pigeon

Mom saying she wrote when she was sad; me saying I wrote when I was happy

There weren’t too many things my mom and I could agree on or bond over when I was a teenager, but when I was a pre-teen there were a few, and, surprisingly (to me at the time), writing was one of them.

This was back when writing was a definable “thing” that a “writer” did. Like how you could “be a photographer” and make discretely identifiable “photographs.” Not like now, when text and images are generated aggressively, continuously, algorithmically, whether we like it or not, consciousness is a co-adaptive fiction created by the self-preservation drive of meme-complexes, and the only creativity that counts is that which garners quantifiable attention, which is what money has metastasized into now that our economy has gone all superhyperbolic, kind of like how barter maybe metastasized into money, however many thousands of years ago that happened, perhaps for similar but completely different reasons.

Maybe the “back then” I’m imagining never existed. Probably I was just naive. Looking back from here, though, it sure feels like something was materially different. Sometimes it feels like we’re not supposed to be able to know if what we’re remembering ever actually happened or not. We are told nostalgia is a lie, the good old days weren’t good, and I guess that’s true, but the present isn’t necessarily that great either, ya feel me? Like since when did looking back by way of comparison become a thought crime? What else besides perceptions of the past can help me formulate the boundaries of my present discontent? I haven’t lived in the future yet. Those who tell me it will definitely be glorious are selling something. Those who guarantee the singularity, the end of normal stupid humans, are selling something too — a protection racket, maybe?

Whatever. IDFK. Obvs. In any case,

The last thing I would have ever expected my mom to be was a fellow writer.

She just seemed so — I don’t know, conventional? Unsurprisable? Hemmed in by expectations? She was a magazine reader, not a space traveller!? And yet, she told me, having observed the absorbed hours I would spend at the typewriter, that she used to love writing too, in college and before.

But she said she especially found writing gratifying when she was sad or depressed about something. It was a way to somehow, by digging into those feelings, relieve them.

This I thought was passing strange. For me, writing was a precipitate of joy. A quirky dance in place, necessitated by excess energy, the linguistic analogue of tapping my fingers rhythmically on anything and everything, because what else am I supposed to do with that nervous vibration, that constant fibrillation — ?

Writing for me was walking across the frozen pond in the backyard on a freezing sunny day — skating over the surface of the infinite depths. To be able to walk where you can’t walk. To not sink where you will surely drown. To defy the laws of physics.

In other words, space travel.

Engage your fingers and conjure worlds — what could be more giddy, more ridiculously sublime!?

So who was (or had been) this maudlin creature, this heartwrecked schoolgirl weeping into her diary? What could a mom — my mom — possibly have had to be sad about? Because I hadn’t yet begun to outgrow my solipsism, my capacity for curiosity about the real human beings right next to me was weak. I am afraid I have a faint memory of assuming these alleged writings must not have been very “good.” I probably assumed they were “poetry” or something like that, that a “girl” would write.

In fact my mom did write a poem for me, years later. It was called “Don’t Blink” and it’s one of the loveliest gifts I’ve ever received. I can see the cursive loops on the yellow legal-pad paper in my mind, but damned if I know where it actually is now. I hope I have it somewhere still. When she first gave it to me, I only understood it on one level: don’t blink, because time goes by so fast and your kids grow up. Of course I didn’t really get it; I was still fresh and high on doing the growing up! Now, the irony in the title resonates: you can’t not blink! Tell yourself not to, and your eyes burn, tears will form, eventually you blink involuntarily. Turns out time goes on either way.

Where’s her writing now? Where’s mine? Where’s anybody’s? What is text? Is it what we are made of? Language is an organism, I told my creative writing class. We are hosts. The stories flow through us like water through a riverbed. Like the energy of a wave through water. When that energy wanes, dissipates, passes on, what is left? The stories survive. We? Maybe not so much.

What is writing for me now? Do I write when I’m happy and bursting with exploratory energy now? Have I become my mom and write when I’m sad or anguished or lost? Both, I’d say. Also more often something else, additionally, something in the middle or outside of both of those. This is necessarily the case because I’m so rarely unambiguously happy or carefree these days, but then again I’m rarely irredeemably depressed either. I’m always somewhere in the middle, which is merely the edge of the edge. I am so, so, sorry about how cringe and fake this sounds, but I think it may really be that I write, now, because I have to. It’s weird to have to do something that doesn’t really exist. But then again it’s weird to have something that can’t really be “had,” like consciousness. It’s weird to be something that you can’t really “be,” like a “self.”

It’s kind of liberating, actually.

Anything goes. Infinite possibility. Skate across the lake. Spring is coming soon.