“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical

“All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom”

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical

Letter to Anna from 2018, Auugust [IV]

SUBJECT: THAT PECULIAR DESIRE TO ALMOST IMMEDIATELY REMINISCE, ONCE ITS MINUTES EXPIRE.

Anna

I have deep recollections: vivid, real, olfactory [visions (no—hallucination feels strong)] of you—rips and sounds of words spilling out of you, exciting chatter, energy—the spillage of worse days to come, of angst-days, past days … they mean little in these borrowed rooms, held by inescapable clicking (not of our own) —we check it, and leave it, ignore it while finding ourselves, at peace, confined, realigned.

Do you remember those rooms?

All those times (are they, many?) we crossed thresholds of familiar boxes knowing nothing but counts of clock-feasts: frustrating limitations … annoyances which crept up on us when the nights couldn’t belong to us—when it was just us and us when we became, us.

We’re only the shackles of those our own makings bring, though ways around such things were, as so many clicks, switches, lines, stripes, threads against our skins … not clocks, but related to time.

We had one, I slept a day, you sat beside me; another movie prop which made it rain (there’s little to be had that improves the day with barbs that turn us back). And yet we still return, it matters because they end, feelings threatened—treasure all the same.

Is it we, who circle between these rooms, or is it me, circling memory removal one by one—each holds, feels, clocks pressure, texture under your feet survive: the return around emotions left (I feel it still, see you crunch and hide toes in balls—you don’t look, away?) marks impossible to take away.

Remove the rooms, lose the time? Hide the point [ask] how clocks conspire—steal from us, and memory, always memory—particularly those of when we became, us.

We found ourselves where we need to be or needed each other to be, right, at the time—it’s the challenge of when words escape before becoming words, not hidden, elusive, beyond attempts to sound it.

There’s never breadth between us, my love, no air: an exchange of weight we share in place of finding rogue vowels—the ticking takes tolls—we remember not to remember borrowed rooms, temporary victories are briefly measured against our arms, bruises wrapped around, rotating pivoting points, and the ticking takes fewer pieces; less than it likes against the little we’re able to take and hide against our vacant mouths—the space left un-whole by unformed words.

Temporary things are the precious insides we leave on the inside where the permanence of our memory resides.

But only when we park our watches at the door.

—JustD

* Photo by Nina Sviridova and Dmitry Vozdvizhensky, 1980s.