(I am not writing this with any particular person in mind.)
1.
A room. A room will do. Four walls, a ceiling overhead, a floor underfoot—everything that's needed is here. The smell of dampness, old wood, a hint of salt from the sea—all of that too. It was here before, it will be here after; it matters not to the room whether anyone is inside or not.
Take this for granted. Or take it that you have taken it for granted, meaning you have taken it for granted once more, as one does every day. In truth, there is nothing really to be taken for granted, and yet take it. To carry on, you must assent to something. Even if nothing exists.
A window. Beyond it, the sea, or what passes for the sea in these parts. Something grey—like the water at a river mouth; neither river nor sea, neither fresh nor salt. In between, the color of tin—of an old bucket. The middle is what is true. What lies between the river and the sea—that is it—heavy as lead, dim as smoke; neither coming nor going; doing what it must, in its own way, which is to persist. Whether you look at it or not, what does it matter to it? It will endure; its nature from birth is this—to keep going.
Like breath, like the throb within the chest. Those things that obey no command of yours and never have—the sea does not obey, the heart does not obey. Now you understand in your bones what you did not understand before: that no one ever wanted to know you. There was a time when it seemed the questions were real, that answers had worth. That time is over; it ended before you even noticed it ending. The real thing happens when your back is turned. Attention itself is blindness—whichever way you look, there is nothing there. Most things are like this. All things are like this. To notice is to exhaust—that is the eternal rule.
You are in the room. You know this much. You can trust your senses as much as can be trusted, which is not very much. But it is enough. More is not needed. Enough to carry on. Not enough to know—it never was—but enough to carry on. Let that suffice.
A bed. Narrow. A few inches too short; your feet stick out at the end into the cold air. Made perhaps for a child, or for one who has learned to curl up—as a snail learns to curl within its shell, for one like that.
You have learned. It was no difficult thing to learn. The body can adapt; the body is skilled at this. More skilled than you, far more skilled than the person sitting silent inside you. That one never adapted. Not ever. It stopped. And the body goes on, adapts, curls up, persists.
The body does not know it persists. That is its strength. Your knowledge is your disadvantage—it is not an advantage at all. Call it a condition—a condition you did not choose, but which chose you, long before you could have said no. Which means always.
A chair. By the window. Wooden. Hard. Tilted slightly to the right. It too has given up staying straight, all on its own. It sways. Not a rocking chair, but the floor is uneven, the legs not all the same length. Shift your weight and the chair moves, back and forth, a little, barely at all. The smallest sway that can still be called a sway. The sound wood makes against wood—very faint, a creaking, creak and creak, that is all. Sway. Sway. Like the boats in the harbor, moored in cold water. Like a rocking you do not remember.
When the mind is elsewhere, the body rocks itself. In its own solace, to its own motherless lullaby—exactly that kind of swaying. The chair rocks you, or you rock the chair. Who rocks whom, let that question rest; the rocking itself is the point.
Coming and going, this way and that, never arriving, never arriving anywhere. The truest form of motion. It goes nowhere, arrives nowhere, wants not to arrive. Content with this, satisfied with so little.
Going and coming back, going again and coming back, to the same place, the same window, the same grey light. A swaying. Another sway. And again. Again. You sit there hour after hour, staring out, watching that grey thing. The sea, which—like you—is going nowhere at all.
Once, early on, just after you had stopped, when fear still lived in your body, when you thought your limbs might rebel and pull you upright, drag you back into that motion—you bound yourself to the chair. With a scarf. An old one; it had lain in a box under the bed, beside the tape machine. Whose scarf, who could say. Five or seven of them, perhaps. Long. Thin. Thread-bare in places. One still held the smell of mothballs. Years from the box had dried and settled into the cloth—the smell of time itself.
You bound yourself. One around your chest and the back of the chair, one around your waist, two around your wrists, lashed to the armrests. Not tight, not cruelly tight. Just enough to feel held—that tremor of contact, the way cloth wraps a child, the way earth holds the dead in its cold, patient hands.
The scarves held you in the chair against your body’s mutiny, against legs that might have stood, against feet that might have walked out into the world. They knew their work—the scarves understood: to keep you still, to block the going.
You sat there, bound, and the swaying felt better then, with the scarves. The tug of cloth against motion, the pull backward when your body tilted forward, the downward drag when you tried to rise. The scarves did their work—to stop you, to seal off departure. Your work too, it seemed. The two of you at the same labor—you and the scarves, both busy with the work of staying, the work that has no end.
