Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

wondered how people like A.J. existed—people who didn’t love people; who didn’t seem to care if other people loved them.

It’s strange how even in new distress, old distress doesn’t leave you.

A question keeps scrolling through my brain like a movie credit: Who do you want to be, in the next week, and after?

Wasn’t it Charlotte Bronte who said, “I am just going to write because I cannot help it”? Words are like that for me—relentless and choking.

I debated a two, three, or four-beat knock. Two would have been too timid, and four would have echoed Beethoven’s Fifth.

This is such a small moment, housed in such a small space, but it will spin like a planet in my memory.

The words he wrote to me would accumulate in my chest, imprint their rhythms on my pulse. In this way, he would feed my next poem. He was an energy inside me.

That’s what they are, words: all metaphors. Shapes and sounds we imagine as tangible, embodying things, ideas, emotions.

wanted to see something of yours in a space that was mine, and to be honest, it looked quite at home there.

And so I did, Vivienne. I read you. Not as an instructor reads a student, or as a critic reads a poet. I read you as a boy reads the girl whose mere presence and voice spark sudden fire in his chest.

Vivienne, I fight an impulse to pull you to my chest and keep you there.

I think “my” in this case is lifted from a kind of metaphor—it is the “my” of “my heart’s desire.”

p.s. I’m sorry about my eyes. I don’t know that they’ve ever affected anyone in quite the way you describe. I’d close them or look away if I could live with the thought of not seeing you.

Your eyes are the sky, not the ocean.

He was good at holding me.

“Do you have a heart issue?” His hand covered mine. Yes. I had a heart issue: It was holding me. “You are my heart issue,

“Where is your home, Vivienne?” Wherever you are, I startled myself by thinking.

They just were—as any true thing is: sunlight, heartbeat, crocus in April.

voilà! we were silently kissing like love-starved bookworms in a forgotten corner of the library, adjacent to shelves filled with eighteenth-century English poetry. I could practically feel the souls of poets rising from their books to gawk at us.

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.”

They had kept another secret from me. So I held onto mine. I could feel them like razor-edged jewels in my fist.

“Lahko noč,” he said. “‘Easy night.’ Zara Breznik says it.”

Peter doesn’t make me feel fretful. He looks me in the eye and makes me hope that things can work out.

No time is long enough.

We have never named what we are together. Him and me, two people who give words to everything.

I think it was love I felt in our hands. It was new and fluttery, but sure and safe.

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

Perfection might be easier if happiness were not so distracting.

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. I keep hearing, For what I think will be long enough— I keep turning the gift of his journal in my hands. I could start the essay with We speak in degrees of metaphor.

Often with him, I feel out of my depth, like a girl playing grown-up in a dream.

It is still baffling to me that the moment a life you never fathomed begins, its loss can be a blow to you—a sorrow.

they’re yours—my words, all the care I took with them.

The past is never where you think you left it.

“I just need—” I turned to Adèle. What did I need? With my free hand, I rubbed at my eyes. “—that . . . woman.”

I hardly sleep anymore for the dreams in my head of a woman who once, or still, lives in this building.

I have never not loved or wanted you.

Vivi, I stood thinking. Vivi. From the Latin—vivus. Alive or living. Breath in the throat. Blood in the veins. “Vivienne—” My eyes shut.

Just looking at her captures all the feelings and the words and the lifetimes in my being. Anything I were to compose would only reveal my own banality.”

Vivienne is the rhythm underlying my thoughts, the pulse pressing each minute forward.

Vivienne pressed her lips into a straight line. A line of poetry void of words,

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

It felt like returning home. Not that I had ever before experienced that feeling. Not that I have called any place I lived home. It was the first time I had felt it. Weightless and grounding, a warmth in my chest. Purpose, relief, and stillness. Hope.

“All death is a sharp stab of heartbreak.”

I love you filled the space between sentences.

I say life is short. The old words—let them rest. They had their day in the light.

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

The thought occurred that 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.