Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

And it is a fact, though I cannot cite statistics, that most people who die did not actually plan on it.

A body wants another person’s arms to hold it. It does not long to hold as badly as it longs to be held. Here, it wants another body to say, rest here a while.

“I felt that,” he said. “A sense of an empty afterward.”

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations? Peter Breznik (many thoughts lead to him) says poems are one way to connect. I say food is another. I think every baked good and poem is a world. When you create one, you hand a person a view of the stars within you. When you eat someone’s bread or read someone’s poem, you walk the roads inside them—their memories, their joys, their sadnesses.

Poetry flows out of you . . . Why should you silence that just to escape notice of four rows of twitterpated would-be academics, who take themselves way too seriously?

“It is terrifying to be a parent. To choose to behave one way with your child, and then watch what comes of it. It is like planting a garden with aster and dynamite, but you never know which, and either sprouts up at the oddest times to remind you of what you did well or poorly.”

The French in her wording—avoir peur,“to have fear”—as if fear is a disease one contracts, like cancer. I have had fear for so long now—I think no amount of surgery or therapy could root it out of me.

This is your life right now. It might be both happy and sad, but where there’s happiness—like, good, bright happiness—you take it.”

“My whole life, wherever I’ve been, I’ve only felt like I was pausing before heading somewhere next. But right here, with you—” He stopped beside a wood-slatted bench along the sidewalk, smiling down at me. “I just want to stay a while, be still. Tranquille.”

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink.

I keep thinking about the words we don’t say, but the feelings we communicate anyway, through things. Longing, hope, heartache, love. Through stories, baked goods, sweatshirts, poetry.

am, I don’t feel as though I’m leaving a place I dislike as much as I’m leaving a person I don’t want to be—a scared girl so frail, other humans do not dare speak the truth to her.

Let these words be a home for you. Read back and remember how, for one raindrop in earth-time, we found each other.

The ghost of a man who never told her he loved her. Who betrayed her trust, and in his own immaturity, called her a child. A man who permitted her, against the unspoken love in his heart and his own better judgment, to leave without a fight.

She laughed a buoyant cascade of syllables. “Did you really say ‘Bread of Life’ as I was swinging a baguette in the air like a light saber?”

“I loved you, Vivienne—your words and gentleness. Your face and your form. You were love to me, in one body, like I’d never known it.”

we should have said I love you as the punctuation between sentences. It was the punctuation between sentences.”

Ati placed his hands on my shoulders. In bocca al lupo, he spoke the Italian good-luck wish he always saved for our gravest departures. In the mouth of the wolf.

For possibly two seconds—for as long as she would allow—I covered her hand with mine. A shower of blossoms shed forth in my heart. “Najlepša hvala,” I said. Her skin was memory turned warm and tangible. She nodded. “Most beautiful thank you.”

I know—to write is to allow pain and love and memory and time to exist outside yourself. You breathe when the words are out.

matters. I believe in commerce, industry, and art. I believe in love. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in New York, blocks away from a woman whose heart I broke five years ago.

she was teaching me something essential to life and poetry—how to care for the one person you love more than everything, when to say and when to show what you mean. She was twenty years old. She had lived her life within the equivalent of a lemon-sized radius of three prosperous cities, surrounded by love and privilege, and somehow, she understood how to speak and offer love more honestly than anyone I’ll ever know.

What was I expecting? My own actions five years ago—withholding information that impacted her future, leaving her to doubt her adulthood—relayed a lack of love so vast and tangible, it might have filled entire collapsing galaxies.

I pause between the sentences I write tonight and become lost in the reasons why two people see one another. Why—out of all the people seen in an hour, in a day, in the world—two human beings wish to see more of only each other. To find out where the other came from—their sidewalks, their people, their country. The words they say to describe the other as fascinating or beautiful. The intricate specific ways they speak metaphor.

I heard Kieran approach Mary behind me and say in a deep Irish lilt I’ve never heard before in his speech, “I know I love you, Mary Anna O’Brien O’Connor, because even ten millennia with you would not be even almost long enough.”

Even as she feared pending losses, she saw life. She might take me to task on that, but it’s true. In words and bread and sweet things like chocolate, she saw potential to fill human need, to spark love and sustain it.

Her bakery is proof. Poems and birds and ladybugs and nourishment—any small thing in this world might fill you.

She embodies all my lifetimes.

It felt like returning home. Not that I had ever before experienced that feeling. Not that I have called any place I lived home.

The mere sight of her touched off a feeling of home, as well as hope—the difference between the two words just one letter—as if the English language’s linguistic ancestors understood that the words meant so much the same thing. Both are what the people of nations live for, the forces that sustain us on the roads we travel.

We said, Of all the creatures on earth I choose you.

I said, My love, here are branches. Let’s build another place to hold us.

Vivus, Vivienne. Let’s be alive at the same time, together.

Because, if you’ve read me, you know this: I believe too wholeheartedly in loving things.

chin. “I wish it could have happened less painfully.”

“It happened the way life happens, don’t you think?” He leaned forward to lift a copy of my book from the coffee table. “It happened unexpectedly.” I heard a catch in his throat as he sat back on the sofa.

I never could have fathomed that sweetness—the quiet life events in a home.”

She taught her that life is short and love is strong and no amount of time is long enough.

Which is one reason why food and books should be delicious.

for my whole life, I have feared what might happen; but in that moment next to Peter, reading a skeletal map of my life, I feared for what might not have happened. What chances, what risks, what words, what love might not have been notched into my life’s constellation. If hard hadn’t come with good. If sorrow hadn’t precipitated longing. If loss hadn’t intensified love.

The night deepens. We sleep in our nest, hearts broken and mending. We are torn and re-woven, day after day. And so I have written.