novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- epistle to dippy You don't want to be attached to your past in a way that you would want to stay there. - Kiki Smith January 1, 2012 Dear Baby, Sometimes a letter builds in me over months like a slow-moving virus. In pauses, I swear I can almost hear it percolate. And if I don�t monitor its progress, the fever takes me by surprise, and my day is felled by the need to write. The virus this time is your strain. It is natural to miss you, to feel heartbroken, to feel perplexed by your mental illness. Over the year since you left I kept telling myself this, but still this letter compiled its parasitic paragraphs. I am okay. I am slowly getting better. The PTSD passed, and it took me a while to get used to life without trauma. I am trying not to blame myself for everything nowadays; when flashes of the past come, as they inevitably do, I relax and let them play as if an outdoor movie projected onto the brick cheek of a city building. And I try not to wince. It�s funny to realize that the past keeps rearing its ugly head, and you must work to stay moored in the present, thinking towards the future. I pushed you out and things got better, but the awful totality of the past was still rumbling in my blood. I cleaned and found a photograph of myself ten years ago, fat as a dumpling with awkward androgynous hair, an arm around my mother, herself then half the size she is now. I cleaned my parent�s side room and unearthed my zine collection, suitcases filled with old letters, artists books and sketchbooks. Photographs of Lori, drawings by Jakub, photobooth pictures of me and Evelyn in Santa Cruz in 1994. Notes Buck wrote me during class. The tides of emotion I attempted to circumvent with the calculating eye of a librarian. I tried to see my collections as things, rather than extensions of myself. And then I was able to note the reaction, and move on. I came across flats for zines, and I was able to note the improvement in visual communication over the years, and this shocked me, stripped of ego as I now am, to see proof of endurance and improvement in my messy past. There is very little evidence of you in these parts of me � in my deep past. Your involvement only tickled the outer layers. We didn�t really know each other at all. But I remember loving you so completely, I could look at you and dive into your whole life. It felt like I knew you, then. And I am not forgetting how absolutely terrified I was with your cold, calculating version of reality. The trick is to accept the past�s place in your life, because obliterating it is na�ve folly. And when I think about you, my tongue is tied and different places within me alight, and all I want to do is paint. You�ve taken all my words and given them this virus, and I hope that with this letter the fever breaks. I hope one day to meet a man who wants to be with me, not just use me. You were the first man I ever loved, yes, but you were most definitely not the first man who tried to use me. I have begun to treat the series of memories that crop up associated with this strain of thought with an objective observance; I think about how this pattern came about, its roots and influences. Again with the city movie projector. At least I can thank you for the research outline. I said I have begun. It�s taking a while. I am going to be okay. Your life was not interrupted at all, you insidious prick. Looks like we soldier on, in our respective interior climates. Maybe one day I will lock eyes with a beautiful man who likes to tinker with music as I write, or maybe we make art together, maybe we live in the French countryside or at least northern California, maybe Vermont, a man with an iron stomach who will eat anything I put in front of him, a man who takes out the trash and who isn�t an angry drunk. My whole body longs for this, even thought my heart seems too shellshocked still. Maybe the shellshock never goes away completely, nor does the desire to have a man with a shoulder I can nuzzle in bed. You were my Vietnam. Nobody won.
Love to you, elka 11:52 am - 01.01.12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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