fault, a long hold, a winding stair to nothing, repeating patterns leading to the same self I was before.

Light and heat and darkness

Dear Willard,

the lights are down, the heat is coming up from beneath the desk. This last weekend the neighbors have begun their assault on the Christmas season. It is a spectacle in the greatest sense: the million lights, the inflatable beasts, the recorded warbling songs: the curtain goes up at sundown and it runs until sometime between 10 and 11 at night when one or the other shuts the show down for the night. I don't know how much it costs. Perhaps that's not the important question. I know how much it haunts, though. I miss you here, though is that enough to say it? By saying you I conflate the you I knew and the you I think I know and the you I surely know with a thousand other yous. You stand all around me in a circle in the dark, holding glowing candy canes as the lights go out, saying nothing. It is not a dream, exactly. It is both less and more than a dream. The spectacle is real. It's saying something about America. It's saying something about our collective dreamlife, how we speak to each other, don't, or can't. It's saying something about our cant, the canticles absorbed in our brains through a dozen years of religious education. Once I said fellatio meaning education, and thought it was original. Maybe it was. It embarrasses me now, Willard, so overwrought, so meant. This note is no less meant. I write to you because you are a fiction, a screen of Is, of eyes, of the letter y, not to mention the word.

I don't know if it's safe or not. My life feels in danger. I am going to the snow country in two days and am not sure if I will return. Perhaps temptation will wreck me there and strand me, ending everything. By everything I mean everything for me. Your everything will of course go on. It's hard to know that but it's true. It's hard to live knowing that, but we both have seen it. A someone ends and then another. And yet we are still here, until we're not, obscured by scrims of snow or memory or distance, until we're gone entirely, existing only in our memories. Maybe you only exist in my memory. That's okay if so. I will keep you close and hold you there. I will speak to you for a long time, and then I will continue to do so. In memory it is so easy to hold another, to contain another. Only rarely are we pressed by others in our memory, by their drives and wants and uncontainable urges, the waters on which we are buoyed but are only able to access or divine in moments, in the past tense, if we're lucky, if we're real at all.

A long hour, a space, a breath about desire

What good is desire, Willard? It feels impossible, yet it's in the air, clear and clean and white and slowly growing. Does it define the self or efface it? You know it well, I'm sure, its heat, its rhythm, the way it grows into the cracks between moments. We both keep it close and covered, like a lifelong soup pot, like a locket. We are both closed in our own ways. Not impenetrable, I know, these interiorities, but it's a long effort against a shell.

I wonder if it is like a blizzard wipe, a pull strong enough to shake apart the screws of self. It is pure, I’m sure; it’s strong, I mean. Surely knowing it’s wrong does not demolish it. It grows regardless. It banishes thought. It is not like thought at all, though it occurs within. This last year, the au pair. The La Brea tar pits, slick and thick and black and eerie, the way they swallow up the past.

As a yearn, can it be consumed? Used up? Or does it necessarily empty us? Is desire for another the end of us? Or can it be used and held in hand, a lightning bolt, a healthy body shock?

I saw a mountain of white a week ago and thought of you. Sometimes I fear the desert is a dream and I'm still in that tower, years ago, unknowing.

If it's strong enough like blinding wind thrown against a rock wall, it might obliterate it eventually, remove even the letters of the words I scrawled there a thousand years ago, destroy the memory of the name I wrote upon it.

If I vanish in it

then I vanish, and there's nothing left where my body was. I mean there's something left where my body was, but that something isn't me. Every mark is something somewhere. Every mark is left by something. If I could retrace each mark, the world would slowly reassemble in the darkness, getting lighter every lift, healed rift, every movement of a skiff backward on a lake, lightly. A forgetting is a vanishing too, assuaging the traces in the brain until they don't crease the meat at all. All I know is that they can disappear. I pray they can disappear, those selves I used to be, those footprints I made on others' hearts. If they can't disappear can they be covered over, Willard, so at least they're lost to me in time? If we can soothe electricity away, then the singed bit left by it can be taken back too. It's a positive move, to think we can erase ourselves. It enables love, a cove, a covering up of things we did when we were younger, stronger, when our hair was longer, when we believed the world would disappear for us when we closed our eyes. But then after all of that it was somehow still there. In snow, in silence, in that particular silence that snow offers us. It is a chance, Willard. It is a second chance to me, this memory, this offering, this doubleness. Knowing trace makes us trace our knowing. Makes us think back, blackly, makes us wonder if what we did is what made us, or was it what we didn't do? True, is there anything true in memory, or is it all a bit that we can flip in dreams from off to on and back again. Is everything just white on white on black? Where I was I was. I can't take it back.

a blizzard a buzzard

A burial. How to breathe when the snow comes in in force in frenzy and how to even see when there is only one tone one color one state of being. Its own darkness. Eyes close to opposite. When the world shuts down, Bentley, it is so so quiet so slow. But my mind, my mind, so--the storm entering through pupils. It will slow, though, if I walk outside, if I sit and look up, if I let myself become snowflake, become drift, vanish.