Suppose to Never Know

I began writing what and where I was told. My first diaries came structured and efficient. They assumed time occurred in predestined, rational patches. I was frustrated by how I would fail at slotting my life away. So I made days up. One diary, full of gaudy, elaborate headings, assigned one paragraph per month to your worst day. I would sort through my memory, disappointed at the pure lack of rhythm. My days oscillated within themselves to greater extremes than the tides. I thought I envied whoever could look back and recognize that one day which stood out as if highlighted black on the calendar. And so I wrote, along the efficient, formidable lines, the day I hurt myself. It seemed practical and with an inarguable honesty. I imagined someone might look through the pages and turn to me with alarmed curiosity, inquiring further. I felt sure I’d be able to pull out a day from among the rubble of dislocated time when I’d been hurt. I imagined tending to a scraped knee or rubbing away a potential bruise. Those mysterious days, lying between lie and truth, became my clarity. They were a sensibility that I relied on, like footholds in a rushing, vicious current of furious time.

                  Gradually, however, I have come to despise the simplicity which evades me. In a frenzy of revolt I now buy boring black notebooks and fill their empty pages with my raw complication, like the fiery spread of chaos from one being to another. I give meaning to my every sensation, I breathe life into each stale emotion. I delight in contradicting myself every month, every day, every moment. Often I finish an entry more confused then when I began. Furious triumph.

I sometimes think of life as a search. I once swore that I would never encounter an experience or feeling that couldn’t be translated to the page and I have never been proved wrong. I’ve believed every moment holds reasoning, every failure means deserving. When my own words fail me I tear through old magazines and pull out any word that fits. They come from makeup ads and article headings: Illumination, Boldness, Mystery. It is as if each one completes some desperate vein in my body so my blood can run whole again. I paste them onto the page: there, a senseless explanation of all I just can’t explain. Still I search for definitions, rolling displaced fragments of life into sense.

                  Talking fails me more. Something is always lost between my thoughts and whatever sound the air produces. When spoken, I find words are often corruptible, injected with insincerity or misrepresentation. So, I’ve decided, there are things not to be spoken: the whimsical occupations of heart and mind. The sudden thoughts that keep us alive. Words are packaged and presentable, ready to be received. But my pages are raw and repulsive, like open wounds that refuse to heal. In them I make discoveries every day, revelations of half-true clarity that exploded like forest fires in my mind. Soon subdued. I carry along their ashes always, remembering what I knew for a moment.

                  In my family, winter evenings are like respites for our rhythmic lives. The world outside becomes lost to us in murky darkness so that only our own house seems to harbor life. One evening lingers in my memory. Like so much of my life it is beyond logical explanation. I can’t link reason or sense to what happened. Not a single word of meaning was passed, no gestures or promises made. It was a night beautiful to me in its quiet, breathtaking way; one I will remember for its simplicity, like a calm lake in my mind. That evening the house was full of our parents’ guests. There is always an informality to these gatherings. It’s in the casualness of their words, their jovial swearing and ridicule. Quick, knowing smiles and sincere, throaty laughs. That night they sat in the other room, plates full of decorative finger food, exchanging witty banter, their language cutting one another’s air cleverly. Men wore thin, cashmere turtlenecks under refined, coffee suits. Elegant perfumes and modestly outstanding jewelry lit the women up from each seat they occupied.

                  On those winter nights, the house adopts its own circulating life. I love our house- its breathing, living sounds that emerge from the walls and floors. Sometimes it seems to rain only on our roof. A mysterious, plucking noise coming from above when the rest of the world stays dry. At night you can hear water hiss through the walls, the motor grumble coming from the basement. The unbothered hum of its foundation.

                  I was lying by the fire. As the flames exhaled themselves upon me like an invisible, scorching breath, I oscillated between vigilance and dozing. I let my eyes open or close as they decided. My sisters came and lay down beside me. Our bony, sockless feet mingled close to one another, long and wiry. Dusty chocolate hair poured around like syrup, slipping across our chins and foreheads, yawning over our shoulders.

                  Between sisters rages a violent chain of overwhelming closeness and torture. We blend into one another, read each other like planets swinging in a single orbit. The same gravity is pulling us together and igniting our furious partings. When a sister cries, you feel yourself shoved into the enigma and desolation of her tears. When she hugs you something slides into the empty place of a puzzle. Whole. We feel each other’s lies like cracking whips and face one another’s sorrow with an inherent sense of duty. Sometimes we resent the burden of this love. Then we slide away, do something to further print our own selves into time. But we always come back.

I watched a log shrivel and grow scales under ripping wings of flame. I watched clumps of dust crumble away and the woody skin become lost in air.

                  I thought of myself as a blend of a sought knowledge and mysterious impulse. Within me lingers a fragility, a vacancy, a needed completion. I’m sometimes frenzied by irrationality, dancing and drowning in rampant confusion. Though occasionally there is a rest, one gentle sigh and a sudden balance as if you are untied from the inside out.

                  In one moment it came. That night. Another revelation, the settling of a thousand images and of my raging, desperate spirit. For one instant I built my world, I felt the numb comfort of falling into place. I was filled with endless, scattered pieces that suddenly wove together. I began to make decisions about what I knew while the fire heaved and stretched its sputtering fingers higher. I saw a river running through my heart, pumping into each narrow crevice and then spreading out. It ran into my fingertips, it circled my jagged heals. I felt it set a rushing rhythm. For me to live by. It carried memories through my ears like driftwood; songs I knew once, phrases in foreign languages and smells that attached me to the past. Rules and truths that I had made and rejected floated by like dead leaves caught in a current. I was sinking in one instant, lost to the ignorance of a soaring, complete joy. For one moment, one heave of the river, I supposed I’d never really know.