Notes from a Room

‘I got busy for lack of anything else or better to do, because I had to. I still couldn’t read, so I started making plans. I picked a place to move to. I’d move to the other side of the country, from one coast to another. That would keep me busy until I’d have to make another plan. It was a question of having a plan and staying busy. I worked, and in between I started packing all my shit, gave some away, sold what I could, walked around with wads of cash in my pocket. I biked here and there, ran odd errands, called people, carried bags across town with sweat running down my head, bought train tickets, arranged viewings, took notes, made and remade lists, called more people, put things in piles, taped up boxes, stayed busy and moved the line forward every day. I flitted about on the outskirts of the hole, around my fear of the hole, my fear of nothing, which still pulled me into itself from to time. I took my pills, drank my wine and stayed busy. It was all about having a plan and keeping busy. I couldn’t think much beyond the next practical task, and that was how it had to be, I supposed, that was how people lived, how they got through life without topping themselves.’

‘Sometimes things came together when you needed it, even when things seemed to go wrong. Sometimes things went wrong in order to come together. There was a current beneath acts and events that could carry you or turn against you. When it found me, or when I found it, and it brought me towards other people, I called it grace, in the old style.’

‘In the days that followed I realised I knew even less than before. Less than nothing. I knew had to reject what had brought me there and build something new, but how do you build on nothing? That’s not right either. It wasn’t a question of having the power to reject or rebuild. It was as if the deserting force that had brought me to this non-place knew what would happen all along and was still putting my thoughts in question. It was rejecting me, rejection was its nature. But sometime later I crossed a line and took a different direction as the storm somehow drifted behind me.’

After all things could come together, it sometimes happened. There was some interplay between what you did and what happened to you. Currents could gather under the froth of your failure. Or a strange synchronicity would reveal itself, as when random numbers start to form a pattern. It wasn’t that you made your life (only an idiot would believe that) or that life made you: but sometimes acts and events coalesced, pulling you into the world and the world into you, hiding you in the world’s inner space.