UNRELIABLY TOLDㅤ misc

identity, writing

june 21, 2023

The blackness of the night. Breath. Curling, warping, twisting, trapped—free. Mingling with the stars, dissipating, swept away, gone—

"I can't write."

Forever?

Her companion stilled beside her. He felt cold. Maybe she was cold. "Why not?" he asked, simply, too simply—how do you explain the decumulation of years and years of accumulation, of identity?

Simply, too simply, you didn't. Couldn't. How could you? Why would you?

She tried.

"Because I stopped wanting to."

"At some point in time, wasn't it breathing?" He asked this as a doctor (who read too much poetry, who read too much of her old work). Breathing was caring.

But for writing? Breathing? For her? To call it breathing was to mock the real breathers. No, she had just been passing the time, it seemed. "It was what I was," she tried, instead. "I put it everywhere—'aspiring writer.' Wanted to be an author, you know."

"You don't want to anymore?"

"I mean. I can, maybe on the side, it'd be nice. I would. But back then, I wrote in my free time. It wasn't everything, but it was a lot."

He frowned. She couldn't see him—they were so wrapped in nothingness—but she felt it. Sympathy, grief for a lost self—she sank in it. He had too much empathy for a two-month lover, that was for certain. "You don't have to be consistent to still enjoy it," he ventured.

She evidently had failed. One last attempt?

"I don't reach for it. I don't think about it. I don't even try, and trust me, I have the time to."

He mistook her bitter acceptance, her stale grief, for fresh and raw and red desperation. "Baby, it's okay—sometimes you get rusty. It happens to the best of us. I'm sure with a little bit of practice, you'll feel it again. You're occupied with other things, anyway."

She conceded. Why waste their time?

"Look," she said, and pointed. "It's Venus." The morning air pressed against her, as if by losing a part of herself it had gained permission to press in closer: because she was smaller. "Isn't it beautiful?"