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bending_sickleDiane Schoemperlen (2008)
- There is some truth to this, like all lies. - Lynn Crosbie, “Lies”
- I am a writer who cannot write. There are many reasons for this.
- I’m supposed to be thinking about the book I’m supposed to be writing...but I am thinking about you instead.
- My fingers keep sliding off the keyboard in the heat. When I try writing by hand in my notebook instead, my pencil gets all slippery and my hand sticks to the paper. I cannot write in this heat. My head hurts in this head. My glasses keep sliding down my nose in this heat. I get a prickly rash all over my body in this heat.
All I can think about in this heat is this heat.
- I said, I have not had much tenderness in my life
- You begged me to trust you. And I did.
- I did not take this as a sign.
I knew it was simply the natural, ruthless order of things.
- I said, I’m flattered by the way you see me.
- All those rap songs sound the same to me: lots of swear words mixed in with the singer’s pledges of undying love for God and his mama.
- There are also the crows, which have been squawking at each other since daybreak. If I had a gun, I would shoot them. Yes, I would. A murder of crows.
- To tell the truth, I’ve been avoiding the grocery store lately, mostly because of the music. […] But more often than not, the music makes me fearful. More often than not, it leads to sniveling in the cereal aisle, whimpering in the baked goods department, and, once, downright sobbing in the produce section.
- I read somewhere once that a cat’s motto is, “When in doubt, wash.”
- How much more time can I possibly kill with these simple organizational tasks?
- Ellen Gilchrist’s book I Cannot Get You Close Enough
- Your gentleness made me fearful.
- We agreed that we had neither one of us ever felt this way before. (Now that I’m older and allegedly wiser, I know that people say this to each other every time they fall in love. Each new love cancels out all the old loves and each new love is the best love, rendering all previous loves delusional and counterfeit, sorry errors of judgment.)
- Maybe that’s what soulmates are: the answer to all the questions we didn’t know we were asking.
- Stay cool, stay calm, stay alive.
- I sent you the address for the Sound Archive of the British Library, which features recordings of all manner of bird songs [...]. There are animal sounds too […]. You could even listen to the sounds of an approaching thunderstorm or of pinecones splitting open in the heat.
- pregnant mare urine farms
- Archive of Misheard Lyrics
- Moonscapes: A celebration of Lunar astronomy, magic, legend and love by Rosemary Ellen Guiley
- Sometimes it was as if my life had become a story I was telling you, as if I were now living in a novel or a movie and narrating every movement I made for you and only you, my singular and spellbound audience.
- But me being me, with my obsessive need to be understood (and my equally obsessive fear of being misunderstood), I couldn’t stop trying to explain myself and my own apparently puzzling behavior.
- I said, For so many years I lived behind a wall, and right now I want to put that wall back up again.
You said, Please don’t put that wall back up again.
- Your emails were always speckled with ellipses: sometimes the standard three dots…sometimes four, five, six, seven. First I thought they were charming, your dot dot dots. When I told you this, you were a little embarrassed. […]
I said, Please don’t be embarrassed or self-conscious. I love your dots! In them, there is breathing, sighing, thinking, smiling, laughing, teasing, stuttering, longing, hand-holding, hugging, sometimes just a drink of coffee, sometimes unshed tears, sometimes kissing, sometimes composing your thoughts or yourself...those dots are very versatile! Those dots are punctuation revolution! So please don’t hold back...send me your thoughts…send me your dots!
But later: They were maddening. I would stare and stare at them, as if they were a kind of hieroglyphics or Morse code that I would be able to decipher eventually if only I tried hard enough. But trying to read between the dots was even more exasperating than trying to read between the lines, even more impossible than trying to make sense of those emails from strangers that are just long nonsensical lists of unconnected words. I would peer and peer and peer at your dots, trying to figure out all you weren’t saying, all you were withholding, all you were hiding, all the secrets you were keeping from me, all your sins of omission.
- I would like writing to be my refuge, my anchor, my salvation. Once, it was all of those things. […]
Apparently, I have no refuge.
Words fail me.
Or I fail them.
