People

The world gets to him the way it gets to everyone who feels things without a volume knob.

Slowly at first. Then all at once.

He is thinking about this on a Sunday in late July — July 23rd, he writes it in the notebook, top of the page, the date that anchors the entry in time and therefore in reality — sitting in the apartment with the fan going and both cats arranged in their configurations of heat- management. Ghost on the floor between the desk and the bookshelf, maximum surface contact with the cool hardwood. Omen on the top shelf, because heat rises and Omen has apparently decided to meet it there on its own terms.

He is thinking about people. The specific gravity of them. The way they attach, and the way attachment works when your nervous system was calibrated in an environment where attachment equaled risk.

He has loved people. He wants to say this clearly and without qualification, because the narrative of a person who has PTSD and has been through what he has been through can sometimes get flattened into a story of isolation — the solitary poet, the damaged loner, the person who chose the notebook over the human connection. He did not choose that. He has chosen people. He chooses people. He loves with the specific completeness of someone who knows what the alternative feels like and has decided against it, every time, even knowing the cost.

The cost has been real.

* * *

He does not use her name in this book. This is not cowardice. It is a choice he has thought about carefully, the same way he thinks carefully about every choice regarding what belongs on the page and what does not. She has her own life. She has her own story. The parts of that story that intersected with his belong to him; the rest of it is hers and he will not put it here where it can be read by people who have nothing to do with either of them.

He will say: she was the first person he let read the notebooks.

He will say: she had a way of listening that was different from how most people listen. Most people listen while preparing what they will say next. She listened the way you listen when you have understood that what the other person is saying is more important than what you will say in response. He recognized this quality immediately. He had been looking for it, without knowing he was looking for it, his entire life.

He will say: when she read the notebooks she looked up at him afterward with an expression that contained no pity. He had been braced for pity. The people who had read his writing in the past — teachers, the rare friend he had trusted with a poem — had responded with a particular softness that was adjacent to pity. She looked at him with something else. Something closer to respect. Something that said: I see what this cost you and I see what you made from it and I am not afraid of either.

He wrote about that look for three days.

* * *

The relationship is real for a long time before it starts to be not real.

He does not mean that it was fake. He means that there comes a point — not a moment, not a single event, but a slow accumulation of smaller things — where the real thing that exists between them begins to have a different quality. Begins to have the quality of something being maintained rather than something living. The difference is subtle. He notices it first in the writing — he stops writing about her and starts writing around her, which is always the sign that something has moved from the center to the periphery.

He does not blame her. He has never blamed her.

He blames the way two people who are both carrying things they have not fully named will sometimes find that what they are carrying is incompatible. Not wrong — not bad, not a failing — just incompatible in the specific way of two systems that work well independently and create interference patterns when they try to run at the same frequency.

He blames, if he blames anything, the years before the correct vocabulary arrived. The years when he was managing without knowing what he was managing, which meant she was trying to love someone who could not always tell her

why certain rooms were closed and certain hours were impossible.

He has written about this in An Inconvenient Attachment in the only way he knows how to write about it — directly, without softening, with the full weight of the actual feeling rather than a safe approximation of it.

He finished writing that book four years after he started it.

He still reads certain pages and feels them in his chest.

* * *

July 23rd, continued. Sunday afternoon.

He takes a walk. This is what he does when the thinking gets too circular — the walk, the physical movement through the actual city, the reminder that the world is three-dimensional and his body is in it and the body needs to be somewhere specific in space or it starts to lose track of itself.

He walks down State Street and up toward the park. He does not have a destination. He has a direction, which is sufficient. He watches the city. Two kids on bikes. A woman hosing down her front steps. A barbershop with the door

open and the sound of a radio coming through it, something with a beat he does not recognize.

He thinks: the people, places and things are easily his muse. He thinks: they are also what hurts him. He thinks: there is no contradiction in that. The things that move us are the things that have access to us. Access requires vulnerability. Vulnerability is how we get hurt and also how we get anything worth having.

He walks for forty-five minutes.

He goes home.

He feeds the cats.

He sits at the desk.

He pushes through.

* * *

He thinks about love the way he thinks about the city — with clear eyes, without sentimentality, with the full weight of what it has cost and what it has given.

He has loved. He will love again. He is not, despite what the solitary apartment and the cats and the relentless writing schedule might suggest, a person who has given up on human connection. He is a person who has learned to enter it carefully. To look before he steps. To understand that his nervous system will work

against him in certain conditions — the conditions of vulnerability, of dependency, of trusting someone with the rooms he usually keeps locked — and to work with that rather than pretending it is not happening.

He is twenty-six. He has loved once in the way that reconfigures you. He has had other relationships, other connections, other people who have mattered in different ways and at different depths. He does not catalog them here. They are theirs as much as his.

What he will say: he is not afraid of it. He is not looking for it, in the way of someone who is specifically searching. But he is not closed to it. He has the notebooks and the practice and the discipline and the cats and the city and the work, all of which would survive the addition of a person who understands what they are part of.

He writes: He is not finished. That part is also not finished. He is still learning what staying looks like. He is learning it in real time, page by page, which is the only way he has ever learned anything that matters.

He keeps the line.

* * *

He goes back to Holyoke on a November morning.

Not to the house — he does not go to the house. He goes to the canal.

He parks on the bridge and walks to the middle and stands looking at the water. November: the canal is its most honest now, stripped of summer’s decorative quality. Just water moving through a channel. Just the mills in their current state of becoming-something- other-than-mills. Just the city on a November morning, slightly gray, operating.

He stands there for twenty minutes.

He is not revisiting. He is not processing. He is doing what he does when he comes to the canal, which is: standing in the place that made him and letting it be the place that made him, without judgment, without the narrative of overcoming.

He came from here. He is not over this. He has not escaped this. He has carried this with him to every city and every desk and every notebook. The carrying is not failure. The carrying is what he made from it.

He looks at the water.

The water moves the way water moves: steady, unhurried, going somewhere it is going anyway.

He thinks: I want the writing to do this. I have always wanted the writing to do this.

He walks back to the car.

He drives back to Springfield.

He parks on State Street.

He carries the groceries up the stairs.

He feeds the cats.

He sits at the desk.

The notebook is open in front of him.

He stays with it.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. He knows what this means practically. It means time taken from writing. It means doing the things that are not writing because the writing cannot survive without them. He has accepted this. He has not made peace with it, exactly. He has just kept doing both.

The pen comes up.

The page receives it.

He sits back and reads what is on the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet revision. Something earlier than that. Is it right? Is it true? Is it going where it has to go? He reads it back. The afternoon is moving. The window light is different now. The body has been here a long time. He stands. Rolls his shoulders. Ghost lifts his head from the couch, considers, puts it back down. Vincent returns to the desk. He looks at what is on the page. The work outlasts the wound that made it. That is the whole point. The work continues. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

His hand finds the pen.

He moves forward.

There is always another line.