You untied them one day. When the fear had passed, when your body had long since ceased even trying to stand. The stopping had ripened to completion; your body had accepted it. And the scarves went back to the box beneath the bed, beside the tape, to their rightful place.
The sea. Beyond the glass. It does not turn back to look, has never looked; it has no such habit. It does not know you are there. Needs not to know; knowing would change nothing. Like the room, like the chair, like everything else—things that know nothing. Everything but you.
You know. And if you didn’t know this one thing, perhaps you could live.
A hat. Say, a hat. On the table, or on the bed, or on your head. Somewhere—you cannot quite place it. It moves. It was on the table; now, look, it sits on the bed. You didn’t move it, or perhaps you did; you don’t remember. The hat has its own separate life. A bowler hat, black, or turning grey, the brim curled from years and years of being picked up—the way hands work without thinking.
The hat is the last monument to going outside, to an old custom—when you went out you wore it, when you returned you took it off. The hat has remembered what it meant to go out, even if you have forgotten. It sits on the table amid the rings of cups, waiting for a head—a head that no longer ventures out, has not forgotten, simply cannot. The hat waits. Waiting, whether you exist or not. To the hat, nothing matters.
Shoes. Two of them by the door, one standing upright, one fallen to its side, as if the shoes themselves never quite learned how to hold stillness, how to be unworn. How many days since they were worn—call it weeks or call it months. The leather is hardening, stiffening; touch it and you feel it becoming wood—the shape of the foot fading from within. Once the shoes held the smell of leather and sweat; now only dust. The shoes are forgetting the feet; the feet are forgetting the shoes. Everything forgets everything else, in the end, given enough time.
You tried once to put them on—recently or not so recently, who knows. The right shoe on the right foot. It wouldn’t go in. The foot has swollen, perhaps, or the shoe has dried and shriveled, or both. Force it in and it won’t come out.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, gasping, pulling. The shoe won’t come off, the foot won’t slip in—the two conspiring together against leaving.
I let it go. Unlaced it, or left it on—don’t remember. One foot shod, the other bare. Buffoonery, without reason, without stage, without audience, without that laughter without which a fool cannot bear his sorrow. No audience now, no laughter, only shoes by the door. One standing, one tilted, and two bare feet cold on the floor, going nowhere—nowhere at all. As always.
The coat. Behind the door, hanging from a hook. Long, heavy, turning from black to green to grey—everything the way it becomes grey. Hanging from the hook, slowly sinking under its own weight, from shoulders that aren’t there. The coat holds its shape in its own folds, the shape of being worn, or the shape of leaving.
Those three things together were the armor against the outer world. First the shoes, then the coat, then the hat. And then out into the air, into the world.
The coat would stop the rain, or pretend to. It was a little too long, dragging on the ground behind. Mud would cling, it would soak, grass would snag—the mark of having gone out. The coat’s hem bore a stain, or the mark where a name had been. The way a table’s mark disappears into the clutter of its pattern. The name has sunk, but lies beneath the water, now and then it glimmers.
Pockets. Deep ones. The hands would hide there while walking, stones would gather without knowing, things would be lost, found, lost again. Sometimes the same thing, sometimes different—a handkerchief, a coin, a piece of thread. The pocket too has its own history, like the table’s. The coat hangs behind the door, from the hook, will hang as long as the hook holds. The cloth grows thin, the thread loosens, green becomes grey. Everything the way it moves toward nothing, the way a river meets the sea. By the ordinary law—waiting and decay, silent, hanging from the hook.
The table. Between chair and bed, small, square, marked with stains—stains from setting down cups, year after year. Every stain a cup, every cup a day, every day a sitting. They bloom like a pattern in the stains, not quite a pattern. Scattered. Haphazard. Dense in the middle. Empty at the edges—the cups always came down in the same place, as if the hand descended by some invisible pull.
Habit is religion. A religion of one’s own making, no one taught it, there’s no book. Every morning rolling the stone uphill, every evening watching it roll down. And the next day again, and the day after. This repetition alone is life.
Stain upon stain—some deep brown, as if from yesterday, fresh, the smell of tea still clinging to the wood. Some faint, from long ago, a forgotten morning. The stains remember—like the mark of the tide, the line remains even when the water recedes.
Some have nearly faded. The wood has swallowed them, only a ghost remains. I could count them, if I wanted to—but the wanting itself has run out.