I read his journal. Then again and again and again until what seems clear looks foreign. As if with each reading, I am taken deeper into the green hills of Tennessee, away from what I know, to some strange and enchanting place where pretense is abandoned as clothes before skinny dipping. And it does feel this way, like I am skinny dipping into his most inner thoughts, doing something I am not supposed to do, looking into another's journal. But I do it anyway.So each night, while the others take to town, I escape into his words, his thoughts, into the mind of one I long to know, knowing, I never will. Still, these quiet moments alone, it feels as if we are together, my cot, a lamp, a greenish-brown wool blanket and this little black book, a gateway to what remains, what lives and I wondered at the life of words, our words to outlive us, to give pain or pleasure. And I imagine he is watching me, read him; and that even in the next life, he feels a warmth coming from this realm; that even in this hell of death and destruction, huddled upon a cot, his words held in the bowl of my hands, there is a warmth.
10 comments:
I often times take out old letters from my great granmother - who was my pen pal while growing up - I have hundreds of letters and I saved every one, and re-reading them brings her back to me, if only a tactile thing to my fingers holding the pages, my nose smells the moth balls and coffee from her home and my heart fills up with that very same warmth.
There is definitely something of a guilty pleasure - and measureable risk - in reading someone's journal without their expressed permission. :) It is for this very reason that I have destroyed all of mine except the last couple....we're talking decades worth of writing. 4 decades, actually. LOL
I like it that there is a feeling of connection and "ok-ness" with this reading. I like it that it feels safe, and supportive.
Cat, I've done the same. A couple weekends ago, I looked at some of my father's writings and what struck me the most was not content, but his handwriting, so very distinctive, so very him; and although he has been passed some four years now, he seemed alive on that paper, with the scribing of those letters, knowing his hand held this paper, his pen marked this page. It some ways it is a shame we communicate, like here, so much in a digital form. There are days I long to receive a handwritten letter, to pore over the curls and crosses of ink, to smell the paper and perhaps a hint of fragrance. Sigh. Thank you for the comment. Peace to you Cat.
Grace, I like that you have come to visit. Not notwithstanding gummy bears and whiskey and steamy showers, I find your insights my own guilty pleasure. You feel electric, in how you live and embrace life and I see it so clearly in your postings and comments and I feel blessed whenever I feel your digital touch, your digital looking, holding, caressing. :-)
I like it that you like all of that! LOL :-)
Did I mention that I'm kinda sorta blogging again? Posted my first poetic musing in some time. I am beginning to tenderly explore that part of myself again...like a tongue explores the open space where a tooth used to reside.
Your words are appreciated, Trée. Love Fest all around!
Grace, you didn't. But now I'm looking forward to exploring your pelagic musings from the bow, nose to the air, wind in my hair. :-)
I enjoy escaping into your words, Tree :)
Sue
Sue, you are welcome to come for the ride anytime. :-)
The opposites are what strike me with this post, it is these that simultaneously lend such warmth and such sadness, the many thoughts and feelings that it evokes poignant. The drawing of him into her by his words, of falling between them, of being enfolded within his notes, enhancing at the same time his absense, the print that she reads now telling not only of him in a knowable sense, but of days further down the line of time passed than her own time spent with him, incredibly moving in the leap through a period of life and in who a person is, what we are made up of and how we are known. In the post that spoke of them lying together, the moments where he spoke of his father, in those moments though we be only reader, one knew she had known him, looked upon him, seen him for who he was, and so as she sits here with his diary, it isn't so it seems to me the gaining of information or insight so much as it is elongating them, their time together, taking back some of what was lost. You have written of wanting to know, of knowing she never will, yet still it speaks not of unknowingness but of time, of memories tallied. Of all those things you spoke of in an early post, days ahead that are dead before the body.
One of the most memorable books I ever read was about a young woman who read her mother's diaries, by request, and in so doing everything about her memories, about her thoughts pertaining to her mother, events that she did not understand at the time, information that she was not privy to, and though it was so memorable I had not thought of it in a long time until I read this post. A dairy a reflection of one's inner most thoughts, uncut, not meant to be read and thus the closest one can get to being with the mind, having the heart of another, tiredness has caused most of my points to be forgotten, the opposites with which I began and saw so many of within, fresh eyes will find them again no doubt, but again wonderfully poignant is the merging between them, he gone, she here, a link between time past and time now, a link between the living and the dead, the heavens and the earth, of love halted, of love undying.
Warmth and sadness. Okay, what I'm about to say is gonna sound strange. When I write a chapter like this, I write from inside the character and there is no separation, which is to say, there is no attempt to do anything but just be in that moment without any sense of labeling or assigning or trying to be anything. I'm just Mary. I'm writing as if writing what I would write at this time. What it is I don't know till someone else reads it and says it is this or it is that. In other words, there is no effort to be warm or sad or anything else other than as true to the moment and the emotion as I can and as I've said before, both of those change, which is to say, if I wrote this chapter 30 before or 30 minutes later, it would be different. These chapters or posts exist, are created, in a very finite window of time. Like catching butterflies. So to see how others see them later, for me, is always fascinating, almost as if someone is holding up a mirror and saying hey look, this is what this is, can you see it. And that is why I am always so appreciative of your comments Ms Storm. They are the mirror by which I see.
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