Time is overflowing
"Right now I am experiencing this split notion of time. Hopefully, one day that feeling will end and everything will be reunited, like in a story. Before writing, I should probably wait until these two days have merged together in my own life."
1. The Bite
I felt his quiver under my arms, and some suppressed gasps for breath, belying the collapse of a man, raw as a newborn, translucent, like a feathery light.
There was never a moment like this. Tears, I meant. He never had cried like that before—not at the death of his father, even. Not in daylight. Not before his daughter.
An instinct of a man, raised as he was, renders it habitual to silence the wrench; disturbingly yet, a silence of a particular kind, with blare, buzzing at the back of your mind. The opposite of quietness.
I suppose a part of me always anticipated an overt performance out of him—a cinematic scene; something you watch on the screen, something to reconcile with that is absurdly human in its enactment of humanity. Only later did I find out that death, or at least his father's, is not so much a heartbreak as a regretful loss. Only, was he mourning the passing of a phantom, crumpled in the silence of age, forgotten in the corner of the house.
Was that all? I used to think, All a man can live his life through?
Be it a Wreckage.
2. Birdy
Befuddled, she silenced herself, wandering around the room, as if a stricken bird, trapped, adrift, yet drenched to the skin. Watery, her eyes, in which all the monsoons of this country amassed, swelling her flesh, gazed into mine--a soul uninhabited of grace, love fordone.
I stammered, you didn’t break me.
“I broke your heart just like how they shattered mine.”
3. Unfinished
I have not yet placed these pieces into a vessel that can retain such scenes of living. Like the cavities unfilled, it aches by my jaw from time to time.
To systematically record them, journal them, and ornament the writing with rhetorics and plots that make sense, I find it uncalled for almost; scared, ashamed of failing the memories, undone the recesses that had once violently perished in front of me.
Will the fragments ever find a right place to sit? Will they write themselves in the future?
...
The night that I finished reading I Remain in Darkness, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as cliche as it sounds—a loan of utterance, a resonance. To understand the pain is to stutter. I hence stopped exploiting my words to keep the pain comprehensible and intact, for I have lost touch with the voice in my head that tells me what to do in the morning, what to eat for dinner, what to dream about, what to remember, and what to forget, as "I can speak only of her, to talk about anything else would be impossible."
Amongst those days, there was nothing else to offer but a dire gloom of a heartbreak. Kneeling was the only way to repent. And yet, Ernaux carved out that same taste of blood with her soul bare, in which everything that tormented me, everything that made me indignant, or sick, or suffocated me, and everything that destroyed me—are all there in her writing.
She lent me her eyes and her tongue. Time was personified. I have no more to articulate in my private realm after that touch of life.