Meaning & Spells

You experiment with telling the truth

You experiment with telling the truth.

Start there, where you want to start. Start anywhere. A beginning is only an entrance. It doesn’t need to be the front door.

There is another you through the side door. You see yourself there, young and crying, hiding after a fight. Now your group texts provoke the same response. You lock the door. You don’t want anyone to get inside.

If you tell yourself that keeping others out is what keeps you safe, where does love go? Do you turn a partition on and off to receive it? Do you lower a moat for only a few hours to let somebody else in, and bang the door back up, clumsily, when you see a weapon in their hand? It was only the glint of a watch. They were checking the time. They wanted to make sure they had enough to spend with you.

Living in defensive mode makes you sick. You know this. You tell your mom that any legal case can drag on. You have to do what you can to manage stress or it will make you sick. What do you do with anger? You keep a steady routine in your life. You meal prep, mute group chats, grocery shop with recipes in mind, get off Instagram, ride your bike, make few plans, leave group chats, go to bed before midnight, wake up and meditate. If your brain has been running in overdrive for years, when does it rest?

When you zone out the window and focus on a squirrel bickering with another over whose magnolia tree it really is. When you dip a croissant in your coffee. You used to wake up at 5 am to see your grandpa before he went out into the cold air in his cycling shirt and shorts. He would give you a hot chocolate and a croissant, which you dipped in there. With two siblings, you wanted the feeling of singularity for a few hours. Now you wake up before any of your roommates to chase that feeling again. Everything is a door somewhere. Open any one.

Bruce Lee said, “Don't speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke. Your body doesn't know the difference. Words are energy and cast spells, that's why it's called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life. What you're not changing, you're also choosing."

Last night you called yourself a “bad friend” as a joke. To be a bad friend is to be disappointing. It is to let someone down. You laugh about it. Ha, ha. Bad, bad. Bruce, can’t you chew on the words until they lose their shape? Can you devour the stories you have been told until they lose meaning?

I know you’re right, Bruce. I don’t need to wake you up to ask.

Michelle and I sat on her floor, eating canned beans and discussing all of my shortcomings. It’s strange to create a list of all the ways you suck. Have you ever done that? Imagine that when you die, someone reads your journals. They nod or shake their head around your list of presumed failings. They agree with you on some of them. Some are, of course, preposterous–clearly the product of someone suffering from low self-worth and a damaged sense of security. Hmmm, on others, they don’t really get your wording. They think you missed a few.

If I do not tell the truth in every instance it is because I have not found it yet. This door did not lead to it. It led me somewhere else. I am still searching.

Or, I did not want to tell the truth because I did not feel like it. Or did not trust you. Or did not feel like trusting that day. Sometimes it’s not so simple so as to say “truth!” Or “lie.” You live in your own fictions. Where are the threads? I don’t know, tangled off somewhere.

The story of my self-hatred intertwined with the story of abuse, the story of that breakup, the story of her childhood, a childhood forty years before me, a childhood sixty years in the past. She said she would sit on the toilet and talk to herself. That was her image of her grandmother. They locked her up, didn’t they? Now she calls you her name, first and last, as a nickname.

A body in line with other bodies still holds its own shape. When you speak like this, it’s not so much about being understood. You say “truth” as if it is a thing constantly available to you. These firmer categories are comforting, aren’t they? You tell the story of yourself to create it, over and over. Of course you want others to believe it, to control how they see you and to play a part in authoring your image. But you are also forgetful, and you are trying to remember yourself. Which doors have you opened today?

The thing about writing weird shit is that not everyone wants to read weird shit. Do you write for readability, or do you write because you are burning and you need to get this fire out!

It’s strange to do anything. Moving one’s fingers over a keyboard like it will lead somewhere. “Cellar door” is said to be the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Ok, whatever. He had it tattooed on his arm like a clue. Clue: Donnie Darko was a popular movie especially amongst troubled boys who were trying to create themselves. Litter your body with clues. You read his and they told you, Find another door.

There is a home for “troubled boys” on the hill before you enter St. Sauveur. Every time your mom drives past it, she mentions that a boy from there used to climb the hill to her home and hang out in the yard. He was nice. She always wondered what happened to him. The story spreads over years. You are 12 hearing the story, you are 16, you are 31. The story continues on somewhere inside you.

You know energy dictates how you act, and that you are controlled by it in ways you do not even realize. You know that the constant answering of group messages drains you in ways you cannot articulate. You know that living in a house where you sometimes feel like hiding drains you. The fantasies of your future are so simple. A kitchen to ferment in. A place to store an electric toothbrush and waterpik. A dog? A backyard where you can sunbathe naked. You have given up on the dream where all of your friends live walking distance and you can have dinner with all of them several nights a week. When you asked he would do if he was a millionaire, he said, “Have smoothies everyday,” so you went out and bought him a blender.

People think the best way to tell the truth is just do it. Nike knew what they were doing when they trademarked that phrase. No way around it. Just do it! This is the only door. Just go through it. You enjoy the directness of certainty as much as any, but you don’t agree with people when they think that the “truth” and “fiction” are firm categories. You think they have the whole world weighed out on scales, and are eyeing you suspiciously to see which side you belong on. A side door is still a door. Images can be spoken through too. It is not as easy to say, This is what happened. Let me tell you what happened.

Memory is not a tidy home. You offer disparate images because they act as threads. The silence and spaces are frustrating. Do you want to be told exactly what to believe and exactly what to feel? Is it worth it to work this hard (reading) to get something (meaning)?

You want there to be space for you to figure it out too.

When you think you are following a leader and then see that they are there beside you, looking for someone to show them the way through the dark.

Let others piece this story together. There are more doors to try. You find a window to crawl through.