Author Archives: Roxanna Renata

Solitude: The invisible thread

“You live your life as if it’s real… The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must… And if you can relax in that… if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended.”

– Leonard Cohen

I make it all perfect. I arrange my hair, slip into my black silk lounge dress and floral kimono, feminine and lovely. I spray my French perfume once on my chest and once at the nape of my neck, so my hair can soak it in. I count my calories and I wash my face, make sure the black from my mascara isn’t under my eyes. I clean under my fingernails and make sure my nails are shining and there are no nicks in my clear nail polish. I vacuum the floor and clean the mirror, no trace of dust bunnies or water marks. I put the food away in cabinet and wipe the counter. Put my shoes in the closet and hang my handbag with the latch closed. I sweep my balcony and empty the ashtray and straighten the chairs. I make my bed and dust the shelves, organize the books and magazines. I hang my coat and wipe my sunglasses clean for tomorrow. I shake out the bathroom mat and hang the towels neatly. I put my gold away in the little geometric Persian jewelry box. I listen to Bach and imagine I’m floating through the world, light as a feather and walking along an invisible thread, a set trajectory that nobody, including myself, can see — but we don’t decide, the piano keys do.

They bounce my thoughts up and down and suddenly I wonder why I’m alone. Then I remember I chose to be. All their faces, all their bodies and thoughts and movements, so big, so loud, so real, so imposing around me I can’t hear myself think. And when I can’t hear myself think I get dragged into the undertow without realizing. Then I wake up one day and I can’t think at all and I’m thrown this way and that and I don’t know which way is up anymore and I don’t remember where I came from. Not my home or where I live or lived but my center. The quiet of me alone in a dance studio late at night listening to my headphones spinning round and round for hours, walking at night with the cobblestones gleaming after a brief drizzle.

I come from the quiet, I always have. “Renata alone and quiet in her room,” my grandmother writes of me, a poem to describe each grandchild. I come from the quiet and the dark. I need the dark to find my way to the light within. When the sunlight comes in too harshly through the windows I can’t think, it’s just like when they’re around. I need the dark — quiet and gentle.

I’m from countless nights spent pacing back and forth starring up at the sky, that impenetrable limitless expanse of nothingness. Cursing the dawn, but always secretly waiting for it to arrive — to come and take away this burden — this empty weight of the silence and the dark closing in. But I need it, I never knew a sweeter lover than that weight, it never asked anything of me but to be there. It wanted me so badly it stole me away from everything else. It was never impressed by what I had or did, only who I was.

Sometimes I ask myself how this happened, how did I get so comfortable in the stillness, to crave so sharply the softness and quiet order I construct around myself my like a cocoon? Then I remember it’s always been this way. “The invincible defeat.”

I come from the secluded bench in a big damp European city park, much like any other. After I’ve run enough to exhaust myself I lay down on my back and stare up at the tops of the bare trees, black veins pulsing on a grey sky. I imagine them spinning around me, I’m the eye of the hurricane. My hands rest on my stomach and I’m panting. They are closing in on me, I imagine. But they’re not — just a foolish fairytale, delusions of grandeur. Life is not so simple.

I’m from those moments when one accidentally says something too revealing in a passing conversation, scaring themselves but still stealing a sideways glance at the other to see their reaction. That glance of hopeful terror. That glance that even if you feel it on you, the most loving thing you can do is to pretend you don’t notice it while taking the other’s vulnerability to heart, in stride.

I’m from that delicious lost moment when you jolt awake on a trans-country train and somewhere between sleeping and waking it takes you a bit too long to remember who you are and where you are and that you’re on a train and you’re a person and others expect to see you eventually and you’re on your way somewhere and why you’re going there. And you enjoyed those few brief moments of non-being bliss a bit too much and feel a pang of grief but then you glance at your phone and realize you’re still 30 minutes away from your destination — you have 30 more minutes to be a non-entity, so you feel your bones rest a little gentler in your cushioned window seat.

