“I am before, I am almost, I am never.”
– Clarice Lispector
The truth is that I knew next to nothing about Sharon.
I never met her, but I once spent a week’s worth of lunch breaks writing journal entries and the beginnings of poems dedicated to her on slips of paper torn from the same yellow legal pads I scribbled TO-DO lists on at work. I wrote, mostly, about the plant she left behind: the same wilting pothos that my mother moved from house to house, that crisscrossed the country with us from Arizona to Illinois and back. I wrote about the way that it seemed to grow sideways, the way that it always looked tired, its leaves drooping like half-shut eyes after a string of restless nights. I wrote imagined scenes in which my mother leaned against her kitchen counter and collected the dead leaves, lingering above the sink for a beat longer than necessary before crumbling them in her palm and throwing the plant-detritus down the drain.
But mostly, I wrote about Sharon. I wrote about Sharon staring out of hospital windows. I wrote about Sharon taking walks in the sunshine. I wrote about Sharon lying on the grass and imagining herself free.
I never finished any of the poems. A handful of weeks later, I asked for help.
*
Emma said the word maybe like she was trying the future on for size, allowing the syllables to settle into her skin just long enough to imagine how uncertainty might feel: maaaaybe. (Once, in a group therapy activity, I was assigned the role of Emma’s Maybe. My job was to sit in a corner and repeat it, over and over, any time she was prompted to consider a future vastly or microscopically different from the present that had unraveled her. Maaaaybe, maaaaybe, maaaaybe. Maybe?)
The night we met, we talked about what this felt like—being so paralyzed by all of the maybes, all of the what-ifs. I said it felt like being stranded on an island. (Or maybe I said it felt like standing on the very edge of a pier, toes curled around the weathered wood. At any rate: it was a sloppy metaphor; there was water involved.) You know that you need to jump to get to where you want to be, and every cell in your body is screaming at you: jump!, and sometimes you kind of start to jump, but then you inevitably stop yourself before you can get any real momentum going, and then you find yourself exactly where you started, but even more tired than before, and I was just so tired.
Emma understood. She understood better than anyone else I had ever met.
*
“Despair is a form of certainty,” Rebecca Solnit writes. “Certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.”
I am beginning to believe that certain mental illnesses carry with them a certain flavor of certainty. Like swallowing a mouthful of stale airplane-air, maybe, or like inhaling lungfuls of the inside of an apartment whose inhabitant has died or moved away. It tastes like writing about the future in the past tense: I did, I did, I did not.
It tastes, in other words, like a future that I did not choose, but that has been determined nonetheless.
*
I know a handful of things about the past for sure. I know, for example, that when she was approximately my age, my mother met Sharon in a place very similar to the one in which I met Emma. The sort of place that you do not choose to go to so much as surrender to when there are no other options left, when both the past and the future feel barren and uninhabitable and you are so full of maybes, so full of sharp shards of ideas of how the present could be, but isn’t, that you cut yourself on the edge of even the most inconsequential decisions: how to spend an afternoon, coffee or tea, the arrangement of words to form a sentence.
I know that Sharon, like Emma, exists primarily for my mother in the past-tense, in the remnants she left behind. I know—because she tells me, matter-of-factly and without elaboration—that sometimes my mother and Sharon would take walks around the hospital grounds. I know that, somehow, Sharon’s plant fell into my mother’s care after she was gone. I know that recently, after decades, it finally died.
I tell her, in turn, about the clothes Emma gave me before she left, about the fabrics with all of their bright bright colors that hurt my eyes but that I accepted anyway. I tell her about the text messages Emma sends me at odd hours of the day, punctuated with emoticons:
it’s the middle of the night here and I’m thinking about you
I hope you are still using all of those fanciful words
maybe we won’t ever see each other again
fighting okay
You won’t forget her, my mother tells me. You never will.
*
In her book Betwixt-and-Between, essayist Jenny Boully writes about in-between spaces: experiences that do not fall firmly in the past/present/future, and the relationship between grammar—specifically, verb tenses—and lived time. There are some verb tenses, she argues, “that are not taught in schools. These are tenses that one learns instead when one grows older and knows that things will either be or not be, when one finds out that one might have been or might not have been something or other.”
