Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

Papa always says one listens with one’s eyes, and I thought of that as I looked at Peter Breznik: I pictured my words sinking through the pools of his irises to his brain, and I felt like I was going to drown.

But poetry can change a life, too. If I ever did teach a poetry class, I would point out that poetry isn’t too difficult; it is simply a vast and overlooked country. If you want to understand it, you need to stay a while, explore, and visit regularly.

I am basically the reincarnation of my Catholic French grandmother in regard to relationships: One should proceed slowly, and when two people make contact, they should walk a long way together.

If she could just look at me as a person who loves her—if she could just see and be seen and speak openly—I feel like I might find surer footing. The wounds on our insides might heal the way divots in sand disappear beneath waves.

I wonder where that expression comes from: heartstrings. A heart with strings. A puppet heart. I don’t think French has an expression for this. Which may suggest that my French parents’ hearts don’t have strings. Which would explain why I can never tug at them.

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 think my genes are stacked high against openness and even higher for self-infliction of pain. And also for generalized infliction of pain—on anyone who has hurt me.

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?

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.

How did humankind arrive at this planet and learn so much, only to always have the incomprehensible gaping sorrow and shadow of death looming over them? How has the human heart evolved to love so sharply and fiercely—to crave intertwining its strings with another’s—when our species would be much better off if we could love less or not at all?

When I try to lie down, Maman’s necklace digs at my skin, but I can’t take it off, even if it was Robert who clasped it. Wearing it makes me feel like she’s here, like even if she is sick and even if one day she is gone, I can keep her this close, lifting and falling with my breath.

A warmth filled my chest like tea poured into a cup. I let go a breath. He wanted me to acknowledge him beyond his role as my teacher. He wanted me to say that I noticed him, which he has said to me, in a sense, many times, in his responses to my work and when he tries to talk to me.

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. When I give in to writing one word, a Niagara follows. Words white-cap out of 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. Peter’s body and mine had hardly ever touched. He’d never held my hand or my waist; we’d never occupied the same material space for longer than a class period. Yet I had given him my words. From the first tentative ink stroke I put down on paper, I knew I was writing to him. The weight of each word and the shape of each line, the vibrance and surprise of each image—everything I wrote was for him, intangible gifts I imagined him opening and taking inside his mind for safekeeping.

He loosened my hand from Maman’s necklace, pulling me toward him, into his office, the door snicking shut behind us, triggering a flash of image and idea: a splintered door swinging open, light filtering in. On one side, a before; on the other side, an after. Even if a person stepped right back through the door, that action would still be after; the body would be altered in some way for having stepped through—even if the alteration were as simple as growing five seconds older.

I felt like he was waiting for me to decide—which words to say, how many, how close. I felt full of breath, of insistent momentum, a hushed force along a line etched toward him.

Being held by Peter in the actual world was a sensation of starlight—that silver hum over the coast when the sky is still illumined, night trembling like water at the brim of a glass. I wrapped my arms around him, my face turned in, my ear at his heart.

“I shorted out.” I finally arranged words in my head. Peter smoothed my hair, face tensed in concern. He was good at smoothing my hair. Much better than Maman. He was good at holding me. Peter Breznik was holding me. “Do you short out a lot?” His lips pressed my forehead where my hair starts. I didn’t think so. The words kept slipping down a tunnel. But no, I had never shorted out. “You kissed the shadowed skin beneath my earlobe and my heart exploded.” I pressed my palm over the silky-cotton fabric of his shirt. “I like your blue sweatshirt better.” “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, and I have never shorted out.” I shifted on his legs to loop my arms around his neck and study his face, probably like a drunk. “I want to be your koala. Did I say that already? You know how they cuddle onto things?” His laughter burst out like a beam of light in his dimming office.

I can still hear every word he spoke to me. Beneath the lamplight at my dorm entrance, he brushed his lips over my ear. “Vivienne, you’re better than poetry.”

The sky reminded me of a kaleidoscope—all the shapes and brightnesses of clouds and stars shifting, or the earth imperceptibly shifting beneath them. It struck me that by walking through the door to Peter’s office after reading his letter, I had set every last particle of my life in motion.

Since January, I have heard Peter speak many words that I did not anticipate, and I have typically felt upon hearing them that my soul might launch to the sky. But in the silence following I might like a life in New York, I felt perfectly and disbelievingly quiet. I feared that my voice might shatter his sentence, which seemed suspended in tiny glass letters between us.

hand lifted to cradle my head. “You’re beautiful the way birds are beautiful—the way they startle you from gray and inertia. The way each bird’s song is completely its own. And your words—I’ve never—”

When Hillary stepped through our bedroom door a few minutes after 7, I was curled up on my bed like my new fetus sister was curled inside our mother, except I was weeping. For everything. For living in California; for the words Luc had said to me; for punishing my mother with silence while she had had fear and worry; for wanting to be held by my former poetry instructor more than wanting to make amends with my parents; for my parents’ forgiveness; for the beautiful, miraculous, devastating news that Maman was having a baby.

He leaned down to kiss my forehead. “You should never stop caring for your family. They’re a source of air and art for you. But this,” his hands tightened on my shoulders, “this is a thing you can have right here. 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.”

I could feel our separate energies—his an easy, forward momentum, mine a pensive, backward pull; and there we stood, at rest together. Yugoslavia in turmoil, Maman’s life in the balance, but between Peter and me, a thrumming in the air like happiness.

Maman paused a long time after the second reading, in a quiet that felt warm and tight, like not just I, but both of us, were clenching our jaws and trying not to sniffle. I wondered if the baby had fluttered at her voice—at my words being read by our mother.

I didn’t know exactly what we were to each other at that moment—boyfriend and girlfriend, soulmates, future lovers? I still don’t know as I write this entry. We have never named what we are together. Him and me, two people who give words to everything. But I think it was love I felt in our hands. It was new and fluttery, but sure and safe.

I removed my watch from my wrist on Monday. Each day, I pretend that hours aren’t quantified, that any minute I spend with Peter is somewhere in the universe an infinitely expanding forever. A raindrop in earth time, but from a far-away planet, a clear sea that has never been measured.

Perfection might be easier if happiness were not so distracting.

His chin rested yet again on my head. I wanted us to be a living statue, flesh and blood and deemed to remain in that pose forever.

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 felt like I barely knew him, or like he didn’t know me, or like I didn’t know myself. I felt like I didn’t know anything—what to do, where to go—and like no one actually knew me, either, not even the people who conceived me. Though I knew I was wrong in one respect: Peter knew me. He knew all my words, and he knew the deep hurting places that all the words came from.

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.

I was afraid to hear what she had seen. To learn that I had appeared a man too broken, too flawed, for her to risk trusting again, risk caring for. But weren’t we both a little broken even before she lost faith in me? It was being together that felt like perfection, like we could never want for anything different.

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

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.

I don’t wish for her to be sad, but her sadness matches mine—the precise shade of light, a quarter-moon’s amber glow. The last purple of day on the horizon. Dear God, I could sleep in it, my nightmares abated, just knowing her ache runs as deep as my own.

I had held her like that for countless times in the seven weeks I had spent as the man she loved, but just then, in her sitting room, we felt both familiar and new. Like two people reunited, but instead of bearing gifts from our journeys, we both bore scars to unwrap and show each other.

I smiled at Vivienne, feeling at once both young and grown, broken and healing, fatigued and renewed, with the pulse of the sun in a desert. Her own smile washed over me like water.