Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

Anyhow, boys are a drain on time until a woman is gainfully employed and settled and buying expensive shoes and/or bakeware.

I keep feeling that if I were in New York, where my life is, nothing could change or ever go wrong, because I’d be aware of everything and everyone I love, and you can only be surprised to the same degree as your ignorance.

A Slavic prince and a perpetually distraught French schoolgirl.

If I interview, you’ll have to tell me where to find some good coffee.” Yes, I thought, I’ll draw a tiny map on the back of a poem draft, with arrows guiding you to my favorite tree-shaded bench in Central Park, where I’d be waiting for you with croissants and excellent coffee.

When I told her what had happened at the library meeting, she pretty much laughed her head off. Tossing my Golden-Retriever plush toy in the air, she said, “Vivi, you hare-brain. The graduate instructor for sure doesn’t hate you,” which filled me for five seconds with euphoric nausea. I wanted to float back to the library and vomit at the same time. Why is attraction a mix of elation and sickness for me?

Along the walkway to the steps, leaves shook in the breeze. I wrapped my arms around myself thinking, That’s evolutionary grace—that human beings have two arms long enough to hug themselves. But even as I thought the words, I knew that a person’s own arms aren’t enough. 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 am embarrassed to say that I have often felt like the hub of my family’s figurative wheel.

But all along, in their minds, my help was unnecessary. I worried needlessly and depleted their energy. I was a dent in our wheel’s rim. I was never the hub I supposed myself to be.

But I also want to be held without sparks—that is, quietly, like the marble woman in Rodin’s Hand of God, the way she is curled in the rough-sculpted hand, obviously unfinished, resting.

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?

If we are all walking the planet as discrete and variously shaped poems, the most obvious poem would be the least interesting, as well as the easiest to laugh at, judge, or discard. I would like to be known as unreadable.

I hate to imagine other people in agony over writing—it really is one of the most painful endeavors that language-wielding creatures can undertake to do.

Everything was hushed, as if we were in . . . a library.

😆

By the time I arrive at next Wednesday, a thousand new heartaches will have found me.

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

a modern-day version of Thomas Hardy’s Gabriel Oak, who would look a woman in the eye and say, “Whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up, there you shall be.”

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.

But then I would be the person I’ve been with my parents—the fretting, short-circuiting girl who needs reassurance to exist. And anyway, Peter doesn’t make me feel fretful. He looks me in the eye and makes me hope that things can work out.

I felt like a woman born with summer-bright eyes to a world where nobody leaves or dies, who knows that the day, the month, her whole brilliant life will turn out exactly as she’s dreamed it. In my real life—which is blessed enough—I am always braced for illness to strike, for reservation, uncertainty, silence. I didn’t know how to proceed in the life I had landed in.

Anyhow, if I had given voice to those questions, I would have only wanted to ask them again later, and then probably again a short time after that. And then I would be exactly that person I do not want to be—the pesterer, the worrier, the figurative spewing electrical wires.

he said like a spokesman for all composed persons everywhere.

“I guess perfection is just . . .” Dropping the tote-strap to her hand, she began slowly swinging it. “Not thinking of what could be different.”

But after surviving that year and writing about it, and now, even as I write about this one uncertain, shimmering-brief day, 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. You can live until tomorrow.

“A person can be mired in sorrow, and laughter still finds you.”

“You’re the only person I know who hears a love story in a bio.”