Words
The opening draft salvo from a work-in-progress which may, one day, turn into something of significance...
They have finally condescended to give me some paper. No pens of course, but rather soft-nibbed crayon-like implements which are just about adequate for the task in hand — even if I do need to keep sharpening the damn things. No knife to do that, but rather an especially-designed sharpener where the blade is tucked away out of harm’s reach. As if I would.
Gifted as reward for good behaviour, they made a big show of handing it all over; perhaps they expected trumpets to sound from somewhere, an alarum to acknowledge their benevolence — rather than what I had done (or not done) to deserve to be rewarded in such a way. Maybe both. Once upon a time I would have been happy with flowers.
What are you going to do? one of them asked, even though I didn’t have a vast range of options… Perhaps they expected me to regress to being a child, that age where houses are daubed as wonky squares with inadequate windows and doors, and where little stick-figures stand behind a picket fence or beneath an equally inaccurate tree. If so, that would represent such a massive misunderstanding on their part, not to mention culpable misdiagnosis.
Didn’t you used to write once? another chirped up. Their voice infused with the tone you might use to a child, a trace of both suggestion and praise; it was as if they were trying to remind me who I had once been. I imagined them reconstructing me as if I’d been a mathematician who had once solved complex equations but was now being encouraged to go back to one-plus-one to see what she might make of that. It was a semi-rhetorical question which obviously didn’t deserve an answer — especially not for them, and not in that moment. Let’s face it, even acknowledging ttheir vacuous enquiry would mean descending to their level, surrendering myself up to inadequate theories both of who I once was and who I now am — assuming those are two entirely different women.
So I said nothing. They left me alone in my room.
I am two entirely different people of course; that is, the person I am now is not the same person I was when I’d first been gifted crayons all those years ago, the child who scrawled uneven buildings, smiling parents, a happy family. Nor am I the same individual as the one compelled to write her first words — my first proper words — in an attempt to make sense of the world and what was being foist upon me. Deciphering inflictions and impositions I suppose. Yet I am also not the same person as the one I was a week ago, the one who could seemingly do nothing but wait for something to happen; the woman who existed before she had this paper which — already sullied — sits on the desk in front of her. I will be a changed individual tomorrow too, and not just because of the paper and crayons. We all will be. Don’t they see any of that? I know they’re looking for difference, but the difference they seek and label ‘progress’ is a kind of regression, a reversion back to an early incarnation of myself, as if that was a ‘better’ model. On occasion, mainly at mealtimes, I can’t avoid those other women who are clearly no more than a shell of their former selves, women who have been truly hollowed out by life; women assailed and assaulted by the everyday, and have been unable to cope with it; or, turned inside-out by confusion, have ended-up defending themselves in an entirely inappropriate way. Of course you never get to see those who have committed the most despicable misdemeanours; they never get to have lunch with us. I suspect they might not get paper and crayons either, though I could be wrong. Yet what if my gift is regarded as some kind of therapy? If that is the case then I will have been wrong about it being reward or recognition. It might just be a con.
Putting that aside, I know — even if they do not — all that theorising’s irrelevant. I’ve already moved on, instinctively understanding it’s what one does with the paper and crayons that counts. That’s the voice of experience talking!
So no wonky houses for me, nor brightly decorated paper aeroplanes I could take outside and fly in the garden (now there’s a thought!) but writing. Didn’t you used to write once? Yes, and only for ever. And little do they know that, even without paper and pen (or these bizarre pencil-crayons), I have continued to do so, curating little vignettes, as yet unconnected phrases bouncing around inside my head awaiting the moment when I can set them free. But now that moment’s here I can see — as if for the first time — it is filled with jeopardy; jeopardy borne not merely in the two key questions my new materials so blatantly pose, but in how those questions might be answered. It has always been thus.
When they leave me alone with my treasure I can do nothing other than stare at the whiteness of the paper, the rounded points on the crayons, and try to imagine what will happen when I bring the two of them together. That first mark. Always the tyranny of the first mark.
I stand and walk to the window, look out on the garden — not for inspiration (I have never been that interested in nature) but rather in an attempt to clear my mind, to allow those two critical questions to present themselves front-and-centre. And even though I am somewhat out of practice — after all, how long have I been in this room, stared out onto that garden? — they accost me at a trot, then pause, waiting for my hands on their reins.
What am I going to write about? What format is my writing going to take?
The first yields readily. I will write about my life; I will write about this place, how I came to be here, fragments from my history. It will be both a record of fact and an attempt to unravel, to understand. In the long run it may even prove to be ‘therapy’, who knows? Maybe they do. Perhaps I will create paragraphs and sentences which will successfully decode everything, free the locks on the doors, the garden gates, the barriers at the end of the drive. Even if only metaphorically, that would be a triumph of sorts.
There is little else I can do when all’s said and done; I am my only frame of reference. But how to unravel things and then sew them back together? That is a question far beyond their comprehension.
Once upon a time (and there I go again, back into childhood; they would be so proud!) I used to juggle with ideas, notions, theories; I would invent themes, characters, incidents, and then knit them together… Think about knitting (which I never mastered by the way, not the woollen variety): you start with yarn, needles and a pattern; you create stitches, follow instruction; gradually the garment grows, shaped by the pattern however flawed your execution of it. That was how I used to write; it was akin to knitting. But now? Almost irrelevant as now I fear I lack the luxury of time. They gave me paper and crayons so recently; who’s to say they won’t take them away tomorrow, or next week? I cannot waste a moment. So not only does this imperative disqualify my old process, by implication it also prevents me from conjuring up a comprehensive new fiction — and by ‘comprehensive’ I mean one which adheres to pattern, is cohesive, flawless. Worse than that, it is not only time which is the constraint; there is something more pressing: the place, this room, my history; all the combined circumstances which have resulted in some anonymous individuals presenting me with paper and crayons in the first place. Would deconstructing all that not be story enough?
But how to begin?
Outside of the norm, surely — for are my circumstances not ‘unconventional’? It’s true that I could shoehorn myself into a “Once upon a time”, but that seems too simplistic, too inadequate — and I risk taking too long to get to the heart of things. So if not that — and if nothing can be planned in detail because of what tomorrow might bring — what then? Do I just write one single trigger word and allow instinct to take over? I have never been able to be that free-spirited, impulsive, in spite of what their official records may or may not say…
Needing a first word — one always needs a first word! — I have therefore curated a simple list, words which feel as if they belong, as if they will open doors and relieve me of the burden of choosing (instinctively or otherwise). And I have written them down, each word on its own scrap of paper; and I have found a small bag in which to secure these scraps and from which the words will be drawn, one by one, each word a lit fuse for a segment of my knowledge, my experience, my history — hopefully until they are all spent, vanquished.
And why not this way? Surely it’s a method as valid as any other, even if I don’t know what I will have at the end of it? These blameless words will be the keys unlocking what needs to be unlocked — which, in the end, sounds dangerously like analysis does it not?
Even so, it is not without trepidation that I put my hand in the bag and withdraw…