She refers to these tenses—these tenses not taught in schools, these precarious sets of grammatical forms that can only be learned as one ages and experiences for herself the way that time and its relation to events and memory can bloat, blur at the edges, break down entirely—as the future imagined and the past imagined.
Here is where the definite past breaks down. Here is where I search the internet for traces of Sharon’s past, first name + last name + time frame (1980s?), first name + last name + obituary, and find nothing. Here is where I comb through the Google results anyway before eventually closing my eyes and imagining Sharon with long fingers like Emma’s, her nails scraping against my mother’s scalp as she weaves my mother’s unwashed Saturday morning hair into tight braids down her back. Here is where I hear the whirring of a standing fan circulating the stale summer air in a bedroom that didn’t belong to any of us. Here is where I spend days rubbing my skin raw in the shower after allowing Emma to tattoo my arms in Sharpie. Here is where my mother/I holds Sharon/Emma under tables, knees tucked into chins, hands shaking and bodies convulsing as we whisper to each other all of the places we would rather be than inside of ourselves.
Boully’s past imagined is full of ghosts: it is the dream-tense used to describe those things that “could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred.”
I am trying to understand: who might we have been?
*
From Two Journal Entries Entitled, “(to Sharon Rittenhouse)”
March 26, 2018
“I wonder if there was a way in which this [caring for this plant] made you feel human. Capable of nurturing something, keeping it alive. If when you opened your blinds so the leaves could stretch toward the sun you felt, briefly, awash in vitality.
But: it’s winter. You pour water into the pot, watch it absorb into the soil. You turn away from the window.”
March 29, 2018
“At what point did you decide: there’s no other way
(or: you knew of no other way, and what’s the difference?)
to exist inside of yourself?
I want to create something fertile out of it, Sharon.
I don’t want to be you.
Can I say that to someone who is dead?”
*
“Most people are afraid of the dark,” Solnit writes. “Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”
*
Some nights, I found Emma bent over a notebook. She would be writing feverishly under a pool of lamplight, filling pages and pages with her precise block-like handwriting as if the scratch of pen against paper was single handedly keeping the encroaching night at bay.
Sometimes I watched silently as she wrote. Other times, I interrupted her to ask variations of the same question: who will you be when you return home? She would set her pen down carefully, as though wary of disturbing the air with too much sudden movement, and lace her hands around her knees. She would tell me about her husband, her job, her family. She would tell me about all of the tall buildings in her city on the other side of the world, the way that they seemed to graze the undersides of the clouds, a claustrophobic sort of vastness so different from the endless desert she found herself in, now. She would tell me about the guilt: nobody believes I am ill there, I am not ill, it is my fault that I am ill. Her face would set with a sureness I could not touch and it was in those moments that I knew, even though I tried and tried to unknow it, that she was whispering to me from the inside of a certainty both familiar and foreign—the kind of certainty that I’d only ever brushed up against, only ever dipped a toe into, maybe.
But still, sometimes, I tried. My voice catching as I imagined her staring out of windows, palming the glass and contemplating all of the empty space between herself and the ground, I would try to suggest that things could be different. That she could wake up every morning and eat breakfast and watch the people blur past outside all of those windows and keep waking up and eating breakfast even when it felt like all of her pieces had been scrambled and she didn’t know up from down.
In response, she would drape her hand over mine as if she were trying to comfort me even though I’d been trying, was only ever trying, to comfort her. And then, as though she was at once placating me and allowing herself a momentary, heady rush of uncertainty: maybe. Maybe.
*
A few days into knowing Emma, I started to misplace things. My phone number came first—the same one I’d had for twelve years. For weeks, I rolled ballpoint pens between my fingers, closed my eyes, rummaged for digits and, too embarrassed to admit my lapse, scrawled incorrect strings of numbers on official forms listing my diagnoses.
