EPI(STLE/LOGUE)

The older I get, the more sharply I feel writing’s distinct power to revise history as much as record it.

I swam in the ocean today. I was feeling outside my body again, and I needed to do something to reclaim it. (This time, I was like a dissatisfied spectator a few paces off; maybe picture a farmer gazing sadly at his unwatered fields). You taught me this trick, for when the usual methods for knocking the cobwebs off don’t quite work. I use running, while you prefer sex, but the urge is the same: manually jolt ourselves back into place.

Also true is that I did it so I could tell you. Even as I strode into the waves I was imagining how I’d describe it to you, the shock of cold something close to glory, the pain like homecoming into my own skin. I wanted to talk about water and rebirth, maybe baptism. We’ve considered Christianity a lot––your attraction to it and my childhood enveloped in it. Five states and a week apart this summer, I wondered to you if I’m not still working to dismantle what the first half of my life built. What indelible shame was carved into me while I weighed my soul in darkened rooms all those years? Now I’ll confess that lately I fear I also miss it. At least the reverent stillness, the sense of being chosen. Anyways, I thought it was a metaphor that you’d like, even after three months of near silence. And then I couldn’t.

What I’m trying to say is, sometimes it feels like my life now is defined for want of your voice, my landscapes all experiments in negative space. No matter what I’m doing, I feel your silence. Does that happen to you? I can hear what you’d say about this or that jacket, how you’d cleanly anatomize each of my coworkers at the restaurant. The light falls across my desk differently, and most songs sound different too. What I’m trying to say is, it’s a particularly cruel irony that when you left you left so much behind.

—

The older I get, the more sharply I feel writing’s distinct power to revise history as much as record it. I know how you’re going to respond: sometimes story-truth is truer than happening-truth. I do love imagining sixteen-year-old you worshipping The Things They Carried despite its relentless masculinity. You and your eyeliner and Tim O’Brien against the world. But I digress. As I write this to you now I wonder if I’m not changing the way I’ll see our story.

It was always words between us, don’t you think? Our currency and art and altar and favorite sport. Remember how we talked forever, filling up rooms with it, the hours falling around our feet without notice? We walked miles and miles to make room for all our talk, stringing it across an entire city until the streets were alight with our sentences. You love the precision of language––how sharp and penetrating it can be, how elegant to cut and dissect with. I’d do anything to keep it coming, let your mind wash over me for as long as we had breath.

Then some conductor playing with cosmic railroad switches sent the world down the wrong track, and within a week we had half an eastern seaboard between us, instead of one dorm floor. I forget who sent the first letter, but I assume it was you. With everything wrong and gray and unbearable, I still had your words, and these ones I could even touch and keep. Did you know I stopped journalling entirely during those months? Every time I tried, I still wanted what I wrote to find its way to you, so it made more sense to get out a postcard instead.

Part of it was surely the idea of letter writing itself. We both liked the romance, how it felt like making meaning. I think it was Vonnegut who said we ought to write only to please one person. Open your windows to the world and you’ll catch pneumonia. When I slept in your childhood bed, I woke up surrounded by his collection, another relic of you before I knew you. 

— 

I’m moving, exactly a week from today, exactly across the country. Tacoma, like we planned. I don’t really know what it holds for me anymore––I was just ready to follow you. 

I told Rebecca during our last session that I think I should write my dad a letter to tell him about my diagnosis, instead of calling him (imagine all my hedging: I just think it would take the pressure off of him to, you know, respond right away, if he doesn’t know what to say. I mean I don’t expect him to, that would be totally unfair, but it will still be hard for me if he says the wrong thing, you know? And so I can say it exactly the way I want to because it’s important to me that he understands everything and I might mess up my words in the moment and). She just smiled. What’s stopping you from giving him a call right now? We’ve been talking about telling him for two months now, she said. Is this just another way to delay it?

But you get it. You had two months to pack for your own big move this September and did it all at five a.m. the morning of, your bedroom floor a hurricane of shift dresses. Maybe the crux of your battle with yourself is the fact that you need spontaneity and control in equal parts to survive. I’ve never met someone who yearned so inconsolably for such incompatible things. And plus, you’re the only person who understands the dad-thing, the sick-thing. Who can know but you? Who else would I even want to tell?

—

I think I’ve said before that sometimes all my writing feels like a penny circling and circling the funnel of one of those big coin collectors––do they have those in Maine, outside highway rest stops? I come back to the same stories again and again, trying to tell them the right way. Certain themes inevitably crop up, too: girls I maybe-loved, liminal space, penance, addiction. Since meeting you, though, I think I am the penny, and you my funnel.

I haven’t learned to stop writing you yet. Some days it’s tirades: the hurt armors itself in sweeping fury and I rail against your absence, your avoidance, the casually broken promises. Others it’s odes, when I can’t help but idealize you in precisely the way I know you hate. Most often, though, it’s neither. All I really want is to hand you all the small things I pick up each day and hold in my mind, let you laugh, inspect, show me something I’ve missed. 

I’ve never been to Washington, have you?

AUTHOR: Emma Eaton is a rising sophomore on personal leave from Brown. Until her return, she’s studying rollerskating and how to take care of herself.

ARTIST: Elon Collins