What is it I Imagine Her to Be

What is it I imagine her to be—or to be thinking, as she gathers wood, gathers flowers, gathers thoughts that will complete what she has started? I wonder if those thoughts include me; if she has gathered along the way curious things which seem somewhat out of place in that particular environment. When she gets home she will empty the contents of her basket onto the large dining room table—already cluttered with unopened mail and small plates freckled with crumbs from things that were breakfast but maybe shouldn’t have been. She looks at the crumbs for a moment, grabs a small handful of flesh from her belly, and wonders if she will ever care again about which pants she does or doesn’t fit into. She remembers the things in her pockets and empties those also onto the table next to the contents from her basket. 

There is a small fire still burning in the hearth from earlier that morning, the warmth slowly receding back to the place of its origin. The initial warmth that embraced her when she first entered the house has also dissipated and she wonders if she should add another log before she begins sifting through the odd things she has gathered. 

Her house is filled with odd things, or perhaps we only think them odd if we don’t understand their context.

She walks to the small kitchen that is separated from the living room by a narrow strip of blue linoleum. (once, she cupped her hands to her eyes and looked at the strip so that everything else around it disappeared. She imagined lying in a field—sun-drenched yellow—looking up at the wide blue vastness above her…) She has forgotten about the fire waning in the hearth and thinks about tea instead. There are so many things unfolding in her mind; they reveal and settle, drift off, and disappear. Sometimes an image or a thought stays in one place long enough to be contemplated but never caught. 

When her tea is ready she sits with it and looks thoughtfully at the objects that are slowly reconstructing her life. 

Each morning, well more precisely around the time when the first dawn light sends creamy shafts to the edge of the blue linoleum, she puts on her coat and steps out to collect more clues to how she got here. When she returns, sometimes by lunch, sometimes well after dinner, she will empty one or two satchels of flora and yet-to-be-identified objects onto the dining room table. Then she will make herself a cup of tea and sit down in the chair where she finds herself at this moment. 

There are so many things that make up our world that we hardly notice. So many things that shape us, that exert their small influence, like a breath, or a thought of desire never realized. These things are strewn about her table, whispering, sighing, trying to reach her. She picks up a seed or a scrap of metal. Either have histories but so different from the other. She tries to place herself inside each object, imagines being a thing other than herself. She wonders if the things around her absorb her presence and if she can reabsorb some part of her that she has forgotten. 

The ground is still damp this early in the morning and she feels the earth move softly beneath her feet as she takes each step along the narrow path that takes her deeper into the forest. She looks back and sees that the light from her window has grown dimmer in the shifting and shimmering atmosphere between it and where she now stands. She often wonders if she will find her way back. She wonders this as she turns and again begins walking deeper and deeper into the moss-covered nowhere. Here, the light doesn’t enter until well past noon but even then there are places that remain in shadow. She hopes there are places within her that will one day come out of the darkness, she hopes she will coax her hidden places to light. What if we fail to remember before it is too late? What if we run out of time? She wishes she had given her memories to others for safekeeping. She wishes she hadn’t carried the burden alone. What she didn’t give freely, she hopes had been taken without her knowledge, that this place, these things around her, held on to those parts of her she has forgotten. 

She seeks to find herself in every little thing. She has given herself over to anything that may have something to offer. She knows she has forgotten so many things, perhaps everything. What little she does remember might not be real, and even that small kernel of her idea of herself may belong to another whom she also has forgotten. 

She is angry with herself for letting this happen but tries also to be gentle with her thoughts, knowing that redemption is found only through forgiveness. 

The air remains cold, the sun barely dents the frigidness of this day even as it rises higher on its arc before descending again into the dark portent of tomorrow. 

She is reconstructing her world in small increments. She is reconstructing her life in fragments. Can anything be the same if it is torn apart and then rebuilt? Does a copy always degrade, does it lose some essence of the original even if it is built from the same wreckage? How can she know the outcome when she has forgotten the source, how can she ever know when or if the reconstruction of herself is done? She does not know who she has left behind but she knows that she is not her original self. She is compelled by a space that has been emptied, she is driven by that which has been lost. 