I’m from the river that the train runs along. Clear cold water, calm in its chaos, its constantly replenished impermanent yet perpetual existence.

I need to remember. If I don’t I forget the thread, I falter and the piano notes begin to feel like punches to the jaw. I need to remember, so I can touch it and transcend and every glance of vulnerability doesn’t have to be acknowledged and yet is absorbed none the less.

There will never be a sweeter lover than the night. But the burden of love is heavy, and while there is no greater reprieve than the darkness, only the dawn within can lift the weight. I need to remember.

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Dear F: From the Beginning

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death… Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”

– Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“She stood still, slightly darker than the darkness, and their hands met as if guided by some perfected instinct which found no place in their conscious minds.”

– Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandrian Quartet, Justine

Dear F,

I’ve tried so hard to think of my favorite moment, favorite thing that you’ve done, favorite scene we’ve acted out together, but there are are many. Too many one liners to start or finish your story, our story. Maybe that’s all you were really, a one liner – all I permitted myself to be at the time, all I could bear to be. I wanted to be a period at the end of a sentence and collapse into myself and let that be it. And you let me. Oh how you let me. But then I began to expand, without my knowing it, and that was the beginning of the end of us. Of you, of the you that’s only ever existed through my eyes, the you I conceived to be my sentence, the you I composed so beautifully in place of myself.

I’ve tried so hard to think or know if you knew it or know it now. Sometimes I know you do, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I convince myself that I felt it, that you felt it. Sometimes I think you must of.

Now I don’t care anymore. I don’t care anymore because I know now that even if all my projections onto our scenes were mutual, even if it meant something to you, that meaning wouldn’t mean anything to you. And while I agree with your emotional nihilism in theory – that’s no way to live a life.

For all my mistakes, I know at least that I have always fought to live my life in opposition to Hegel’s sub-man, a being who wishes to eliminate the anxiety they feel when confronted by their freedom and therefore denies the world and themselves. A being whom Beauvoir writes is, “afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of possibilities.” This unforeseen future which he fears, “may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.” A nihilistic being who anyone whom has ever wrestled with themselves and the void alone can see straight through – through to the “disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself.”

In any case – fear, agony, and nihilism aside – I, in the face of such indecision when confronted with the overwhelm of catch phrases and iconic vignettes we created together, will just have to start at the beginning.

From the beginning: a Tuesday night at the end of October on the wet cobblestone steps before Sainte-Catherine de Bruxelles. There where I waved to you as you approached and could only see my dark silhouette in my uniformed black trench and boots. From the beginning, when the greying stubble on your cheeks scraped mine as you gifted me your Italian ‘il bacetto’ greeting.

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Solitude Came First: A Female Steppenwolf

Neck

“Solitude is independence. It has been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve… From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh.”

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Solitude always comes first. For most it’s the few moments spent brushing their teeth and washing their face in the morning, or alone in the car and up in the elevator to the office, or walking the grocery store isles on the way home – maybe even later eating dinner in front of a screen. But for some, like me and some other scattered Steppenwolfs, solitude is where we first matured and where we go to become ourselves. Like him, all I’ve ever wished for with each passing year is more solitude and independence. Not long ago now, my wish was granted and I found it as cold and vast as he describes. Yet it quickly became the kind of cold that suffocates you, and I found that its dark stillness isn’t the dark one thinks of in contrast to light, it was the darkness of the absence of light, where no contrast exists at all.

Solitude came first, and then the hot raw steam of flesh, where everything became permitted like a manic but somehow soothing and controlled free jazz improvisation.

Here will live my shamelessly unfiltered stories of the unabashed deep penetration I’ve experienced of my body and self – all that the darkness squeezed out – told in amateur stream of consciousness style and interwoven with bits and pieces of all my friends who wait to greet me in my solitude in the form of books, films, art, and music.

Tales of my delicately sordid life, dispatched from my solitude. I think on the topic of each Steppenwolf would have agreed with Bob Dylan in saying, “you must pick one or the other though neither of them are to be what they claim.”

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