Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

I believe in something like a real self and know how rare it is to hear it speak, to see it liberated from its cocoon of falseness and insignificance, the sham appearances we present to others to win them over, to mislead them.

just a student’s spring trip—the cultural imperative of every budding intellectual—but she was travelling to glue together a dismembered self,

I was always in search of a twin bond that resembled it, a happiness so powerful that I dissolved and disappeared.

All literature stems from a wounded soul, from the spiritual exertion of the human defense mechanism to heal our pain and conquer death.

In daily life we try to make ourselves comprehensible by speaking the language of others in the hope that we will be understood, but at night, when rationality and social adaptation have shuffled off to sleep, an unbound self speaks to us in a language that is completely our own.

Poetry often comes into being despite ourselves, a truth that escapes us, that forces its way out between the selected concealments. It doesn’t heed our desire to cover things up.

She stopped me shortly before we reached my parents’ house and said, “You watch out, when I’m dead, I’ll come and haunt you, like Cathy, like the swagman from ‘Waltzing Matilda.’” “Then I’ll dance with you,” I said.

Thinking is a discipline that takes time, a holy time which—like the monastic Matins, Lauds, and Vespers—must be consciously set aside to protect it from the intrusive power of the banal.

We were both alarmed by our transformation into an average teaching couple, working during the day, living for the weekends and holidays, and only free to do what we really wanted in the time that was left.

“I must get out of myself,” she said.

Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.