She examines a small bit of metal that has been altered by years, maybe decades, of seasons. Woven into or just beneath the rust and dirt she can make out faint bits of red and yellow paint and perhaps the curve of a letter or remnant of a word. She strokes a small scar near the webbing of her thumb. 

My life is a spiral; I am riding it without complaint yet I have no idea where it is taking me. I find myself, my life, being somehow superimposed over hers. I am experiencing her life almost as if it is mine and I am becoming invested in the answers she will find; hoping perhaps that in time some of my own questions will also be answered. 

How do our lives become entwined with others? And here—I am not even sure of the origin of this connection. Am I dreaming? Are we both? I think we carry a twin inside, one who is living a life other than ours, and ours is a life other than theirs. Perhaps both my twin and I have lost our way and we are coming together to reestablish our direction. I watch her, trying to recognize some familiar trait that only the two of us could share. But there is another explanation more outlandish than this—that she is no twin, that I have simply somehow stumbled into the turbulent stream of another’s life. I am a guest in another’s house. “I’ll be so quiet you won’t even know I’m here”, I must have said. 

All thought is the residue of failure…

Why has this thought just entered my mind?

Or is it a thought that has just entered yours?

I feel that I am present where I shouldn’t be, I feel that I have been invited by mistake.

How do we do this? How do we live? Am I even asking myself the right questions?

I don’t know, I don’t know. 

I want to follow you, watch you, and cling to every answer you find as if they were answers meant for me as well. 

Is it true that our faces if split in two have a happy side and a sad side? 

I watch you closely to see if both your sides might be sad. I think that is the case for me, that I reflect endlessly the sadness my face can no longer hide. 

But what caused this? When did I turn away and let that radiance escape? Happiness is buoyant, kinetic. It wants to escape the gravity of its host—and if we let it, it will leave us with the weight of our sadness, the mass of our grief. I don’t know how to live without this distance, without this longing. Give me too much comfort and happiness and I panic and destroy. No wonder I let my happy side go, no wonder I am here—a ghost, invisible even to myself. 

The wind blows reedy chords through the keyhole, ice coats the windows in streaks. You place one object next to another, then above and below. You are constructing a world of objects, of memories. You are constructing a life from things discarded and forgotten. To forget is the anecdote to all our failures and regrets. We so obediently follow the rules of remembering, accepting the notion that we must get our facts right. But nowhere is this written, nowhere is this law (I have done my research on this!). If we forget; if we failed to supervise our memories or tuck them safely away—if we let them run free and neglect to tell them how to return, we willingly banish ourselves to a future that is already forgotten before its begun. 

I am holding on to something. 

I have found my way here to you, but have forgotten how I came. All this repetition of words! All of this, and then nothing.

She moves about the house like someone who has lost her sight but has remembered the placement of every object. She is tentative yet deliberate. She acts as if she knows but there is always a moment of brief hesitance in every action. She trusts, but not completely. There is a lesson here for me and I make a mental note of it.

I have written so much but have never really said what I want to, what I need to. I am beating around the bush and asking far too much of you to understand my meaning, to know what I am unwilling to just come out and tell you. After so many words you should feel that you know me but I am confessing I have steered you down the wrong path and I am sorry for deceiving you. I don’t trust my memory; there is something that doesn’t seem right. I look to you, well, the one I’ve been watching, to get me back on track, to focus, to be honest about what I haven’t said.  

It had been many years since she was last in this place. It is where she grew up and her parents, now deceased, left it to her by default; they had lost touch with her for more years than they could remember (though she had been under this roof, under their care). The letter had arrived in late May but it was only two weeks ago (it is now nearly Christmas) that she finally opened it. She read its contents with no emotion, wondering mostly if it had been sent to her by mistake. The letter stated that after much investigation it was determined that she was the only living relative—the daughter of the owners of this house. It also went on to describe the effort taken to find her and that having failed all other efforts to contact her, this letter would act as the final attempt at contact before the state would seize the property as unclaimed assets. 

