Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond. I accrued skills and knowledge and eventually friends and a sense of belonging. Or rather I grew to find that the margins could be the richest place, the perch between realms you could enter and exit.

Sometimes I imagined all these old people asleep in the homes around me dreaming of the places they came from, imagined the phantoms of those fields and orchards, dirt roads and flat horizons, shimmering in our middle-of-the-night streets.

We die all the time to avoid being killed.

“I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been.

I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.

Of how I was free to be funny or dramatic or preposterous around them, and of how fun it was, and how much we laughed, and how there was room in there to be sad and bereft too.