I've been trying not to write to you.
I spent a lot of time alone in museums as a child.
Often it was the Museum of Fine Art in New York.
My father would teach, and I would go to the museum.
I was too young to be there by myself.
The marble floors echoed with footsteps.
People swirled around me,
But as I was so small, nobody really saw me.
I was glad they didn't.
There was a room full of statues where the slanted ceiling was made of glass
And sometimes rain would slide down it and make them seem alive.
I burned to touch them.
Their skin
Looked soft.
I never spoke on those days.
I just looked.
Sometimes at the art,
Sometimes at the people.
Everyone had somewhere to go, it seemed,
Buzzing with murmured conversation like bees in an enormous hive
They blurred past me.
But every so often I would wander into a room
And find a stranger standing alone before a painting
Completely still and starkly different from the others, as if caught in amber
And I'd know that if I looked at the painting too
I would see a little piece of their soul there.
Maybe that was where it started,
Maybe that was how I began to look into people.
I say into-
I mean
That if you place a mirror directly across from another, the repeating reflection goes on forever,
And if the light hits it just right it creates a prism-
Hallways of mirrors all throwing shards of light and color and shadow back on one another infinitely.
I say into, and I mean that I haven't found my home yet
But I've seen little glimpses of it
Refracted in someone's eyes
Just for a second-
Only ever for a second
And only ever there.
I've been trying not to write to you.
There's something I'm looking for,
And I've been searching for it since I can remember.
It is a constant hunger in the core of me,
Deeply rooted and deeply unsatisfied.
As I grew, it grew
And bore fruit I could never stop craving
But could never be sated by.
People sense it in me, now.
I see it touch them.
Sometimes a stranger will move around me like a moth around a flame
Trying to get close enough to thaw, but not
To burn.
Sometimes, they will withdraw
And look at me with shining eyes
Like an animal which knows something with teeth
Watches.
Whatever it is,
It moves me like it moves them,
But in here is no retreating from it.
After years of aching inside, I learned to seal myself up.
It was so tiring to need all the time
On such a massive scale
To chase something I wasn't even sure existed.
If I can keep all the light out
Sometimes whatever is in there will curl in on itself and fall asleep
Dormant, like a plant beneath deep snow,
But even while it sleeps, it grows.
The world settles into a haze
And I find...
Not peace,
But at least rest.
Sometimes I stay like that for months,
Sometimes I convince myself that there is no other way to live.
But nothing is ever permanent,
And eventually someone
Takes me by surprise.
All it takes is the barest of seconds
And I am garishly exposed
And the light is harsh.
I throw up my walls, my defenses,
And huddle, praying in the dark.
But by then
I never know if I am praying to be overlooked
Or discovered.
I only know
That it's the hardest I've ever prayed,
Every time.
Days. Weeks, maybe.
The memory of light courses through me
A drumbeat
Attaching itself to the rhythm of my heart and vibrating my bones.
I struggle to contain it
And it echoes off the walls of me, pressing against my skin from the inside.
It seeps through my dreams, steady and strong,
And cracks form all over,
Pinpricks of light slicing in.
When I accept defeat it is like being rescued.
This
Is the feeling I have fought against and worshiped my whole life.
It is the feeling I have watched people run from
Wracked by fear I feel with them but cannot answer to.
It is the feeling which
Some days
Becomes so consuming that I can't eat, can't sleep, can't think.
Like any ancient deity, it demands blood.
But like any good one, it delivers salvation.
It is this... thing, this need,
Which has pushed me out into the world again every time I have decided that I am too fragile for it.
Its nourishment
Is beauty
And I am its instrument
Before I am my own.
I search, I wander.
And it has twisted me inside with pain, sometimes,
But it has also given me purpose.
Once, I stood waist deep in the sea at dusk
In the tropics
With the sun reaching red across the surface towards me
And something in me reached back.
The trees behind me shed their white flowers into the waves
And a storm broke overhead.
The water churned with drops
Lighting seared across the hot sky
Thunder rumbled through me
And I was surrounded by a world of chaos and light and fury.
Beneath me the tide tugged this way and that on the hem of my dress
Wrapping around my hips and pressing me towards the open ocean.
For the smallest moment then,
I didn't feel the twisting of need in my chest.
Since that day I have followed this strange gravity
Whenever I wake up inside.
I let it lead me anywhere, everywhere, as long as I find a moment of peace at the end.
I've followed it through London streets
Where mist hung thick in the air and turned the light from the streetlamps to floating golden dust
Dragging my hands along the rough stones of buildings in the shadows
Searching with my palms for something to soothe me.
I have been pulled from my bed
And out onto lonely roads made of dirt and clay
Trying to wrap my fingers around the slivers of moonlight that slant through the trees
In those moments of morning when the world holds its breath,
When the spiderwebs are still poised to catch their silvery droplets and splay out in shining galaxies on the dark, whispering grasses.
I have swallowed my hesitance and stepped into crumbling buildings
With vines snaking through their bare windows
Found the dormant hearts of them and listened to the small scuttlings without fear or judgment,
Spoken to the ghosts in their hollow language of sighs and coldness.
I have stepped to the very edges of high places
And looked straight down
Felt the complex craving that all human beings have
Which bids them fall
And let it swallow me without letting it move me.
I've looked into eyes that thrilled and terrified me with their power
And opened myself completely
Sinking to my knees.
All this in service of a feeling, which like a shining thread pulls me irresistibly onward, keeping me up nights with my futile searches, and filling me with words and art and music too intricate to make but too urgent to lock away.
I've been trying not to write to you.
It didn't work.