“I live only here, between your eyes and you,
But I live in your world. What do I do?
— Collect no interest — otherwise what I can;
Above all I am not that staring man.”
- To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash, Elizabeth Bishop

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us -
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key…Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I’m waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.
- Part IX, Complete 21 Love Poems, by Adrienne Rich

Note: Unedited

Where do you end and where do I begin?

Your voice on the other line; it still haunts me.

The memory of you; I can’t give up.

Will it end?

The only way to let go is to hate you, but I can’t.

Because I still think of you.

Let’s start with The Truth - for all human emotions lie on top of its foundations. Clearly, from the threads of my previous posts, it’s been obvious that I have been spinning myself into an endless barrage of psychosocial turmoil, despondent destitution or whatever namby-pamby term you could think of to describe such sodden a state. But really, so important is the power of the words that one uses, it can steer the reader to think of another meaning as opposed to the intended effect.

That honestly, I have always been fine and never was I too shaken with the emptiness in my soul; that I should have listened to my heart all along and silenced the reason that screams from above. And more importantly, the support that I have - how I was raised and my wonderful friends who have sat up late at night to listen to me rant - are interminably priceless; it made me strong enough to face any form of battering that came my way.

Eighteen months; for eighteen was the magic number that allowed the final paragraph to emerge from the page. No, I don’t think I can certainly be 100% pleased with the outcome, nor will I rejoice at the coming of Certainty - of Answers and everything that I have been waiting for. But I know, deep down inside, that this was coming anyway, that I was more than prepared to accept this fate. I have never felt more at peace than I am now.

And like how this post is intended, to those who are unaware of Who He Is and What Has Happened: the vague notions that run within these paragraphs deliberately obscure The Event’s minute details. Because Mystery makes us interesting characters - that everyone is just a story waiting to be read, their thoughts typed out in fine print, their ideas hidden between the lines - that it seems mildly criminal to spoil the plot with giveaways.

He is still Fiction in writing - what genre would he be: Drama? Espionage? Thriller? Horror? Romance? Mystery?

Mine would be more Non-Fiction: Literary Criticism. Philosophy. Essays. Memoirs. Diary. Self-Help. Biography.

If I were indeed asked to summarise this chapter of my life, I would have this to say (and this is when I shamelessly lift from poetry):

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising from beneath
the horizon - where I said “a cleft of light”
I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
Shared, could be chosen without loneliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be the figure in that light,
half - blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
- Complete 21 Love Poems (Part XXI), Adrienne Rich