The past is a word (and one of many)

I've written here before about the competing "poetic" structures that I employ in order to understand what (in less precise moments) I call my identity. But what these structures have not yet learned to offer me is a strategy of responding without resistance to the needs of narrative when they do, as they will, arise. The one effaces its origin, substitutes development for dispersal; the other takes that origin and exalts it, removes it from the world with a devotion that can only conceive of movement as a fall. They are both different forms of a similar stasis. Stephen in nothing and Sqaure in everything.

Luckily, the need, in my own life, for narrative does not too often confront me. No one asks (as perhaps I wish they would) how I got here, through where my travels have led me; no one asks me, that is, my story. Not, I think, because they lack an interest, but because they already know, assuming (rightly or wrongly) it inscribed for them to see in the spaces through which I move amongst them.

Recently, I've rediscovered a friend from high school, the long gap in our knowing each other having, if anything, only strengthened the original sympathy. We talk on the phone when our schedules allow, she talking more than I, and myself preferring that. I'm loathe to offer myself up in a story to her, loathe to say, "This, Shanna is what you missed, what has passed. This is the interim." If she asked, however, I would answer, turning with the words from Square to Stephen. But could I tell her - is it possible to tell at all - without the fixity of Stephen's backwards gaze, the insistent trace of the origin? If not - and perhaps the answer may very well be no - is it possible to rest in that no, to offer and be offered by it? In an email, I asked Shanna, whose husband had been overseas for the beginning of the war in Iraq, what his absence had been like for her. She answered, but with a preface. "As weird as it sounds, I think you're the first person to ask me that."