The half-room rebellion: Drafts from a coward who mothers stolen pain

I keep the lights off so the blue of the screen can fake a horizon.

How to steal pain [badly]

There’s a way I hold other people’s stories like costume jewelry: turn them in my palm until the light hits and I can pretend it’s mine. A headline, a friend’s breakup, a photo from a ruined city I’ve never walked: if I press hard enough, it leaves an indent. Then I parade the indent as a wound. It isn’t malice. Please, trust me. It’s hunger. I want to belong to the choir of hurt because the choir is singing something true and I am terrified I’m only mouthing along. So I borrow their notes. I plagiarize grief the way a bored student plagiarizes citations: frantic, reverent, and slightly proud of the footnotes. Look, I say to myself, I too can ache. But it doesn’t fit right. Other people’s pain has different seams. When I wear it, the shoulders sit wrong and the cuffs drag. I spend the day in someone else’s catastrophe and still come home anonymous. Every theft has a tell. Mine is neatness. I sand down the edges so the pain can pass safety inspection. The original is jagged, unsanitary. My replica is curated for display; tragic, yes, but photogenic, thank you for asking. I can’t stand the smell of the raw stuff. I Febreze it and call it witness.

Blank page, loud room

“Write about what you know,” they say. Fine. I know how to open a new document and then immediately check three apps to see if anyone has posted a better sentence. I know how to scroll until my brain is a roulette wheel and the ball lands on “apocalypse” twice per hour. I know how to mistake proximity for permission. The truth is I can’t write because I keep auditioning as a version of myself that deserves to be read. The part requires me to be braver, funnier, more tragic. I’m none of these on command. I am a person in a half-room: the bed cut off by a bookcase, the desk cut off by guilt, the mirror cut off by a sweater that never dries. The other half is on the internet, where my life is perpetually almost. When I do manage a sentence, I put it in a museum of almosts. I walk the halls, nodding at glass cases labeled: Almost Poem, Almost Essay, Almost Courage. The security guard is me. The thief is me. The tour guide is me, too, whispering, “Please notice the craftsmanship on this unfinished thought.”

The [cowardly] rebel who won't leave the chair

I am not apolitical. No. I learn politics and I know when I leanly lean. But, I think... I am conveniently seated. I sign the petition, I retweet the outrage, I treat indignation like aerobic exercise: heart rate up, no actual movement. I call myself a rebel and then I hide behind the screen because the street terrifies me. The street is concrete and sweat and other people’s breath. The street would ask my body to believe what my mouth declares. Call it cowardice. I do. I can sense the part of me that wants to be seen doing the right thing and the part that wants to be unseeable while doing it. I want the halo and the cloak. I want to be applauded for leaving while already home in pajamas. Sometimes I fantasize that the half-room is an underground cell and I am writing samizdat that will topple something. Then the kettle boils and the revolution requires milk and two sugars. The pamphlet is a paragraph. The tyrant is the cursor.

If you were to rummage through my braid inventory

1. One borrowed sorrow that fit too well.
2. Three drafts that pretended to be essays.
3. A window that faces a wall and still calls itself a view.
4. A chair that has memorized me.
5. A conscience that wants receipts, not metaphors.

What I [actually] know

I know the names of two neighbors I’ve never spoken to. I know the noise the hinge makes when I consider opening the door. I know that my own pain is ordinary and I keep dressing it up because ordinary pain doesn’t feel enough. I also know this: the replica and the block and the cowardice are siblings. They share a mother named Avoidance. If I wear your sorrow, I can avoid meeting mine. If I rehearse the perfect essay, I can avoid writing the flawed one. If I posture as a rebel, I can avoid failing in public. Avoidance is elegant. It wears all my vocabularies. It knows how to make paralysis look like principle.

The unglamorous experiment [the volta]

Lots of things have happened recently. Good and bad.

I got called for a written exam for a job so amazing I thought my application would vanish unread. Not only did a real human respond, they even shifted cities across the country just to make it easier for me. And yet, as usual, I delayed. Delayed studying for the exam, delayed my own work, delayed the notes I had promised to review for those women’s community program, delayed new applications, delayed my care. Delay as habit, delay as identity.

So I arrived; scared, regret knotted in my stomach, bundles of fear jumping across my digestive system. But it went well. The people were supportive. My laptop failed; they gave me theirs. They handed me sweet water. A comfortable chair. I wrote and wrote all I knew. The whole time, I half-expected my manager or co-worker to call me into some meeting. They didn’t, at least not until an hour after I reached home. It went well, and I was lying in bed with the rain puttering softly outside, wondering how the day could possibly be so kind. Then at night, my mother became sick. Sick enough she couldn’t open her eyes. Fever too high. I fed her some bread with my sister. I rubbed some disinfectant on her puss-filled index finger. I slept alone. Thinking about her. How I should have filled her water bottle. Went to check. It was there. The next day passed watching her lie on the sofa, motionless. I gave her food, water, medicine, care, love, tears borrowed from my sister’s eyes. But I kept delaying everything else. I kept imagining I would respond to the ladies, imagining I would finish my work, update my blog, exercise, upheave my life. Imagining instead of moving.

Days passed. One, two—three? The ladies emailed again? Or was that the same email as before? She did send me a phone message and now it is gone. Disappeared. I lost track. Instead of replying, I scrolled through articles about people arrested five years ago in a political crisis, immersing myself in secondhand despair. Rotting in imagination while regret kept peeling me. 

Finally, tonight, I wrote my feedback. I scheduled the email. And I wrote this blog.

The hinge squeaked the same. I came back to the half-room and the blue horizon was still faking it, but something else was less fake.

Terms of use [for my own writing]

1. If I write someone else’s pain, it must include a cost to me beyond applause. If there’s no cost, it’s theft.
2. If I can’t write, I will write the inventory first: objects, sounds, receipts. When language won’t bear meaning, it can still bear weight.
3. If I call myself a rebel, my body has to leave the chair at least once. Otherwise I’m just adjusting the Bluetooth settings on my conscience.

Coda from the half-room

Look: I will fail at this tomorrow. I will put on a borrowed grief because it looks good with the outfit. I will scroll until the cursor declares a state of emergency. I will declare myself a principled introvert when the street is loud. But tonight, the museum of almosts has one empty case. The tag reads: Removed for conservation. I’m not cured; I’m catalogued. The chair is still here, but it is an unreliable witness now. It has seen me stand.

End of exhibit. Doors open to the left. Mind the hinge.

- Oizys.