- I said, Yesterday was a long day in which many things that should have been simple were complicated, may other things that should have been pleasant were frustrating and annoying, and still more things that should have taken ten minutes took two hours! It was one of those days.
- You said (as you’ve said many times before), You are such a good writer! Words just seem to flow so easily for you. You are so lucky. I envy you that.
I did not say, Luck has nothing to do with it. I spend hours and hours working on these damn emails to you.
- Wild Goose by Mary Oliver
- She said, impatiently, It doesn’t mean anything…it just is.
- I said, I don’t think I’m asking for a lot. And yet even the little I’m asking for seems to be to much.
- At first I wrote to you every day anyway, whether I heard back from you or not. […] It took me a long time to realize that every time I did this, every time I clicked on that Send button, I had put myself right back into the same position again: waiting.
- My friend Lorraine has a saying on this topic [hope] too: “ I’ve given up all hope and I feel a lot better now.”
- I wanted you to have some sense of what it felt like to be the one waiting. I thought it would do you good to suffer a bit, as I’d been suffering. I thought you would appreciate me more if I wasn’t always right there chirping away at you, regular as rain.
- I said, Although you are the most important thing in my life right now, I often feel that I am just a speck in yours.
- I had an epiphany about the fact that there are a goodly number of public places in which crying is acceptable, train stations definitely being one of them, also bus depots, airports, churches, hospitals, cemetaries, movie theatres, and possibly bars very late at night after half a dozen drinks and a few too many sad songs (although not in grocery stores, as I had already ascertained).
- It occurs to me now that you were not peering at my so painstakingly chosen words the way I was perpetually peering at your infuriating dot dot dots.
- The difference between thinking and worrying is that when I’m thinking, I’m mulling things over, rolling them around in my mind so I can see them from different perspectives (not an unpleasant experience and frequently productive), but when I’m worrying, I’m fretting and fussing and getting myself all in a knot (not so pleasant, not so productive, causes high anxiety, which then feeds on itself like a chain-reaction collision and just gets worse and worse).
- I said, I’m trying so hard to get my ducks in a row. To Kate I said, Every time I get my damn ducks in a row, they get blown right out of the water again. Bloody feathers flying everywhere!
- Another [time] you said it: I’m not the only guy in the world, you know. Like a child I cried, Take it back, take it back, take it back!
- We agreed that we both felt all this was a test. But we weren’t sure what we were being tested on.
I said, Maybe we’re being tested on different things.
- You said, It is not my nature to share my feelings and problems with everyone.
I said, I am not everyone.
You did not reply.
- I am thinking about how many things there are that if a writer puts them in a story with the right words, the right tone, and the right timing, they are very funny. But in real life, those very same things were devastating.
- dudgeon
- I wish there was a Take back button on my computer that was as easy to click on as the Send button.
- I said, I am so emotional, also obsessive, neurotic, anxious, overly sensitive, easily hurt, easily upset, sometimes nasty and bitchy, and, at the moment, very depressed.
- After I jubilantly shared this passive-aggressive information with Michelle and Kate, Michelle said, No matter how you handled things, it would still have ended up exactly the same.
I found this very consoling
Also liberating.
- The only way I could explain it [writer’s block] was to tell them there was only one story in the world for me at the moment, and this story, ourlarge, fiction seems so small and irrelevant. Michelle said, Someday the words will come back to you, and then you’ll know exactly what you have to say.
- Finally, I understood that the relationship I’ve been having with you is entirely different from the relationship you’ve been having with me.
- I said, It has been my experience in life that if you push a person away long enough and often enough, eventually they will go.
- You said you were devastated to hear what you had put me through. (As if this were the first time you had heard of my pain.)
- I did not say, Don’t talk to me about devastation. I’ve cornered the market on devastation. As well as on many other conditions that also begin with the letter d.
Desolation.
Desperation.
Depression.
Despond.
Despair.
- I said, I don’t want to have anything more to do with you ever again.
This may not have been entirely true before I said it. But once I did...it was.
- I decided to get on my high horse and ride.
- ...Tom Thomson’s famous painting of a northern forest with black pine trees in the foreground and a still river shimmering in the background...
- uxorious
- Passive-Aggressive Homestead
Ibid.
