As I wander the tiny boutique shop off the main street of town, my eyes skim over all the various outrageously over-priced items: fancy stem ware, stuffed animals, books, candle holders, scented bath crystals, etc. I stop in front of a small table adorned with assorted charcuterie boards and tiny cheese slicing knives which are accompanied by a package of cocktail napkins (8 for one hundred thousand dollars). The napkins are white with bold black cursive lettering which reads – and I am not making this up – “Shut Up, Liver, You’re Fine.” Aside from being really stupid, the napkins make me cringe in another sense entirely. I find myself imagining actual people at an actual festive event, attempting to *party* around these pitiful napkins whilst trying not to think about their disgusting livers which are, apparently, speaking to them? Begging for mercy? It’s so gross for so many reasons, not the least of which is that I guess we’ve now graduated to a next level kind of collectively kitchy suicidal alcoholism? Like literally on purpose offing ourselves in plain view at social events? Cool, cool, cool.
I’ve not had a lick of alcohol in 188 days. I run like the wind and sleep like heaven. But I still wake up and live in this same bizarre, ignorant world which makes so little sense to me, drunk or sober. I try to wrap my head around going back to the office and working as the country I live in descends further into absolutely horrific, chaotic madness. The thing is though it isn’t totally chaotic in the sense that it is not uncalculated or random. Any semblance of a rational, sane society is willingly dismantling itself right before our very eyes. We take the lunacy and give it ammunition. We take the innocent and we make them weaker and blinder and dumber still. And idiotic we stand laughing and snacking and partying all around it.
In real life I despise the guy and everything he stands for. He hates women but disguises his hatred with grand performances of fake affection and by ‘disguises’ I mean hides it in plain sight for anyone who is paying the slightest bit of attention to notice which admittedly seems to be few and far between. But in my dream, I’m hugging him tight and crying on his broad sculpted shoulder as he soothes my hurting heart. I couldn’t tell you why it hurts so much exactly but I tell him it’s because no one understands me and that’s close enough to the truth if I have to use words to convey the jumble of emotions which lies tangled in a ball of ache somewhere between my chest and my throat. I’m inclined to explore the chakras there for clues to unlocking my highest potential but don’t because I am exhausted. I don’t want to lift a finger or even my head from the pillow when the day rolls out and tumbles in through my window, splashing me with its somber gray light.
I change my tampon and its like a fucking murder scene. They say these days in these times I shouldn’t put this information onto the internet but I am old enough now that my cycle is all kinds of over the place so whoever is *tracking* the intimate details of my very basic life can fuck all the way off. I pull on my hooded sweatshirt in an attempt to disappear my bloated creaky body entirely, put the coffee on in the hopes of feeling less dead inside, and wonder about all the girls out there who are already pregnant against their will and staring down the barrel of carrying a life to term in a way that can only end their own. Forced smiles have become forced births and we act like that is such a stretch from one to the other. We have made the girls and women into machines.
Across the street, the neighbors have strung-up a shimmery pink sign that reads Welcome Home Baby Girl and there are pink balloons everywhere, too. We all congratulate the young father who is hugging his little three year old before returning to the hospital to tend to the new mommy and I feel sick to my stomach. Maybe it’s because I’ve got my period or maybe it’s because the thought of getting pregnant literally physically sickens me. It always has. Baby making was never my calling and by calling I mean my desire. There is no such thing as a ‘calling’ we just want certain things for ourselves so deeply they won’t stop bugging us until we either get them, do them, or breathe our last breath trying to make happen one or the other. The problem is that capitalism tells us what we want is a cute sundress delivered overnight, the sexy glimmer of immediate satisfaction thereby stifling our much grander more beautiful, imaginative, and dangerous cravings long enough to bleed us dry of the cash it might require to obtain them.
Increasingly, and I am not about to say anything shocking mind you, the “United” States has become a most menacing place to live out one’s life or what remains of it. While you are so busy being secretly terrified of getting caught unsuspectingly in a mass shooting as you go to collect your Cinnamon Toast Crunch at the local grocery store, the high court slashes a line across your rights to do with your body what you decide is best for your body and that’s the end of it. Everything is a lie built on top of the biggest lie which is that white men get everything they want because they are entitled to take it and women are nothing at all except decorations or easy bake ovens meant to either pop out infants or die in the process of attempting to fulfill that duty. We are little pink balloons and ribbons which adorn the bloodiest of battlefields.
