(four attempts)

1

These days, I am away from home. They call it “house-sitting” because houses are like babies: they need care, they absorb what happens around them, they can burden.

I am trying to construct a theory of homespace. It’s a fake goal, a way of intellectualizing hardship in order to perform some distance from it, to access some version of relief. So as to build a better poem or write a better essay. So as to encounter less longing.

So I walked to the top of a nearby hill by myself at midnight, a thing I did at the house where I am sitting, full of responsibility toward empty space, this place where I occasionally forage for snacks, or overthink a thought, or grow manic enough to turn toward the partial woods nearby in the middle of the night. It was Valentine’s Day, and I began the day right at its nightly birth, like a baby, sticking my hand out into the dark new world, surprised by everything. Even as I type this, it’s hard to say whether I am writing from that moment or this one—from the lived experience, or this reflected minute, this period called after the fact. Transcribed and scrubbed clean, a portrait of the night that is as clear as day. Experience dulled by artifact.

2

Everything that I attempt, that I essay, is an effort toward safety.

3

Usually I write things down in order to imbibe them, to ingest whatever permission language holds for me, and this is my trick for achieving self-determination: I see the words and then I listen and then, eventually, I let myself know. I was writing frantically by hand in an unlined notebook and I will hate everything about this when I look back at it. Now, or then? I’ve thrown away whole journals, entire periods of my life. But where’s the safety in that?

4

There were four components to that night in the woods, like window panes on a square house,

and they multiplied as I peered through each one. Healing appeared impossible, because forgetting appears impossible sometimes (I don’t remember writing this but I see my penmanship and know it came from me, so I type it here). Who am I trying to forgive?:

myself, for fucking so many certain men

my parents for getting divorced

my parents for getting married

myself for manipulating A, B, & C through my own trust issues & deeply embedded fears

D’s choices

E’s fear-based words, filtered through their own struggles and grief

myself for panicking and inducing panic in others

the women i see on TV

the women i’ve seen in porn

women who care about being beautiful

myself for caring about being beautiful

F for panicking, and her reactions to what happened at the end of my time in [other state]

my first boss who was probably just as scared as i was even though i was only 15 and she was not

G for reacting to my control and emotional instability in the ways that they did

H for their lack of honesty, incited most certainly by my fear and emotional instability

my mother for expecting so much from others, holding them to standards of perfection until she’s driven them away

myself for struggling with almost all of the exact same things as my mother

myself for being so hateful toward other kids in elementary school

my brain

my laziness

& how i am starting to laugh like my mother

& how i’m just as scared of solitude as my father

& all these (mostly) men on TV and in politics who are such scared babies

& seriously, I, in ways i can’t even bring myself to fully contemplate yet

& myself in return for abandoning I

& myself for not being too good or consistent in my female friendships

& J for however, whyever, that friendship had to combust, if it was even a friendship in the first place

& those people who encounter moments of authoritative power and grab onto them because it’s scary not to

& my parents for trying to fill an unnamable existential void with me

& my father for abusing and manipulating my mother

& my father for all his letters, his use of words and coherency

& my father for craving women in an unhealthy manner

& my father for wanting to blame my mother for how i turned out, a mask that hides his own feelings of inadequacy i’m sure

& my mother for being so stubborn

& my father for being stubborn

& that guy in middle school who told me how my thighs looked, defining my body from outside my body

& then for telling me how i couldn’t kiss

& then for how many fingers can you fit inside, just tell me that

& my mother for reading my journals and finding out about what i did with that guy and telling me i was too young

& myself for making the inevitable mistakes of a too-young girlbody saturated with media

& myself for being so, so perpetually scared of and afraid to confront things

(spiral of fear) (generational fear)

& people who find comfort in the status quo

& K’s mom if she has seen me at times as an intruder

& L for making up stories and being a scared girlbody full of grief like we all were, are

& myself for highlighting drama w/ others as a way to avoid taking charge of my own life, which is also always taking charge of my own death

& my dad for needing things like porn and “damaged women” with such insistency, such destructiveness

& myself for feeling threatened by other people’s strengths

& myself for fearing objectification, misogyny, and women relegated to their body parts, so intensely that i enact those very things myself, existing on the perpetual lookout

& myself for breaking M’s heart

& myself for taking advantage of the safe person he was and, if i should even say this, collaborating in his becoming unsafe

& myself for expecting too much from N

& myself for despising in others the very things I still haven’t unlearned

& myself for feeling jealous of the personhood of others, turning that jealousy into anger, and resisting strong people in the face of their strength and accomplishments

& myself for wanting to be perfect

& myself for not being perfect

& myself for not going to Germany in high school

& myself for dissecting those animals in middle school

& myself for valuing men over myself and needing to relearn about value and selfhood so late in my adulthood

& myself for thinking i need to put up walls

& myself for leaning into the wrong kinds of fear

& myself for not paying attention

& myself for revolving around “validity”

& history

& everyone i’ve met who had a history, i mean

myself for having a history, for being willing to throw so much of it away, & feeling put off when i encounter the clear history of others, how they hold on, how they’re less afraid than me

& myself for thinking i could erase and rewrite my history

& myself for knowing i will continue to want this in the foreseeable future, despite knowing better, even now

& myself for being good to others when i need them most

& myself for when i’m filled with the desire to not know

& myself for expecting a tangible apology first

(forgiveness doesn’t rely on) (forgiveness doesn’t exhaust)

what is a girl healing herself even as healing appears impossible?

what is a girl healing herself through the endless act of making?

(she is a bad-

girl good-girl

so she can

take turns

saying “no”

in ever-

widening

circles)

she is equal amounts forthcoming & patient, looks her body straight in the eye       

she forgives her controlling blood, her lip-bitten curl, the tide on her bending back

she pushes

she lugs

she goes home because she wants to but only if and when

(she knows she can do things based on if and when)

she is exhausted & knows

that the thing about exhaustion is

just sleep a little,      she says      get some rest, come back tomorrow,           bye!

Photograph of two girls by Sarah Cook