If you were to stack every Typewriter Series poem I have ever written, all those on tattered old scraps of paper, the receipts from Irish pubs, the free hotel pads they leave next to the bible on the nightstand, the centuries-old sketchbooks I was given by friends who know antiques, that stack would reach almost four feet high. If only you could keep it from tipping over.
Take the un-mailed letters I wrote to Sarah in all that time I spent waiting to finally be together, fold them up like letters fold up before they get slid into envelopes, and make another stack beside it. That stack would tower over it, a hair over 19 feet tall if my back-of-the-napkin math is correct.
This is time and its passing.
This is the accumulation of the days I was sick, those I was worn out, exhausted, saddled with sadness, defeated. These are those of such longing, of ache. These are days of travel, of stillness, of rainfall, blizzard, boiling heat, or thunderstorm. Each poem, each letter, a promise I was making to no one, every morning I woke and felt the weight of all those words pressing on the inside of me.
I do not know why I do this, and I have never known. Sarah has stopped asking too, accepts it as one in a long line of unchangeable things about me that are either charming or chaotic, depending on the day. These stacks, imaginary representations of very real things, are the shape of me pressed into something organized, something tangible, though I’ll never hold them. Not really. The poems are in binders, the letters never actually slid into envelopes, but they still hold the precise textures of every single day I spent creating them.
There are the mornings in Edinburgh, the light just peeking over the crow-stepped gables of the Royal Mile, when I woke early and left Sarah sleeping in the little cupboard bed off the kitchen to write a haiku on the back of our grocery receipt. The poems typed during rainstorm on a typewriter made almost a century ago, the little dimple that matched precisely the shape of my ass in the computer chair I bought on clearance from a Staples I didn’t even know was still in business. There is the cycling on and off of our central heating, the aging of Gilly as he sat beside me over the years of my writing. I wake and I write, I eat and I find scraps to jot down the words that rattle in my busy mind. I do these things, over and again, these invisible acts, these nothing moments that no one would ever ask me about. These moments, these promises, are closer to who I am more than almost anything I’ve ever published.
I have done this so long, so very long, that I cannot possibly remember ever being a person who didn’t.
The Typewriter Series poems, over 3,310 of them, on all those discarded scraps of paper that were destined for some landfill. The haiku, good lord the haiku, almost 4,500 days in a row writing seventeen syllables onto a tiny piece of paper before I’d even had a bite of breakfast. So many haiku that 5,7,5, is tattooed on my inner-right wrist, a reminder to that strange unnecessary dedication. The letters to Sarah, all those I wrote in the ache of what felt like an eternity of waiting, when she was someone I was hoping for instead of sleeping beside in the quiet hours each night. All these shadow missives to a woman who hardly knew I was even writing to her. Even the workouts, those boring things no one wants to ever hear about, all those I refuse to skip unless it feels like Death is quietly knocking on the doorframe to my body. 11am almost every day of the week, the days I tell myself “THIS TIME it’ll get rid of the headache,” and then hope it doesn’t make it worse.
The part I keep forgetting?
Almost all the time, no one really knew about any of it. No one really had to, no one held me to anything. The letters still aren’t sent, no one would have cared or even noticed if I didn’t post a haiku some morning, the Typewriter Series poems could have stopped, restarted, or disappeared without a trace and I guarantee maybe only three family members would have asked why. The workouts were almost all done in my old dank basement where the ceiling was so low I couldn’t lift my hands above my head, and the pullup bar was in the doorway to the kitchen. I knocked myself out cold on it one day, running in to answer a phone call and forgetting I had it hung up. I still have a lump from it on my forehead. All I created, all the promises I made to myself, and no one really knew.
But I knew. I always knew. I kept a strange little ledger in my soul I think, a little old-fashioned one that maybe General Store owners would keep during the pioneer days, and every time I made another entry. If only to stop that feeling from creeping up and creeping in that not doing the thing, that breaking that promise, would make a ghost of me.
I think a secret that no one ever says out loud about a long personal project, and I do use the word secret intentionally because the moment you announce it the spell weakens, is that the project isn’t even the point. Not really, not at all. The Typewriter Series poems weren’t the point, the haiku weren’t the point, the letters to Sarah, the boring workouts that should never be a topic of conversation, absolutely not the point. The point was just the person that you become in the room when no one else is watching, when no one is there to hold you to the promises you made. The accumulation of all that time, but more, the day that comes and you realize that it all added up, all those invisible secret mornings, to a self that you can live inside. A soul you’re proud of.
I’ve got a four foot stack of Typewriter Series poems, I’ve got a 20 foot tower of letters beside it. I’ve got a chair that knows the exact curve of my buns, and I’ve got a wife that now sleeps beside me every night, who won’t ever hold those letters in her hands most likely.
I’ve also got all those mornings in Edinburgh, Scotland or Boerne, Texas, or Middlesex, New Jersey or even simple little Helena, Montana.
I’ve got the closest version of myself I’ll ever reach. A little tiny spiritual movement of one.
The storm rolls in, the storm rolls out, Gilly sleeps and chases bunnies in his dreams beside me.
I make a new promise to no one again. Again, this is enough.
I love you all.
Be good.