The next time, it was intentional. I dropped a letter from my first name. I wanted to slip into a clean one-syllable like a new self, rename myself into a future whose contours were so slippery they left my fingertips oily and stained with residual want. When I whispered it to myself in the dark, I barely recognized my own voice.
*
“I have a suspicion that in this life, mirrors are not meant for looking into but rather for looking out of,” Boully writes. “I only have to master this kind of looking, and then I will be able to see what the outside has to offer, instead of only seeing myself looking outward and being confronted with the self who looks outward ad infinitum.”
If pressed to describe my past (lived), I would probably tell you that it felt like staring into mirrors. Not literal mirrors—those I mostly avoided—but a sort of funhouse of existential mirrors. The kind that reflect back to you only the pieces of yourself that you are most ashamed of, most afraid of giving into; those pieces that you allow to assume an outsize significance in your life by your very unwillingness to acknowledge and therefore forgive yourself for.
It’s possible, then, that even before I met Emma—even before I knew about Sharon, even before my mother listened on the other line while I told her: she’s gone, she left, she’s gone, only to assure me I would not forget—that I was already searching for a way to look out of my mirrors instead of back into them.
It’s possible that I was looking for reflections of myself in everyone I saw.
*
On the nights that my grasping for uncertainty felt particularly tinged with desperation—with a white-knuckled kind of hope, an eyes-closed, crashing-into-corners kind of hope—I would suggest to her that instead of going home, she could stay with me in the desert forever.
We could walk, I would tell her. We could walk and walk into a thousand early-summer sunsets like swollen bruises and allow ourselves to forget that eventually it would get so dark that we would not be able to see at all.
*
It’s like this: suddenly, I went from seeing myself looking outward to seeing myself looking at a landscape of shared would have beens, could have beens, should have beens: who would we have been, if we had not been eclipsed by our illnesses? Who could we have been, if we had asked for help sooner? Who should we have been, if we had not mapped ourselves onto our own shame, hadn’t constructed the boundaries of ourselves according to the architecture of our shared desire to disappear?
*
But what pieces of Emma, of Sharon, of my mother have I discarded in order to build a past imagined that could hold us all?
In looking, I fear that I have done to these women precisely what I have done to myself: I have built a narrative out of fragments, smoothing over our differences so that I am left with a story that feels big and sturdy enough to swallow me whole. A story that will live perpetually in a grammatical state of in-betweenness; a story in which each of us has frozen into a static pillar of maybes to form a collective woman who:
almost ________________
wanted to ______________
loved _________________
could not ______________
could not ______________
could not ______________
*
But is there something to be said, too, for the maybe? For the way a maybe snakes into a sentence, into a paragraph, into a narrative into a life, leaving holes where certainty could’ve been?
Maybe I was staring into mirrors when all I tried to do was look out from them, break them open. I wanted to let the air in. I wanted to feel a breeze lift a lock of hair. I wanted to feel a shift in the air as a cloud covered the sun and darkened the room so that we were all reduced to reflected smudges and did not have to see ourselves at all.
Maybe I was trying to build a story with enough room to hold all of our collective uncertainty. Maybe I was trying to build a story in which Sharon/Emma/my mother/I did not have to be defined by what we had failed to recover from/forgive ourselves for/move past.
Maybe I was trying to build a story that saw us all: imperfect, and trying to become.
*
It was an unremarkable Friday night. We’d been training ourselves to let go. So far, I’d only been able to shout underwater—small, tepid groans that barely made a dent in the chlorinate-blue.
But then Emma screamed and it was like she had swallowed glass. I could have sworn that her jagged cry was sharp enough to draw blood. I could have sworn that she tore a hole in the sky, that time stood still; that, somewhere, her scream still rings in the air.
I can almost see it, now: somewhere, a woman bends to water her plants and suddenly the air around her begins to vibrate. For a moment, she is suspended inside of the scream. She forgets the day, the month, the year.
She forgets her first name.
Katie Miller is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Minnesota. She lives in Minneapolis with her cat. Instagram: @miller_katiec.
Photo by Miquel Lleixà Mora on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND