You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all.” “Some,” yes. “Most” if we’re lucky. “All,” no. There’s no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some—a tell-most, maybe. This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.

It’s a mistake to visualize the narrative arc I was handed in school—inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement—and to try to map my life onto it. It’s a mistake to lay that shape over my lived experience, like a transparency the teacher would align over a worksheet, projected, so we could watch her write on it. It is a mistake to ask oneself, Is this falling action? Is this crisis? Plot is what happened, and what happened is one thing. What the book—the life—is about is another thing entirely.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own: “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.” Next question.

The things we call “life-changing” are and aren’t.

consider what in their poem is essential. What does the reader need? What is the poem insisting upon? When you consistently leave something—or someone—out of your poems, that’s a conspicuous absence.

I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience…. —Audre Lorde

How do I distill the silence, the knowing that I don’t know?

I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it.

I’m adding my sadness to the list of things we’ll never get the sand out of. Like anything you take to the beach, it’ll be gritty forever.

For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.

You carry the past with you, but you can’t go back.

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

I’d told the truth as I’d known it, but the truth had changed. This, of course, is the nature of truth.

You’d rather be half of something than whole on your own.

For the first time in my life, there is an opening on the time line, an opening not labeled with a man’s name, like the white space between stanzas in a poem. There are blessings inside every curse.

I crave the answer to when will it end even more than the answer to how. We can endure anything if we know when it will end.

There is joy in surprising oneself.

What I’m living and experiencing is my life, but what about the rest? If I know so little about the life I’ve called my own, if there are blank spaces I can’t fill in, can I still call it my life? Can I still claim it as mine?

scar tells a story, a very short story about pain, injury, healing—what so much great literature is about. A scar is concise communication.

Yes, I laughed, as I always do. Under all comedy is tragedy. Under the boat, the water that holds us is dark and full of things we can’t see.

“I’m a woman of my word, now haven’t you heard / My word’s the only thing I’ve ever needed.”

“Well, we can’t see ourselves any way but backward,” I told her. “We don’t see ourselves the way other people see us.”

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me. —Lidia Yuknavitch

There isn’t a singular, golden, impossibly definitive metaphor that encapsulates everything. No, it’s all of them. I’m handing you a stack of Polaroids to shuffle in your hands, so some of the work is yours.

Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible. I went to find beauty, and it was still there. I go looking for it, and it’s there.

“A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation. This isn’t the story of a woman who fell in love again and therefore was healed and lived happily ever after. This is the story of a woman coming home to herself.”

I thought that I was vanishing, but instead I was only coming true. —Clive James

I love this definition of family: funny people who love you. Truth.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.

Sometimes I need to hear the same thing in different words from different people, different sources, before I really hear it.

Let me tell you a little about the cento. It’s a kind of poem assembled using the lines of other poets. Memory, too, is assemblage—a kind of cento, collaged from pieces. From the scraps of a life.

now? I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. But here’s the thing about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it. This flickering? It’s mine. This path is mine.

listening to music on her phone, gathering songs the way a magpie gathers shiny things.

songs I love, yes, but more importantly, songs she noticed I love. It’s the audio equivalent of a hug from my daughter.

My work was not the problem. My work was the solution. I kept us here with words.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken… —William Stafford

To feel at peace is to be free.

Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life. —Rainer Maria Rilke,