She had no memory of this house, of her parents, or any other aspect of her life prior to the accident that reshaped her life at 24. (or assuming it was an accident, even the origin of her estrangement from her former self was lost in the same event.) She is like me. In so many ways we are similar. There is the obvious difference of our sex but in most other ways we are forgotten enough that no one will comment on assumptions I might make. Perhaps this is why we are here together; forgotten enough so that we might, together,  remember.

I am trying to reconstruct a theme…a scene or a template of something that seems familiar for a moment and then is lost. If only I could capture it and show it to you in the palm of my hand as my fingers slowly open, still trying to contain it. 

I think the only true difference between us is the degree of our desperation to remember. I think you are simply curious. You seek what will always still remain separate from you, even when it is reconstructed. But for me—I am trying to re-braid a rope that is rapidly fraying; a rope that is my only tether to a chance to change the outcome. 

When she first read the letter, she had given little thought to her past. It troubled her hardly at all not having memories of childhood or family or any of the traumas that her friends constantly recounted as the origin of their troubles. She felt free of these entanglements and thought it more of a blessing than something to be troubled by. But the letter also shook something loose or began to thaw something that had been held in ice and was now slowly beginning to stir. She began to dream of unfinished things, or desires that remained just out of reach. When she walked from her apartment to a cafe or the market, she often swore she saw someone she recognized disappear around the next corner. 

She began to wonder about that house and the life she may have discarded there. She began to feel a hole growing beneath the surface. 

When she called the attorney who sent the letter, arrangements were made for her to sign papers and be given the keys to the house. The process seemed to lack gravity, she thought, much less even than joining a gym or renting a car. She tucked the keys in her pocket, folded her copies of the signed paperwork, and left to walk the nine blocks back to her apartment. At block seven her steps began to slow. She felt like she was dragging something behind her and instinctively turned to look, knowing even in the action that it was a ridiculous notion that something large and heavy had somehow attached itself around her ankle or to the bottom of her shoe. But nonetheless, she came almost to a halt, somehow making it those remaining blocks back to her apartment without succumbing to the weight of this invisible but impossibly vexatious burden. 

The next days were meteorologically difficult. 

The next days she barely moved. She held the key in her palm until her sweat made it almost float. 

The hole growing beneath the surface continued to grow and the volume began to eclipse the things that were not empty. When we refocus on the space between things we realize that everything is defined by what it is not, by what is missing. 

I think maybe we should all stop talking. Talking is like a fan that pushes away everything that might tell us something if it is left to linger in the otherwise stale air around us. When out of nowhere we smell something lovely and beguiling…what is it, this scent that seems to have no origin? How is it we can come upon such a startling and unexpected beauty when we are not expecting it? I think we are wired to form opinions about everything. It is the first impulse that kicks in when we are exposed to anything at all. 

    …wait, what is it you said?

    I know you don’t quite understand me but I’m here to help you.

    Please give it just a little more time. I know it all seems so much to take in, as all things that 

    leave an impact generally do.  

There is so much chatter in our heads, so many voices trying to make sense of the world around us. We bleed into space these noises in our heads, we need to be known by any means possible.

How much then should we allow ourselves to be influenced? Is this irony, that we should strive for nothing more than to influence others, to make them see and acknowledge our presence, our “right” (not accident) to be here while at the same time resisting anyone else’s similar influence on us? 

My story is a story that has never been written, as is yours. My life is a life that has never been lived, as is yours also. Between the two of us, we have experienced so much but it is just a speck of what is possible. 

I was a child within a child, a dream of what could be without the means to become. I was a world within a world without a star to foment life. What will become of what will not be?

