Category Archives: Writing

One can tell a lot about a person, at any given time of their life, from how they sleep: how hard or easy falling asleep is for them; whether they can sleep anywhere or only at home; the postures in which they sleep; how they awake, and how quickly they rise — quite apart from their own statements, let alone the content of their dreams. For some people falling asleep is a welcome respite from tiredness or discomfort, for others it’s a nightly grapple with separation, with death. How much, for example, can lovers not tell about each other from their behaviour before, during and after sleep? I never told you the thoughts I had when, after we’d made love, unable to sleep as I knew I would be in that unfamiliar room, with this still unfamiliar woman beside me, I looked at you sleeping so prettily, your mouth slightly open, your face trusting sleep. I never told you I didn’t sleep that night. I’ve never told you that not a day has passed since then that I haven’t seen your sleeping face in my mind every time I try to fall asleep. Sometimes sleep, when it comes, is a relief, sometimes it’s an enemy that takes my precious image away and replaces it with random ones; and always, when I awake, after I’ve turned in bed all night, your face is clearer to me than ever, and I never want to get up but stay in this dream forever.

Hiatus.

Sometimes you speak to me, you become almost human, then we speak together. Moments of pause, a gathering together to be celebrated. Moments of ecstasy which make me all the more aware of how you elude me even though I’m made of you. And beyond you? What made you?

Who are you? My self beyond my self. What ties me to and unbinds me from the world. These very words, and the spaces between them. This act of writing, which I’ll never understand. In the beginning was you. I fell into you, I fell into a state beyond repair. And beyond you? Unknown upon unknown.

The word before the first word. The word after the last word. Before and after you. What is it? Impossible silence. The clearing beyond your clearing.

But the very words with which you address me are my words, you tell me. They are already the words with which I address myself. That’s already much, you say, so much that’s there’s little more for you to do, here in the clearing I make for you, when you choose to address me. But how can I be sure this is your voice? I say. And what is this ‘little more’?

They say the mark of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. And me, when I address you over and over expecting a different result, am I insane? What happens when the result is the same no matter what one does? When the same non-answer stretches out around me each time I address you? Do I stop? Do something else? Go elsewhere? But there’s nowhere else to go. Or is there?

What do I want, why do I write, why do I address you? I want you to reveal yourself in me, to reveal yourself through me, in these my words. I’m in you yet outside you, how can this be? So easy to get tired, to give up. Ink marks on a page, obscure in a century. Scratchings in rats’ alley. Is it possible that they both hide and reveal me, hide and reveal you? In writing: inside and outside writing. The first word: bite of the apple. The horror that brings you near in your distance from me, over and over.