One Essay
Minor Arcana: Swords
I was afraid of my feeling. – Sarah Manguso
Ace
The famous art critic comes to school to give a talk. She asks three questions:
What do you see?
Why are you seeing it?
What does it mean?
Like the moment in the dawn when the streetlights turn off, which is the moment right after I look up and realize they’re no longer necessary.
2
I don’t always mind a blurry thing, but sometimes clarity is good.
What will come into clarity that could have been kept blurred? Do I want to see it straight on, and at what risk? What if it’s painful, do I want the pain? Want to be in control, want to lose control. To keep out and to let in. To trust the other enough, or pretend to trust, in order to learn to.
How do people DO this? I wonder. What is reasonable?
3
I cry so hard, sobbing, hiding from my kids in the bathroom, or quickly wiping away tears when they enter the kitchen. I force myself to eat, though it’s hard to chew and swallow. Whenever I manage to eat something, my stomach aches. I live for weeks with this knot inside; I lose seven pounds.
4
I’m done remembering, or I want to be.
Which leads me to stop before I begin. And then I begin again.
L. writes to me while I’m at the beach: I wish for you a healing message from the water. But there is no healing message from the water in Mississippi that summer. Instead, a toxic algae, the kind that makes people sick, blooms, and we can’t swim, and the kids become ill.
5
R. texts me one morning, two days before I am to visit: Can you assure me that L. and I aren’t ruining your marriage? My heart starts to beat very fast. Eventually I respond, I’m pretty sure it’s my desire to live a fuller, happier life, taking my needs seriously, that’s ruining my marriage. Later I write to her, In fact I can’t honestly reassure you of this. I joke that she’s a bad influence. I ask if she’s trying to break up with me.
But that sudden flare rises from my gut, as I have in fact wondered if I’m under some kind of spell or illusion. I buoy myself, try to feel triumph and joy, to pay attention to all the good, yet there’s always this undercurrent of guilt, shame, precarity. That there will be winners and losers. That if I don’t reassure everyone that everything is okay, I’ll lose them all.
6
An acquaintance speaks of wanting protection. They say it in the form of a blessing before dinner – from what? I wonder, but don’t ask. One friend tells me he wants to protect his loves, how love for him is in part about protecting the other. I disagree, I tell him: love challenges. And yet for years I’ve held back in order to protect my spouse from me – and to protect myself.
The fear is not that I’ll fall from the edge of a great height, but that I’ll throw myself off.
I touch the feathery milkweed seeds, pull them out, toss them up, and most of them fall right down, but the wind takes a few higher and higher.
7
We talk for over three hours, a very difficult talk about our relationship. S. says he feels trapped. I say I have felt that too, and sometimes still do. It gets late, after midnight, and we attempt to go to bed, but we both struggle to fall asleep. Eventually he gets up. Eventually I sleep.
Then I have his recurring dream. We’re in a cabin surrounded by woods, and we think there’s a bear nearby. We see it – it’s small – we assume the mother is close. I want to leave the cabin, the small bear’s now inside it, and S. and our son are also inside, trying to get out. Then we’re all outside. I see the bigger bear, the mother, stalking S., but from above him, on a hillside, while he can’t see her. I worry she’ll charge, but we escape.
When I tell him about this dream, he says, Yep, that’s the dream. Haven’t had it in years.
8
I drive past a sign in front of a church – it’s been up for months. “There is no fear in love,” it says. When my friend and I pass it together, we sometimes note what a lie that is, or how it shames people, or how it could encourage self-doubt, if one does feel afraid. Intellectually I can understand the idea that if one gives oneself over to an all-encompassing love, to God or Spirit or Nature, if you believe that is there, then you have nothing to fear. But I don’t feel that way.
In some images the woman stands alone in the mud, bound and blindfolded, loosely. She’s on the shores of nightmare and desolation, but she could release herself.
9
I hear the whistle of the train I’d thought briefly – it had flashed – of throwing myself in front of, about six weeks ago. That kind of thought hadn’t occurred in years.
What if my kids one day read this?
Then I’m in the complete darkness of the James Turrell room, Hind Sight, where even after ten minutes I can’t see my hand in front of my face, and even after ten minutes I can barely make out a dim light, as if at the end of a tunnel, but so dim that, in fact, when I look at it directly, it seems to fade. It’s best seen peripherally. To look straight on blurs the image. I spend most of the time wondering if the light I see – though you could hardly call it light – is there at all.
10
Given that the result is, I feel broken.
Given that the result is, Not now, maybe never, I don’t know…
Given that the result is, I have said no.
The end of the story is, I thought the story was over, several times.
The end of the story is, a year passes, two years pass, three years pass, four.
In the end everything means its opposite. The story has not ended.
Instead of a story, instead of an ending, something else shifts.
And again.
Again.
Page
You are dear to me, L. writes, in the beginning. The situation, he says, calls for step by step honesty and attention.
“Dear” means “regarded with personal feelings of high estimation and affection; held in deep and tender esteem.” Synonyms include “beloved, loved.” To determine his feeling, I study the words.
Builder of webs in the pit of me, who is me. Is it?
Knight
In the dream I tell my father it isn’t any of his business what I do in my marriage. This makes him irate. We walk away together while he responds angrily.
Someone says, You can’t be married and have other lovers! You can’t be married like that!
Queen
Nearly every person I’ve loved deeply, I’ve loved through language. Through reading them. Through hearing their written voice.
“Find your fear, then go there.” A sentiment I admire, and I tell S. He disagrees vehemently in a way that seems indicative of a huge difference between us.
King
I wanted to write tonight about what I’m identifying as a crisis of self. The knots in my stomach spread, tensile, overtaking.
At the same time I like when L. makes things difficult for me – up to a point. Blocking the desired thing. Whatever that delicate point is, that cliff-edge, that line, I like to be pushed toward it.
We kiss both cheeks, and then a tight-lipped, closed-mouthed brush on the lips. I put on my backpack, my handbag on my arm, and walk toward the station door, pausing to glance over my shoulder to see L. a last time – a little surprised to meet his eyes as he sits in the car, watching. I hold them for a second, then turn, push open the door, and leave.
Notes
This essay’s epigraph comes from the book 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso (Graywolf, 2017): “I wasn’t afraid of what I would do or what would happen. I was afraid of my feeling.”
“Ace”: The author and art critic quoted is Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.
“9”: James Turrell’s installation Hind Sight remains on view at MassMoCA.
“Page”: These definitions and synonyms come from the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Queen”: The full context of this quote, from Carly Milne’s introduction to the anthology Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography (Carroll & Graf, 2005), is: “A wise person once said to me, ‘Find your fear, then go there.’”
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Melissa Dickey lives in Western Massachusetts and is the author of Ordinary Entanglement, Dragons, and The Lily Will.