(i am rereading bluets, so of course i must talk about language)
In the beginning I could not speak. I am nestled in my mother's womb, soft and unknowing, and her fingers are splayed over her stomach, or lips forming song, or arms encircling her torso. This is, of course, hypothetical. I had no language for thought. All I know was that I was loved.
The problems begin at birth. I was always a crier: crusted streaks down my face, a sob forever caught in my throat. Strange, the universality of it. It is our first plea to be known. I cried at being forced out of a crib, in basement shadows, in the vastness of a room without a nightlight. Each day of kindergarten I cried as my parents wrenched me from the car, marched me to sterile classrooms, left me huddled beneath a desk, palms shielding me from view. I do not know where this pain originated. From the beginning I must have had something to say. What do they say about neurodivergence? The isolation of a sensitive temperament, the chaos of your emotional landscape, the urge to speak it out of you. I have always felt fundamentally unmoored. Standing at the edge of a spiral with the desire to imbue everything with its weight. Attempting to dissect the bloody mass of my pain, tear apart its entrails, so it could be as real to you as it is to me. When I learned language it was something like coming home.
Writing is the most intimate of gestures: a way of pressing my mind to yours without knowing if you’ll feel it. It is something like unveiling a secret world. When I read the words of even intimate friends I am struck by what they hold inside. A stifled passion, some muted softness, a crevice unseen. To write is to court exposure—to lay yourself bare with the faint hope that someone might be reflected in what they read, or otherwise, to armor yourself in language, so they won’t see too much. I am terrified of being known. In fiction I hide behind ambiguity, a careful web of half truths. The instability of a narrative, the rigidity of ideology, a roleplay of detachment, or madness, or truth. A wary defense against invalidation. In this space I am free to perform vulnerability and tangled contradictions and leave you to contend with the rest.
If you were to peer into my notes app you might find a place I cannot hide. I am overflowing with thoughts unspoken. Love letters and loose drafts of texts and birthday wishes, discarded essays and idle musings and spirals that buckle under their own weight. It is a strange place to visit, this grave of abandoned text. The fragmented attempts at catharsis. From The Red Parts: If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, I could—it all could—just disappear. How much of my emotion is founded? Leftover is the compulsion to comb over each line, excising the melodrama until the prose runs beige, or else leaving it flush purple. Each word is a plea for ablution. I go deeper. Marked as locked: An unspoken confession to family, the shape of a lifetime hiding. A skeleton of that last argument with a friend. Six pages of shameful agony sent to someone in an attempt to force a reckoning of my pain. (I was not being concise. Distilled it reads: why are you hurting me? please stop.) Apologies too stale to send, confrontations left unspoken. The urge, even now, to resurrect them. I am a guileless believer in language. To communicate is to risk misunderstanding, but also to make a bid for intimacy—to insist that the attempt is worth it.
It is idle to fault a net for having holes. I am thinking of the structural integrity of a sentence and the spaces that exist between words and the ease in which it all collapses. Time and time again my words have failed me. The error in translation, the gaps in self concept, the fear that stills your tongue. The quiet grief of shaping the abstract into speech and surrendering it to interpretation. I am trying to find the words to say to you. Do you remember the baths we took as children? Our tangled limbs and soapy water and the absence of any modesty? I wish to recapture that innocence, Eve before the fall, because I have since been corrupted. When I think of the space between us now I am reminded of the devastation I felt when I learned of the gaps between atoms and the reality that we can never fully touch. I want to crawl inside you, void space and time and any concept of material reality, until we are unborn again. I am imagining this world without language, toying with Wittgenstein, drifting in warm fluid, bodies sealed with wax, or else the space before conception, a hazy soup of primordial truth. I am imagining the unblemished heat of understanding, a dialogue of gasps and tremors, where the weight of my hand in yours is enough to transmute the depth of my care. Where there is nothing between us but the smoothness of an umbilical cord untangled, where I could unravel everything we cannot form into speech. That is a world where we could coexist without pain.
But in present day I am staring at strings of letters, a dustbin of essay drafts, each missing some vague truth, and I am left with nothing but the discordant loudness of thought and the silence stretching above me. The world is rigid and cold. My words are stillborn. I watch them blend together, ctrl+a, and backspace.
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