I don’t want to lose a single thread
from the intricate brocade of this happiness
I want to remember everything.
Which is why I’m lying awake, sleepy
but not sleepy enough to give it up.
—from I Don’t Want to Lose, Mary Oliver
Spring is here! It’s wet and muddy outside, but I can feel the warmth in my bones. I can feel it creeping up my spine, and I can hear T.S. Eliot whispering, “April is the cruellest month” as I hurtle towards the end of my senior year, drinking coffee and talking for an hour with Than as we watch lilacs rising out of dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. The days are longer, but not long enough. “We have not long to love,” chirp the birds outside my window at 2 a.m, urging me to start the day as soon as possible. “The hours we have together are not that long!!!”
One of my favorite lyrics on the new Taylor Swift album (unfortunately on one of the tracks I like least) name-drops Patti Smith. I jumped off of my friends’ couch when I first heard it—Patti Smith had been my niche interest for too long for this to be a coincidence (it was past midnight and I was convinced that everything was a sign and that the Patti Smith could ever be considered a niche interest. I am still convinced everything is a sign).
The object of my obsession these past few months has been Smith’s book “M Train,” which I found at the Village Works Bookstore in the East Village last fall break. For a book about luck and loss, encountering it felt like serendipity, and I took it in as slowly and carefully as she sips the coffee at the many cafes she describes.The book has the most delicious opening line I’ve ever read: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” I think about it about often. It knocks around my head like an early 2000’s DVD screensaver. It’s easy to talk about nothing, but writing about it feels daunting, which is why this platform feels so important to me. It’s easier to write about nothing when you have nothing to say, Smith writes. “If only I had nothing to say.”
“M Train” induced the same affliction in me that Smith suffered from when she read W.G. Sebalt. I was overcome by the “desire to possess what [she] had written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.” “It’s not mere envy,” she quickly clarifies, “but a delusional quickening of the blood.” It is the urge to create something that evokes the same feelings, and also to capture the feelings it evoked in you. I feel that delusional quickening of the blood now, as I write this essay about nothing.
In the book, Smith mourns the cafés she will never return to, and the cafes she’ll never know. They are among the many things she’s lost. She discusses places, possessions, and people she’s lost at length: her mother, her brother, her husband, and a coat. These are “things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again.” We search for them “as we search for our hands in a dream”—vivid, but out-of-reach, as if on the periphery of a dream. She talks about these lost things like ghosts. She has “a ghost of a phrase” gnawing at her. I have words rushing at me faster than I can write them down, and I stay up all night trying to wrangle a lost thought into words*. She does not realize the depth of her love for people until they are gone. I am struggling to understand how to make the most of my final weeks with my friends. She shakes hands with a coffee dealer in Veracruz, “knowing, most likely, [they] would never meet again, nor would [she] find coffee as transporting as his.” I write an essay about all the people I’ve fallen in love with in bookstores. She admits she doesn’t remember the faces of the women who cried as they nursed her back to health at Casa Azul. I am filled with overwhelming gratitude and guilt every time someone is kind to me.
She writes:
Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat.
I have spent a lot of time in therapy talking about my fear of losing things and people and moments. I talk about losing my black leather jacket—the first thing I thrifted when I got to college—the same way I talk about losing my grandparents and forgetting things. I make lists obsessively. To-do lists, lists of things to buy, lists of funny things my friends have said, lists of movies I’ve seen and articles I’ve enjoyed and things I’ve learned. Smith verbalizes my fears in a way that makes me want to claw at my skin, writing, “The things I touched were living. My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to frame these moments. They passed without souvenir … what I have lost and cannot find I remember. What I cannot see I attempt to call.”
I am terrified to let moments pass without souvenir. This year, as a way to preserve them, I have started scrapbooking (as if writing alone wasn’t enough). My therapist asks me what would happen if I didn’t document everything. I’m not sure how to answer in a way that adequately reflects my desperation to “reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation.” Smith writes, “I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.”
Here's another quote that echoes in my head like an intrusive thought—most recently in the middle of a perfectly pleasant Saturday brunch. Don’t go. Don’t grow, I plead. But things go, and people grow – as they should, and as they must.
And so, she realizes that some things “are not lost but sacrificed.” She sees her black coat, in what she calls the Valley of the Lost, being picked up by someone else. She imagines it mourning her, and then realizes that perhaps she “absorbed” her coat; perhaps it served its purpose and has moved on.
I, for one, seem incapable of moving on, and yet I am reluctant to go back. But Smith reminds me—in a third quote that pounds at my head unrelentingly—“Nothing can truly be replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.” I implore everything I have ever loved to stay the same, in an effort to cling to a feeling of permanency. And yet, I am changed every day, and everything I love is radically different with every passing second.
Maria Popova, in her essay about “M Train,” observes that “every transformation is invariably a loss, and the transformed must be mourned before the transformed-into can be relished.” Impermanence will always prevail, and that is the only permanence we can ever realistically know. I long for lost things that I can only make out the outlines of in my memory. I mourn the feeling of home, but Smith writes:
Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream… all the lost things that may one day call to me. The faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.
In “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays,” David Foster Wallace writes, “Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Home might only be a town you’re just a guest in, but doesn’t that make every town—and person and possession—my home for a little while? And have I not been irreversibly changed by every town I’ve ever lived in, and every coat I’ve ever lost, and every person I’ve ever loved? If being expected to stay the same when I return is a disservice to me, is it not also a disservice to my homes to expect them to always stay the same?
Everything goes, and everything grows. In the meantime, I do the only thing I can:
I’m going to remember everything and then I’m going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That’s what I was thinking in my dream, looking down at my hands.
Like Smith, I can only offer up my world on a platter filled with allusions. I write not only what I know, but what I remember and what I dream about. Egon Schiele once claimed, “Copying from nature is meaningless to me, because I paint better pictures from memory.” I try and knowingly fail to find combinations of words that even tangentially manage to capture images not lost, but willingly given up, to the vicissitudes of time to make space for growth.
I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who ownnothing–the reason they can fly.
—from Storage, Mary Oliver
Bibliography:
“The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
“We Have Not Long to Love” by Tennessee Williams
An interview with Baylee Schmitt, the artist who crocheted her childhood home from memory: https://crochetfoundry.com/blogs/news/stitching-stories-the-artistry-of-baylee-schmitts-crochet-installations.
*I am convinced I wanted to add something here, but I can’t remember what. It’s 6 a.m. and I am choosing to let it go.