Twelve — Why I Am Writing This Now

Twelve — Why I Am Writing This Now

I am twenty-three. I am writing this on a Tuesday evening in the apartment I have lived in for eight months, which is the first place I have lived that did not contain him and therefore the first place in which I have been able to hear myself think without the low-frequency interference of waiting for his response to whatever I was thinking.

Eight months of quiet has been, in equal measure, relief and confrontation. Relief because the quiet is real and the apartment is mine and no one in it will locate the counterweight and deploy it. Confrontation because the quiet is also the absence of the noise I had organized my interior life around, and the interior life, deprived of its organizing noise, does not immediately know what to do with itself. I have spent eight months learning what I think when I am not thinking in relation to what he thinks. The learning has been slow.

I am writing this now because I have something to tell him that I will not tell him in person. Not because I am afraid of the telling — I am past most of the fear, or I am past the kind of fear that prevents action; I am not past the kind that makes the action cost something. But because telling him in person would require him to respond in person, and the response in person would be the counterweight, applied to the thing I am about to write, and I am not interested in the counterweight. I am interested in the saying.

Kafka's letter was forty-seven pages. His mother refused to deliver it. I do not have a mother who will refuse — mine would deliver it with a hope I do not want to burden her with. I am refusing to deliver it myself. This letter will not be sent. It will be written and held, in the way you hold things that need to exist in language before they can exist anywhere else.

The holding is the point.