Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect.

I didn’t even think, be a writer.

Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.

I knew even on the plane back to the west as the evergreens and rivers came back into view through the perfect drizzle of home that if I was a woman writer, then I was a broken kind of woman writer. I drank many tiny bottles of airplane feel sorry for yourself. I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, with only a head and heartful of beautiful memories about what it would be like to be a writer, since I’d eaten with them and shared such perfect company. It was the only prize I allowed myself.

But something in me had been born, still.

SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.

With Marguerite Duras, you must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city — foreign to you — foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. Lose your name and your language. Lose your identity moorings. Lose your very thoughts. There must be shutters on the tall slightly open windows. The room must be blue. The floor made of stone. You must be naked. Her breath a whisper against your skin. Up the length of your body. Down. You must listen for the sounds of the city moving all around you. You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion. And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover’s skin stories over you. At night, it will rain. Open the windows. Desire wets. There is no inside out but the body. Love unto death.

With Gertrude Stein there will be eating and paper. Tea and money. She will say it gracefully. She will say it with ice-cream. Eating and paper. A flesh circle. So kind. And then again again.

Make quiet for Emily Dickinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it.

In the next room H. D. has brought the walls down, but look how the light dances across the floor of things differently now. Even your feet are new.

With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.

Jean Rhys came through the vast corpus of literature like water cutting canyon.

Adrienne Rich went down into the depths ahead of you. Her dive brought the possibility of language up to your surface. Breathe. And understand the broad shoulders you are standing on to reach the air. Take these objects.

With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and with whom, when to pick up a rifle.

Jeanette Winterson will make a small thing enormous as the cosmos.

Toni Morrison will let you cry home the passage.

Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything.

With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night.

When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong.

Go ahead-with Anne Carson — rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling.

With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless.

I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

IT’S YOUR SECOND EX-HUSBAND’S BIRTHDAY, YOU KNOW, the one you divorced because he slept with not one but about five gazillion different women, and he calls you at 2:00 a.m. all drunk from Paris where you two used to rent apartments and make art because it’s his birthday and he tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 — By the way, I’m switching to second person because if I say “I,” in your head you’ll just picture Heather Locklear or something so-YOU. You are 37 on your way to the big 4–0. You are divorced for the sad sad second time. You are in SoCal. Living alone. Making sure your blonde is blonde. Waxed.

So your second ex-husband calls on his birthday and tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 and that they’ve tattooed their ring fingers together and she looks so much like you and acts so much like you and smells so much like you at 23 so you calmly hang up the phone and glimpse the 37 year old skin of your own hand and walk to your writing desk and open the drunk drawer and pull out the bottle and drink an entire bottle of scotch in the middle of the night and drive your car out onto the six northbound lanes of the freeway in SoCal where you now live due to your great new job as the Visiting Writer because you did the strong thing and left him because you didn’t want to be an enabler and so forth and you wanted to rise above it and get on with your life so there you are on this freeway in SoCal in a red car with your blonde hair and your black dress and your stiletto heels to prove to yourself that you are still attractive like a fucking advertisement for Black Velvet and wait a minute, what’s that shiny you see some pretty lights to the right twinkle twinkle little star and WOOSH you are cutting tracks through the thick ice plant between southbound and northbound freeway lanes at 90 literally carving through them with scars that will last weeks and be on the nightly news and spinning out big time and coming to a smoky stop — miraculously — pointed in the right direction in the southbound lanes.

You know what to do. You floor it. Laughing that maniacal laugh of a 37 year old divorced woman who should be dead but isn’t.

A little soggy voice in your head goes take the next exit ramp and get your drunk ass home which you see as if you are looking through water up ahead you take it and you let go of the steering wheel like your hands are floating away from things until BAM you drive head-on into another car and your airbags deploy like two enormous fatty sagging breasts and the police come and you are sauced beyond belief and everything smells a little like gunpowder and scotch and it’s ma’am get out of the car and ma’am stand on one foot and count backwards from 100 with your eyes closed and with this stick up your ass and balancing an egg on your left tit and what else?