I was away for a week on vacation which was nice. I’m glad I am home now to sit alone with my laptop, my thoughts, and my words. Not writing for a week always feels very strange and sad. Even the morbid thoughts need somewhere to go. Especially the morbid ones. When I speak to people about the dire state of the situation here in the States I don’t seem to get anywhere. People are tired and they have developed a callousness or a fake facade so they don’t have to feel the obvious way we should. I get that. I do that sometimes, too. But I feel rage of a quietly destructive kind. Not the kind which takes screaming to the streets but rather which stands in the corner watching and plotting and seething with acute disregard for obedience. I feel like throwing away everything I have just to try to remove the stench of the life I have surrounded myself with. The life that made all of this oppression possible. All the shit I have bought and nonsense ‘safety’ I have bought into which made me such an easy target. Patriarchy chugs right on along because for the most part, you trap yourself inside of it all on your own. As is so often the case, the women do most of the work by gruesome design.
Sunday morning. Church goers, murders, theives. Liars, beggars, winners and losers and little to be done to change any of it. People post to Instagram their happy little ideas and bits. Photos no longer being good enough to really capture the essence of nothingness, each and every share is now a whole movie reel complete with intro and finishing credits. My god. I do not understand what we have become but it feels much too small and far too distracted like we are animals obsessed with pouncing upon a beam of light. Not because they know where it came from or why or what they need to catch it for, just because the illusion of something solid to hold onto appears to be climbing up the wall that happens to be in front of them. Much like this writing, in fact. It wanders and goes nowhere in circles and I know any editor would curse it all to hell. But these are my circles which may be nothing more than spirals of death and hot air yet I am so sick to death of dancing to any other person’s tune. Least of all those with any authority in this fucked up world at all.
It’s weird, all the literature about addiction and recovery. Alcoholism is psychological, they say. No, physiological. No, biological. Alcoholism is genetic. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is. Well, that’s partly true but it’s all very misunderstood and the doctors fight with the psychiatrists and the researchers don’t believe the evidence and some people have this kind of personality, or that character trait, or kink, or bend, or curve. Or whatever.
I was trying so hard to understand. I really was. But even after reading mountains of books and doing hours and hours of online research and taking in the AA stuff, it feels very much like it felt at the beginning. Nobody knows but they all think they do. Some believe in God and some are offended by God (I’m leaning toward the latter if I’m being honest). I think I liked things better when I just decided alcohol was definitely somehow strangely and mysteriously killing me and I was done with playing along so I quit.
If I stopped counting days, would it matter? If the days and nights became weeks and months which fell forward into years, who would care about numbers in the end? I think it was Allen Carr who asked the very poignant question: what are recovering alcoholics counting towards? Towards nothing happening?
I get that. I mean if I had an allergy to penicillin I just wouldn’t take penicillin anymore. I wouldn’t sit around counting days between turning down a random drug I know I cannot have. It all gets a bit head-trippy is the thing, I guess.
Now truth be told, I am a person who likes a morning ritual so I almost don’t mind that I have this new AA app on my phone that offers me a daily “spiritual reading.” But the repetition of ‘God’ and then God as ‘He’ is fucking exhausting. And the readings are so aloof and vague and condescending. It feels like a lecture or going to ‘confession’ like I did when I was a kid. It’s all sweaty and freaky and you feel like you are squirming with worms inside because you did something bad but you don’t know exactly what it is. And the longer you bow your head and listen you start to feel like the reason you are there at all is not just because you did bad things but you are bad things. Very, very bad, abnormal, wrong things.
I’m not here for it. Half the reason I fucked around with alcohol in the first place was to escape the bullshit patriarchy of organized religion and all the ways it destroyed my sense of worth as a woman. By ‘organized’ and ‘religion’ I mean simply anything or anyone who refers to God as He. Do not start with that shit it is so glaringly disgusting. You think ingesting alcohol is toxic? Try ingesting hate disguised as redemption. I do not need that mess coming back to me now. Not when I am just finally getting free of all the old baggage and trauma that held me hostage all my life.
I realize that if you are not a person who ever became addicted to drinking that all of this may sound pretty bonkers. But I really couldn’t stop unless I made stopping my first priority. My number one focus. The foundational endeavor that would rebuild my entire life.
In a book called Under the Influence, the authors James R. Milam, Ph.D. and Katherine Ketcham talk about how alcoholics process alcohol differently in their bodies than nonalcoholics. That alcoholics do not want to stop drinking once they start, whereas a regular person will not want to keep drinking once the sedative effects of the alcohol start setting in. Nonalcoholics only want the early-on effects, the stimulant, the happy energetic euphoric feeling you get from one or two. After that they feel sick or disoriented or whatever and this turns them off to having any more to drink. The stopping happens all very naturally, so to speak.
There are all kinds of scientific reasons for this cited in the book. And if you believe it that’s fine. And then of course maybe we believe what we want to believe about ourselves, our chemistry, our makeup, our genetics, because then we are not to blame for any of it. And then it can at last be explained and your frustration about what the fuck is wrong with you can be laid to rest. But we do not know what we do not know. And even if you’re like me and you read everything you can get your hands on to try to understand, you still don’t know.
I know I’m not drinking today. Or any day. For the rest of my time here on this planet I am not fucking with alcohol anymore. What I don’t know is if I am supposed to count days. Or continue researching. I don’t know if I am supposed to build my life and sense of purpose around a disease that may or may not be a ‘disease.’ A ‘flaw’ that may or may not be ‘real.’ There are people out there who just stop. They just fucking stop and that’s the end of it. They move on and live and never go back.
All of my thoughts rush forward in my mind like they are trying to get my attention by speaking over one another. This sensation has become a recurring thing. At first it is upsetting because, as a writer, my immediate instinct is to try to get them all down on paper but the thing is, I guess, right now, I just can’t.
I can only write when I can hold one thought at a time, hold each up and inspect it, turn it, observe, record. It needs to be at least somewhat quiet enough for me to think straight enough to get through the tangle of thought-voices and pluck one. And so this mania of thoughts could really scare me if I let it. This mangle of loud thoughts all at once. But I have to trust that if I let it all be, eventually all of it will sort itself out and I will write what needs to get written and leaving the rest will be okay.
I think about my first session with my new Alcohol & Drug Addiction Counselor which I attended last evening. Please let me tell you that writing that sentence feels as surreal and bizarre to me as sipping my morning coffee whilst watching an elephant peddle merrily down my street on a unicycle and yet I am trying to be cool about it like this was all meant to be my life but I don’t think that’s true, honestly.
It was not ‘always meant to be’ in fact it was never meant to be if you asked me a few months ago. A few months ago, I could not even use the words alcohol or sober or recovery or addiction or any of the rest of it. Part of my drinking-self-survival was to pretend all of that did not exist because for me it didn’t. It couldn’t. If it did I might need to deal with it and fuck knows I was in no condition to have to do that.
I tell my counselor man about the flood of thoughts I keep experiencing all the time, to which he responds by nodding encouragingly and calling them ‘racing thoughts’ which I let him get away with it but it isn’t right. They aren’t ‘racing’ like some kind of strongman contest with each other, they are rather like adorable but hyperactive gremlins all cramming into the same doorway at once trying desperately to burst out of the tightness of my mind and onto the freedom of my page.
They want to say what they have been dying to say and finally, mercifully be heard. Each one believes earnestly in itself and trusts me to understand. And I feel very strongly that I owe them that. That I am here to make sure these creatures get a stage. A moment in the spotlight or sunlight or whatever you may say.
I tell my counselor about my darkest times. I choke on tears for the better part of an hour as he sits quietly and patiently and attentively and calmly, like he may even have expected this, all of this, to unfold exactly the way it is. I, on the other hand, feel like a wild animal that can only express what its truest nature is and cannot think beyond that very basic primal premise. A creature which can only be what it is and do what it has to do. Drain itself of the poison it has known was inside for decades but was afraid it would kill off the whole entire earth if she let it out. The poisonous thorny wretchedness that she believed sincerely she had to hold in because better she be killed off quietly like a good little beast instead of cause any more trouble for a single blade of surrounding grass.
What on earth was my self-worth before I got sober? What on earth made me so goddamn afraid all the time? Afraid to not drink and afraid of what the drinking was doing to me. Afraid, afraid all the time, either way. I ask the counselor man if I am an alcoholic. I ask him this right off the jump at the start of our session. I want answers.
But he is wily and wise and diverts the question. Some kind of magic therapeutic hat trick takes place and I find myself telling him about the extremely dangerous nature of my multiple blackouts. He raises both of his therapy knowing man eyebrows and repeats back to me so I can hear it from the outside looking in: Oh, so you had blackouts... I emphasize to him like I am sort of proud but sort of not that I am able to verbalize this: Yes, yes, many many blackouts.
He tells me when we speak about a drinking problem what we are speaking about is a loss of control. That’s all it is really about when you get right down to it, beyond the labels, beyond the stigmas and diagnoses. Are you or are you not in control of this thing that is holding your life at knifepoint.
He asks me if I think that blackouts are something ‘normal’ people experience on the regular. I am stupefied by this question. Because it is so stark, so blatantly naked I don’t expect it, and because the answer comes to me not smoothly, but rather like a crooked person in a faded unbuttoned trenchcoat stumbling down the sidewalk who arrives to me ragged, bewildered, and out of breath.
No? No. No, I guess I don’t think that blackouts are a normal occurrence for normal people. But I just never thought about that. I suppose I was too busy getting myself into or out of one. And then that makes me not normal, not the same. Not a regular drinker but also not a regular human. There is something very wrong about me. See, I knew it. I knew I wasn’t right. That I didn’t fit ever and still do not.
All my life I have felt outside, strange. Not ‘unfit’ exactly but ‘ill-fitting.’ I didn’t quite fit into this life and it didn’t quite fit around me. Sometimes I found that thoroughly and utterly depressing and unfair. Other times, in my art and my writing and my secret inside world, I reveled in it and rejoiced for it. I found it to be my favorite thing about myself, hands down. It was the thing I wouldn’t let anyone touch or take away from me. That uniqueness. I wanted to show it in a way that I didn’t lose it, in a way that would make it multiply and never leave.
All of the poetry I ever wrote was in defense of my otherness.
My weirdness was my wild. My grotesqueness, my beauty.
It occurs to me that never before in my whole life have I ever told anyone at all about my addiction or the very scary places it took me. Never even so much as alluded to it. Never even came close to dealing with it as a serious problem. If I ever had inklings, I would stomp them out as fast as they flickered up. What I didn’t realize was that stomping out a flicker, no matter how fast I could manage to do it, couldn’t make the flickers non-existent to begin with. That even if they only got one split second of oxygen, they could still burn a discernible cigarette-sized hole through my grim facade.
And all the while as I fucked around playing games with myself, none of my drinking was normal even when it appeared as such. To others or to me. This new revelation feels like melting. Like snow off a pine-covered hill or ice cream on a blazing hot sidewalk in the middle of a blistering summer afternoon. Like the springtime coming and not being able to stop it. Like the sticky unfortunate end of a decapitated treat that was charmingly doomed from the start.
As I blow my nose rather unceremoniously, I realize I have dumped all the stories I could think of onto the head of this properly formally credentialed stranger because I just needed it to come out. I cannot stop crying and I cannot stop apologizing for crying. He says he understands it is very hard for me to talk about these things. He is correct but far too mellow about it all. It is hard for me to talk about my alcoholism the way I imagine it is hard to be in a hospital gown in a hospital bed right before they wheel you into the OR to give one of your organs away to someone you have never met. You know it is a good and benevolent thing to do, that a life can be saved, and in the hands of an expert surgeon, it can be done. But it still feels insane and frightening and like there’s a chance you will go through it all and it still might go horribly morbidly wrong.
All this to say that trying to weave my way through recovery is newly complex and odd for me right now. Having my own ‘addiction counselor’ feels like it is a miracle or whatever they tell you about miracles, you know what I mean. They seem ridiculously impossible and also obviously true at the same time. I can’t even believe I am doing this. It is like I am me but I am also doing things to save myself that feel vastly bigger and braver than actual me is capable of carrying out.
Right before we end the session, counselor man, who is himself a recovering drug addict, asks me where I’m at ‘spiritually.’ He wants to know if I am willing to entertain the idea of an otherworldly-world and without him having to say it directly, I surmise he wants to discern if I am open to accepting the ‘help’ of a ‘higher power,’ a term which grates on my last helplessly exposed recovering nerve for reasons I will surely expand on in good time.
In the moment though, trying to appear dutiful and resolved in front of the very kind guy who just let me blurt out all over him rivers and rivers of hurt and pain and silent sickness for the first time in my messy unrelenting life, I write down the word ‘God’ in my notebook. As I do so, a heavy wave of deep and thorough and swollen exhaustion presses all the way from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
There’s a guy who wrote a book called Kick the Drink… Easily! Fellow soberlings have raved about it, so I purchase the thing and when it arrives in all of its neon pink glory, I pull it from the box and immediately note its comical heft. It’s three hundred and four pages long. Is the irony lost on everyone but me or am I just a snarky asshole? Anybody’s guess. Doesn’t matter. I toss it atop a stack of, I don’t know – eighteen or nineteen books of the same or similar topic, which teeters like an awkward multicolored tower in a Dr. Suess-type dysfunctional fantasy land.
Quitting is a mind game mostly, or at least it seems to be for me. I’m fifty three days into this wilderness and it is the hardest thing I have ever done. Perhaps I was not prepared or I was naive or whatever the case but here I am having ‘made it’ this ‘far’ (whatever tf that means) and more than anything I do not want to go back. I never want to be at day zero again. Except when I do. That’s the head trip. I coast along like a proper boss until I get tackled out of nowhere. Pummeled to the ground by an invisible threat no one around me can see but I can feel pumping through my veins as though it would bulge right out of my skull and explode all over the room.
Perhaps if it did, more people could understand how all encompassing the cravings can be. They are impossible to explain with words to someone who has never lived through or with them. This is frustrating especially to a writer. I want to show you with my words. I want to show you everything. From the blissed out euphoria of the first crystal clear mornings of sobriety to the shocking, gripping, maddening bite of the itchy cruel desire for just one more.
A couple things help, though. Humor is one but it has to be funny not dickish. Deep breathing is another. I do it as soon as I remember to which is thankfully becoming more often. It’s sort of second nature once you get used to folding it into your routine or maybe what some would call your ‘tool box.’ As in the arsenal of practices which help to mellow you out when your inner booze monster is climbing the goddamn curtains, hissing and jumping like a maniac. I don’t know what the man in the Easily book will tell me but I am skeptical. For better or worse, I am my entire self now. There’s no chemical additives to make me anything other than one hundred percent Allie, as quick to be sarcastic and cheeky as to be tender and frightfully intimate.
Before I grew up and became Allison, my family and friends used to call me Allie. Back when I was free and scrappy and most happy and alive. Before I knew what it ever meant to get trashed. Or to blackout. Or to completely lose control of my innocent body and brain. In all the sober circles, I go by Allie now. It feels right to throw it on back to a time when I was new and clean. Maybe it’s silly but I really do want a fresh start. When you have an addiction, there’s a lot you’ve probably done in your life that you do not remember. But there are also some parts of who you are that you never, ever forget.
Writing away the ache is a real and true thing. It is, that is to say, it becomes, a lifestyle. The pressure builds and builds as with any addiction until you can no longer manipulate your mind or body away from what you most desire.
From what you must say, what must be said to keep you from exploding.
How devastating it can be, then, when you come breathless to the page and find yourself full of nothing, empty hands, a mouthful of anguish which opens to dead air.
It is as much a coping mechanism as a ‘passion.’ Makes you wonder if those who are so prolific are those who are also most troubled, most bothered, most distracted by things yet unwritten.
What must go on inside the psyche of the poet which so stirs, compels, claws, needs. The burning desire to express oneself while wrestling with the arrogance of that, the heavy need to reveal oneself and the shame which circles that very real need, stalking in the shadows, stabbing mercilessly, if futile, at the light.
