You say goodbye, I say hello

Start or end your story with a character letting go of something, or deciding to keep it.

The book I was using to encourage myself to write suggested this prompt, and I began to cry, convulsively. It was a mystery. Out of the blue tears came, my shoulders sagged and shook, and I broke into many sharp pieces. My reaction mystified me, but then, suddenly, I understood: the pain I was experiencing lay, not in having to choose between keeping something or letting go of it, but rather in the stark realization that I could not choose one of these actions and instead was condemned to do both, live both, simultaneously. I would let go, but would simultaneously keep what had just been severed from me against my will. I won’t repeat the over-used (by me) image of Rosalía de Castro, the poem whose I misses the nail that had been driven into her heart, then removed. Nevertheless, it sits here with me, rippling through my mind.

You all know what that poem means to me, so I ought to turn to another echoing image, e.e. cummings’ The Enormous Room. (A gift at an important, intense time of my life, that copy misplaced and another acquired to occupy the original spot on the shelf.) Because in a sense that’s what I came to be: an enormous space which enclosed the thing that has been lost. This, of course, was not an easy task, yet I felt I had no choice. Being left with nothing meant succumbing, being entombed while still alive. It was not my style, so I set out to fix it.

The opened door showed a room, about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow, with a heap of straw in the further end. My spirits had been steadily recovering from the banality of their examination; and it was with a genuine and never-to-be-forgotten thrill that I remarked, as I crossed what might have been the threshold: “Mais, on est bien ici.”

A hideous crash nipped the last word. I had supposed the whole prison to have been utterly destroyed by earthquake, but it was only my door closing…. (The enormous room)

It appeared that I too had entered a prison, or maybe I was the prison, controlling what happened inside me. La cárcel de amor, Diego de San Pedro’s sentimental novel from 1492? ‘A tale rife with the paradoxes of unrequited love: a knight in a far-away land, named Leriano, falls hopelessly in love with a royal heiress to the throne, named Laureola, who does not return his affections.’ In their introduction and translation, Laura Francis and Álvaro Garrote Pascual speak of authority and the Woman Question addressed by so many over the centuries. The question is, what is a prison? Who creates it? Who serves as sentinel? (I really need to reread that book, it seems.)

Only a prison could contain and retain what had actually been released, set free, for me. What kind of prison did I possess? An enormous space where things and people had begun to rattle around, trying to be anywhere else but inside me. Cummings’ book refers to the time of World War I; I had never been in a war, yet a war was being waged within my corporal walls. 

I was letting go while simultaneously understanding that it was impossible to carry out the release of elements that no longer pertained to me. We had imprinted on each other, like some animals do. They have no choice; neither did I. Innate and permanent are features of imprinting. I realized immediately that it was impossible and delusional to think of casting off the elements I had to let go of, because doing so would result in self-destruction and I couldn’t afford that. I needed to honor and assess what had left my being, my soul, so I could recover.

Hence the enormous room that is also a prison. I expanded, grew, reached clouds and crossed an ocean until my walls were in place. Only then was I able to open the door, or maybe a window, to contemplate what was there. Always, at first, I made the effort to avoid all contact, to only observe and listen. This turned out to be a lengthy process, so I was forced to expand further, constructing a structure that went from wobbly but necessary, then turned sturdy, safe, and for the most part, silent. I sat outside myself, slowly translating, bringing over (my walls) what was there. The first rule was to maintain the interstices at any cost; any tactile convergence would be fruitless. Less is more, as the tired adage tells us…

Why does Foucault (Surveiller et punir, Discipline and punish) and his panopticon, derived from Bentham’s of the 18th century, come to mind now? This isn’t something created to enable political control, the only guardian is me, and no torture ish involved. Maybe it’s the aspect of keeping watch, standing guard over a territory of sentiment in order to defend it? “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth" (Chapter 21, Verse 6). And so Harper Lee comes to remind me of the nature of vigilance, the need to keep a close eye on things.

It wasn’t easy to provide any order for the items that occupied my interior. Years were uncertain, although many places were clearly identifiable. I had saved up little rural chapters, boiled octopus on wooden plates, sprinkled with coarse salt, greenish olive oil, and hot paprika. I had days spent in a warm Cathare village, a passage through the Mediterranean (the Aegean would have sounded more mythical) to an island split in two. I had a dingy room in a hotel in central Madrid, meals drowned in sagardoa in northeast Iberia, four-hour bus rides, fig trees on hot days and prickly chestnut covers. And that was just the start of it. I had so much to let go of, but I was determined not to let it go far. And to keep it always within reach. Perhaps one day it’d get sorted out.

The keeping and the discarding were exhausting, so much work, so eternal, but I slogged on, occasionally questioning my sanity. Why bother to hold on to things that were no longer there or shared? Despite the questioning, this was the only path: both release and retain, without getting sliced open in the process. No alternative was even remotely possible. The compilation was never ending, but fortunately I could say the same for my expanding walls. Everything I chose to hold on to was going to fit. Only memory could fix the boundaries. Memory was prodigious.

Cemeteries beside Romanesque arches. Rosemary and hydrangea. Books and books and more books. Silver, jet, scallop shells, bobbins that clacked out lace, umbrellas paving sidewalks, lichens like rainbows. Hives, more than one kind. Jalapeños and Juan Rulfo. Castros, petroglyphs, dynamited heartbeats. Four or five failures to keep an egg alive. 

Keeping versus constructing. Passive versus active. Opposites attracting and reacting, corroding, scraping off the iron oxide. Black shadowing corners and sun-stroked wharves. Pens, inks, notes of many colors. Post cards. Where to stop? A long list is not equivalent to a story, most likely has no plot although everywhere I look there’s one thing tugging on another, trying to get free and eventually curling up in a warm corner like a cat waiting to be petted. 

That, it seems, is the best way (for now) to end this telling of what is held, lost, then gripped once more like a favorite book the wind wants to read. Everything fits - scuffed, crumpled, smudged, or ripped - , everything moves about freely enough, everything sings softly in an alto voice. For now I am simply going to curl up in the warmest corner and dream of what I have. If some things have gotten away, I haven’t noticed. I don’t need them.