Tag Archives: love

Somewhere: Between sheets

“Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”

– Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

I once wrote that I’ll know I’m free of you when I stop listening to your song to fall asleep. When I stop searching for your arms in everyone who shares my bed, stop searching for your sideways glances — always appearing to look just beyond me, too afraid or uninterested to look directly at me. When I stop digging back into the depths to feel again that imprint that is us together, like a small relief left on a down cushion. We were an imprint, you and me. It’s all you let us be and really all we could be. I know that now. We were something beyond time, only to exist in a liminal space, not fit for the relentless rhythm of life.

I don’t think of you anymore to fall asleep. I think of my white room somewhere in Greece, or Spain, or maybe Portugal or Italy — I haven’t decided yet. For some reason it’s always in Greece when I visit it, the only country of the list I haven’t been to, perhaps that’s why.

It’s not bright in my room but it’s cool with white stone walls and through my window, though not a large window, I can see the blue of the ocean expand before me. In the morning I can hear the sea birds and I have an unlacquered wooden table that faces the windowed wall and an equally old wooden chair, the seat polished and worn down from years of use. The floor is also stone, maybe wood — no stone. There’s thin linen sheets with delicate lace patterns on the bed, not the loose modern linen you get these days but the thick fibered heavy starched linen of your grandmother. On the floor there’s one shabby threadbare rug, I think of all the many people who once stepped on it, wherever it was — now only I step on it.

There I can breathe and I wear dresses and I smile at strangers and take the time to look people in the eye. Because there I’m whole and I can gently smooth out the impressions they leave on me — they don’t chip pieces of me away. I have so much to give and it pours out of me. Here I don’t mind the light, I live in harmony with it.

The way it dances in the morning rising over the water and quiets everyone around mid-day with its brilliance. Its firm, fiery hand on you in the afternoon — flattening you and forcing you to move slowly, methodically. It’s pressure which makes it impossible to rush. If you fight against it you will never win, only throw yourself into a tizzy of your own making — better to save face and accept your fate. So you wait and watch, and in the evening the shadows get longer and still you wait. Until the final hour and the dusk brings a tender melancholy of another day passed, another day coming soon to take its place. The relentless rhythm.

Here I rest lightly and freely. I can hear myself breathe and my hair is always thick and wild and full of sunlight and salt and emotions left to linger. Here they are allowed to stay, or go, just as they please.

It’s true before I had my room I had you. You weren’t much light but you beat the darkness. I liked your simplicity, like my room you were traditional, blank, and sparse really — straightforward. I didn’t have to hide and you let me be.

Your song, how did it go? The buffaloes? The delicate guitar picks and droning harmonica? “All roads lead to roam with the buffaloes. And the buffaloes used to say be proud of your name… be what you are… roam where you roam… do what you do. You’ve gotta have a wash but you can’t clean your name. You’re not called Jimmy you’ll be Jimmy just the same. The keys are in the bag in the chest by the door, and one of Jimmy’s friends has taken the floor.” We never figured out what it all meant.

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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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