“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually.” – Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories, Essays on Poetry
I don’t know if it is this way for all poets, I know only that it is this way for me. That the sense of longing for my art is constant, it is sensual, and plays out not just in my mind but in my body as a romance, or a compulsion, I am not sure they are different things.
What I know in the pit of my stomach, at the center of anything inside me that could ever be considered holy, is that if there is to be life there has to be words.
There have to be words enough to bring about an end to the brutal, exquisite, relentless urge, or at least a temporary reprieve.
The hands of the clock slide down the wall as shadows dance playfully in the quiet fading light of evening. Creaks in the floorboards remind me of haunted things, each sudden sound a touch on my shoulder and I could swear someone was there.
The silence gets to you, toys with your senses and knocks your sense of perception just off enough to make you wonder whether or not you are losing your mind. These days, of course, how would you even know.
Do you remember what it was like to be a kid in the backyard right before a rainstorm? How the little hairs on your tiny arm would stand on end at the first distant rumble of thunder, the smell of the earth mingled with moisture, and a rush of electric excitement would course through your veins? Those moments felt so alive to me, more alive than so many moments now all grown up.
Something of the magic falls vacant inside. What it feels like to have faith in a universe which can still surprise you in a way that you can hold in your heart forever.
How long ago was forever?
Sipping my wine, I look out above the empty street. I watch glittery specks of light pierce the dark as the stars come out all over the globe. The curtains blow in the sweet summer nightwind against my cheek.
When I close my eyes, I can feel something in the atmosphere as it is breathing.
A sound like footsteps in the hall as a kid lying still beneath the blankets in the dark. I could have sworn someone was there.
Little dark clouds are forming out over the horizon in low clusters, as the purple hills off in the dewy distance lay themselves down before the pale morning sky. The sun just barely skims the trees while I sit sipping coffee on the grass of a small park on the outskirts of town. The air is still and smells of the empty kind of clean, and it feels good to be alone even in lonely times like these.
I am lucky to feel this way, of course, some are not so lucky by far. Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of solace, perhaps in the name of a new way of making art, my latest obsession is the contemporary author Ottessa Moshfegh, who is making a splash because her works are oddly gripping in their merciless dark humor, focus on the aimless, and as she describes in her own words,
“My writing lets people scrape up against their own depravity, but at the same time it’s very refined… it’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit.”
Makes me wince to have that image shoved at me but there it is and it is a very keenly self-aware thing to say. She’s right. I’ve just finished her 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation in which the nameless narrator is a young woman, hip, pretty “like an off duty model” living in NYC. Both of her (very cold, very emotionally detached) parents have died and she lives more than comfortably off of her lavish inheritance on the Upper East side of Manhattan. She’s depressed and riddled with existential angst and ultimately decides she must not only start her aimless life anew but be completely reborn, transformed into an entirely new person, not on the outside, but on the inside.
In order to do this, she decides, she will need to hibernate, as in spend four months essentially unconscious, sleeping. She finds herself a lunatic doctor willing and ready to prescribe exorbitant amounts of drugs to “cure” the narrator’s made up “insomnia.” The whole thing becomes something of a high stakes artistic experimental endeavor to see if one very messed up girl can start over anew by essentially sleeping her way into a new kind of existence.
The final page of the story describes a scene which occurs on 9/11. I’ll not disclose the ending but suffice it to say there is an epiphany which takes place in such a way as to shock and arrest the reader into (perhaps) feeling lucky to be alive, even in a life which often feels overwhelming, aimless, useless, and terrible.
The whole experience of the book was like looking into a dark tunnel, reaching for the poetic black void, seeking to escape into what feels like freedom but also terror. Looking for a hand to hold but never quite touching it. Whatever this feeling is, be it longing or simply the nature of humanity to reach, to search, to seek, I have it in me. And to read of it in such a bizarrely crafted story made me feel both more and less crazy, both more and less alone.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Moshfegh reveals that an artist friend once told her,
“Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you can’t just fit into the mold—you have to break the mold, blow people’s minds, do it perfectly, and then not care . . . Because if you care you’re not cool, and if you’re not cool you’re shit.”
