Still Here

He is still here.

He says this out loud sometimes — not to anyone, not even to the cats, just to the room, the apartment, the walls that have absorbed three years of his life. He is still here. He is twenty-six years old and he is sitting at the desk in Springfield in September and the summer that has been the most difficult summer in recent memory is turning. The mornings are different now. There is something in the air that is not summer anymore — not autumn either, not quite, but the signal that autumn is coming, the light changing in ways that are subtle and unmistakable at the same time.

He is not fixed. He will not say he is fixed. PTSD is not a wound that closes. It is a changed nervous system that he has learned to live in, to work with, to translate into language. Some days the translation is harder than others. Some weeks are harder than others. He has just had a hard month.

He is still at the desk.

He is still opening the notebook.

He is still writing.

* * *

He takes stock on a Friday morning, late September. He makes coffee and sits at the desk and opens the notebook and before he writes anything he reads back through the last six weeks. He does this occasionally — not often, not as a habit, but at the end of a difficult period, when he needs to see the shape of what he has been through.

He reads: August 16. The date at the top of the page. The writing around the dream. The mind returns to the same rooms.

He reads: August 19. What they call his damage he calls his evidence.

He reads: August 24. It does not announce itself.

He reads: September 2. The 4 AM entry. The entry from after the worst night of the summer.

He reads: September 12. Silence was never strength.

He reads: September 13. The attack documentation. Twelve pages of large, loose handwriting.

He reads: September 14. He survived them the only way he knew how. By getting through the next hour.

He reads all of it.

He closes the notebook.

He sits with what he has read.

He has gotten through the last six weeks. He has documented all of it. He has continued working — the manuscript has progressed, the WordVerse notes have grown, two new prints for Poe & Port are in final design. He has not been functioning at his best for most of the six weeks. He has been functioning.

This is what he has.

This is, he decides, enough.

* * *

The morning after he reads back through the six weeks, he goes to the closet and takes out the box of notebooks.

He does not take them all out. He takes out the most recent ones — the last two years, the Springfield period, the building period. He stacks them on the desk. He looks at them for a moment. Then he puts them back in the box. He puts the box back in the closet.

He does not need to read them. He knows what they contain. They contain him — the full weight of him, the last two years, all the notebooks he has filled in this apartment in this city at this desk.

He closes the closet door.

He goes back to the desk.

He writes: He is still here. That is not a small thing. For a person who has carried what he has carried — across the cities and the losses and the years that tried to finish him — still here is not a small thing. Still here is everything.

He reads it back.

He keeps it.

The pen is back in his hand.

He writes some more.

* * *

He walks the city in October the way he walks it in no other month.

October light on Springfield is specific — golden, slightly elegiac, the light of something beautiful that knows its own duration. He walks at 5 PM when the light is at its specific October angle, which hits the old buildings on Main Street and makes them look like something from

a different century, something that has been preserved rather than merely survived.

He walks with the notebook in his jacket pocket. Not to write in — to have.

He thinks: eleven years ago he walked streets like this in Holyoke with the notebook in his backpack. He has been walking with the notebook for eleven years. The city has changed. The notebook has changed. He has changed. The walking continues.

There is something about the continuity of practice that he finds steadying in a way he cannot fully explain. The fact that the walking and the notebook have been there through everything — through the moves and the publications and the relationships and the episodes and the nights and the recoveries — is evidence of something. Not constancy in the sense of not changing. Constancy in the sense of continuing.

He continues.

He has always continued.

He will continue.

He walks home in the October light. He feeds the cats. He sits at the desk.

He finds the notebook.

He keeps at it.

* * *

There is a coffee shop in Northampton that he drives to three or four times a year.

He does not know why specifically this coffee shop, in this city, when there are coffee shops in Springfield that are just as good and do not require a forty-minute drive. He thinks it might be the drive itself. The forty minutes on I-91, which is long enough to be in motion without being long enough to feel like travel. He uses the drives to think — not consciously, not with a specific agenda, but with the open availability of a mind that has been freed from the desk for an hour.

He gets on the highway and the thinking starts and he arrives in Northampton with thoughts he did not have in Springfield, shaped by the motion and the highway and the specific quality of the Connecticut River valley in whatever season it is.

He parks. He goes to the coffee shop. He takes the same table he always takes, which is not a deliberate habit but which he always ends up at. He orders the same coffee. The notebook is open in front of him.

He writes for two hours.

What he writes in Northampton is consistently different from what he writes in Springfield. Not better — different. Springfield writing has the texture of his daily life in it, the specific grain of the city he lives in. Northampton writing has a slight distance, a slightly wider angle, as if the drive has given him perspective that the apartment does not.

He drives back to Springfield with four pages of notes he would not have written otherwise.

He feeds the cats.

He sits at the desk.

He lays the notebook flat.

He writes more.

He does not understand the mechanism. He has stopped trying to understand the mechanism. He accepts that the drive to Northampton is part of the practice, that the practice has components he cannot fully explain, that the things that work do not always need to be understood in order to keep working.

He drives to Northampton.

The pen moves.

He drives back.

He writes more.

This is the practice.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.

He takes up the pen again.

He moves forward.

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. He keeps at it. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He reaches for the pen.

He sets down what comes next.

He has never not written the next line.