In your apartment, before you came here to reconstruct your life. You often sat in the chair by the window. There was one spot bathed in light, even in winter, and you sat there—the sun streaming over your body filling your eyes with bright contentment. I think I saw you sitting there once as I passed your building on my way to someplace I don’t remember. I think I saw you and felt that contentment too, for a moment, as I passed. What if the light that touched you touched me also? What if, in that moment, we were superimposed upon one another, our images burned onto the same plate? I know that I am somewhere else, that I am this invisible thing here and another version of myself in a different place, solid and unaware. My life would be what it was meant to be, composed of the things I would do if I had taken a route other than the one that took me past your window and into that transformative shaft of light. 

Well, this is how I remember it. This is the story I tell myself, the story I tell you.  It may be that others remember things differently and it is, like everything else, only one interpretation of many possible others. But is there anything else I can do, any other way for me to proceed? 

The day we begin to see ghosts is the day we begin to see the truth; and the truth is different from memory, different from what we have lived, different from what we might remember.  So is this what I am seeing now? I may not be clear about what I mean by ghosts. I mean those phantom things, those hidden things that occupy the spaces we choose not to occupy. They are the other side of things, of experience, of memory. They are the necessary opposites, the things that unify and carry the parts of our story we would rather not recall.

And here is me, old now, at the end of what I can possibly imagine. These ghosts are showing me the parameters of my being. I am not endless, as I thought  I was, though the otherworldliness of my illuminators seems to defy the very limits they want me to understand. But nonetheless, I see/feel the end more clearly than the beginning and this tells me something whether I want to believe it or not. 

It has been two weeks since you came here. Why do I know this? I have not been here as long as you. I arrived after you had already settled in, maybe it’s been a week, ten days at most. You have gathered so many things, already putting them in boxes which you have labeled “definitely significant”, “possibly significant” and “to be returned to where they came from”.

You are surrounded by things, surrounded by boxes, surrounded by objects you should remember but don’t. Have you begun searching in this space? Have you begun to uncover the hidden things beneath this roof, within these spaces you once occupied? There are things we leave behind without knowing, things that if we came upon them again would leave us with a sense of deja vu, would have us trying to remember, suspecting there was something here that once contained a part of us. 

We choose the things that are real—if reality is a product of our memory. And what else could it be? How could our lives be anything other than what we remember? I cannot convince myself that reality contains anything “real” at all (if we have subjective authority over what we deem objective truth). What greater agency is there than to always be free to invent, to describe things as we see them? 

But how did I get here? I ask this question over and over. It is becoming the only thing I think about, it occupies every moment. Every movement of my body is accompanied by the thought of how it could possibly exist in this space, this time. This reality did not seek my permission to become. This awareness did not ask my permission to exist. And yet it does, with or without my consent. So it occurs to me that whatever agency I/we have, exists only in response and relationship to what already has become… 

I am having such a hard time with poetry. That is, I am having difficulty reading something that is trying so hard to be something that it’s not, or something different than it is, or trying to hide what it really is behind something it thinks you will find more appealing. I am having a hard time with myself, that is, I am having a hard time being myself, having a hard time being not what I am not. But I think about what I soon will be, it is always soon right before it happens. I think about when I will not only be something I am not, but actually nothing at all. Really, I am thinking about death—I am not thinking about poetry at all. 

Why do I subdue myself? Why do any of us tie an anchor to our feet? Even in my current state, I am afraid to reach you. I hover in the corners, secretly hoping you will feel my presence. I am so self-conscious, so concerned. But I have already seen that my trepidation was misplaced. 

I’m afraid I have used you, I’m afraid I have lied. You are a surrogate for my own grief and only now can I no longer bear the estrangement I feel.

How do I hold on to the essence of a memory without being incapacitated by the grief of the loss it describes? 

I rely so heavily on my ability to deny.

So I don’t know how, precisely, to proceed down this path.

I guess what I’m saying is, how do I live without being crushed?

What I really mean is, how do I stay standing in the torrent of these tears?