Moshfegh, of course, cares a great deal. In fact, she goes on to explain her perspective on creating while describing why she ended a relationship with an ex,
“He told me in the middle of an argument that being an artist was something that weak people indulge in, and I made him leave, because I guess what I feel is the opposite of that . . . I think art is the thing that fixes culture, moment by moment. I don’t really feel a reason to exist unless I feel my life has a purpose, which is creating. So I feel—I’m not going to call it pressure—I feel I have a karmic role to play.”
Writing strangely as karma. Writing, even if it is dark and nearly shapeless, as the point, as the purpose. This is intensely fascinating to me perhaps because I was brought up to believe there were very clear lines between what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad,’ what is worthy and unworthy, worthwhile and a waste of one’s energies and skills, moral and immoral. But the mysterious Moshfegh inverts everything I have been taught to believe about what I am “allowed” to do with writing, with creativity, with art.
It is so rare for me to find an author who truly sinks her claws into me, who will not let me get away from her madness so easily, but Ottessa Moshfegh is such a creature. Meanwhile, I toss my empty coffee into the trash, brush the grass from my shorts, and head off into this life I’ve got pulsing through my slim little veins, a life of nothingness, wilderness, bliss and grime and grit.
Hello out there, I hope that you are doing well. I thought I might read something for us today, a little excerpt from my book Luminae which was released a little over a year ago now. This piece is titled ‘Had I Never Met You’ and I wrote it with much love and affection for someone who made a dramatic though fleeting imprint on my psyche, he awakened so much in me, the way I saw the act of creation, the possibilities and infinite power of word, voice, music, connection. I hope you will enjoy it.
It’s all around you, the way the vacant words falling from the mouths of those who do not understand separate and resuscitate themselves, surviving only barely by the eating of your breath.
You like the rainy days because they break you and cradle you just enough. I can tell you wear anguish and destruction like a shield, that you believe safety is a gag and a blanket, something you win by paying for it with every aching fiber of who you want to be.
When you smile I want to pull the flowers from your bleeding chest and plant them in the darkest corners of my mind. Never to forget you, you and all of your wilderness, all of your seasons of life and skeletons and death. A wall of tears is suspended in the air, at any moment about to crash along the surface of your limbs. You can tell me all the dirty things, I have no interest in robbing them of you.
The moment I met you I knew we had known each other for a very long time, it felt like my eyes resting behind your eyes would have made perfect sense. The way you saw the majestic and the terrible things I could see and did not turn away. I am always so taken by the souls of those who find silence to be rich, the ones who slide their bodies into a quiet room and listen for the things most people throw away by moving too fast, protruding too intrusively, talking too much. Saying nothing about nothing when I hunger for so much.
They shuffle and speak in low tones as you drift past their illusions and up into the blue electric sky. It’s not that you don’t care it’s just that there has to be more than this, something with a deeper soul must exist if only people would let the darkness into the light and the light into the places where they think there is nothing more to see.
And as they keep trying to sell us eternity, we fade farther and farther into retreat. This moment, the one catching you and I by the gap between heartbeats, this is the only one we need.
So there was my little reading for today. Thank you for having a listen, I am always so grateful for a chance to share with you. If you are interested in purchasing my book, or even just taking a look through the previewed pages, they are all available now on Amazon, paperback and also Kindle versions. Wishing you well, stay safe out there. Cheers.
I was born a poet. I have been writing poems since I learned to write, it is in the dna. I like to say I am a poet’s poet, because I think a lot of what I write about is meant for other poets, because I understand them the most. I know their struggles and dreams and why it is vital for them to write no matter what. We are kindred. There aren’t that many of us and we have a unique adoration not just for the poetry itself but for the craft of poetry. We are so stupidly happy that poetry exists as a thing and we are drunk on it when we are in that kind of freedom zone. Poetry is a place we go and in that place we are more ourselves than anywhere else in our whole lives. The pacing of the lines, the dramatic and mysterious subjects, the way we massage and play with the meaning of the words. We were born like this. We don’t have to be convinced of the value of poetry. We live it. And so I think with my book (Luminae) one of the things I am most proud of is that it is not just a book of poems, it’s a collection of poetry for poets. I hope it serves poets truly well. I love us for honoring the beauty and power of the word in a world that seems, right now, hell bent on ruining that kind of honest expression.
Allison Marie Conway 