Notes from a Room

Something went wrong when I turned up. What was supposed to happen seamlessly happened like a break. What usually happened didn’t happen and that was what defined it: as something that failed to happen, that broke apart instead of coming together, or broke apart the instant it came together. I turned up too suddenly, or you hadn’t been prepared well enough, eighteen years later I still know as much as you do, that’s to say nothing. We’re reduced to a series of empty images: the foundations hadn’t been laid, the ground was barren and cracked. Nothing could be built from my words, the seeds wouldn’t take root. Words, words, words, that’s all we became. I botched up the experiment, like Frankenstein, or the guy in The Fly.

My arrival in the year it all went wrong opened up a space between us, between us and the world, between everything. I arrived in the manner of a rupture, a break that made all your previous breaks, not in themselves dangerous, look like child’s play. I didn’t grow out of you in the slow natural way, wasn’t that the problem? I made you cryptic, though I was sent to make you straight, and you in turn made me cryptic. We still don’t know what we’re talking about, we don’t know anything. My words didn’t take root, didn’t root you to the world. So we both became my words, each in our own warring way. Do we even know who’s who? Do we even know whose words these are? Yet there’s something to be said for that break after all, we have to think this because we can’t think otherwise, we have to think this to stay sane, there’s something to be said for breaking open, being broken open, leaving yourself open, being left open, like an open wound.

Sometimes we feel we haven’t even begun to understand ourselves, to understand anything, to think, to be. We must become aware of the urgency of all this, we agree, we must become our own most merciless critics so we can begin to understand, be, think! But most of the time we’re lazy, we agree – in fact beyond lazy! Most of the time we’ve convinced each other, like silent partners in a crime, that the best way to spend time is to waste it.