The Night

He will tell you this much.

There was a night in Springfield, in the autumn of a year he does not specify, where he was at the desk and the notebook was open and the pen was in his hand and the thing in his chest was doing its worst and the options available to him were what they were.

He does not tell you what the options were. You know what the options were.

The pen moves.

He writes for two hours without stopping and without looking at what he is writing because looking at it would mean engaging with it and engaging with it might mean losing the distance he needs to keep writing, and the writing is the only option he is choosing. He writes past the place where the thoughts are their worst. He writes past the hour when the city outside is its most silent. He writes past the point where the pen runs out of ink and he has to get up and get a new one from the drawer,

which means crossing the apartment, which means being in the body and in the room and in the city in a way that is physical and present and therefore tethering.

He gets the new pen.

He goes back to the desk.

He writes until there is nothing left to write, and then he reads back what he has written, and then he closes the notebook.

He goes to the kitchen. He makes coffee. He stands at the window and watches the street.

Ghost comes and sits on his feet.

He does not move for a long time.

When the city starts to get light — the specific gray that precedes the gold, the sky doing its gradual work — he goes back to the desk. He opens a new page. He writes:

He is still here. That is the whole story. Everything else is just how he fills the time between then and now.

He means it as a report. He means it as a promise. He means it as the thing he will say every morning for the rest of his life when he opens the notebook and picks up the pen and begins again.

He is still here.

* * *

He does not tell this story for sympathy.

He wants to be precise about this. He does not want you to pity him or to marvel at what he survived or to place him in the category of the inspirational, which is a category that makes him uncomfortable because it tends to treat survival as an achievement rather than a practice and because it tends to stop at the survival rather than continuing to the building.

He tells this story because there is someone reading it who is also in a night like that night, and who needs to know that the night is survivable, and that the morning comes, and that the writing holds, and that the pen is something to reach for.

He tells it because silence about these nights is a form of violence against the people who are in them.

He tells it because he has the language and the platform and the practice and it would be a specific kind of wrong to have all of those things and not use them to tell this particular truth.

He is still here.

So is the person reading this.

He is certain of it.

* * *

He calls his mother the morning after the worst night.

He does not tell her what the night was. He does not have the language for it with her, not yet, not in a way that would communicate without alarming. He calls because he needs to hear a voice that has known him for twenty-six years, a voice that contains within it the full history of him, all the versions of him, the boy in Holyoke and the teenager with the notebook and the young man who drove away to Springfield and the person he is now.

She picks up on the third ring. She says: hi sweetheart. The specific warmth of her voice, which has always been warm in the register of someone who means it, who is not performing warmth but has it.

He says: I just called to check in.

She says: are you okay?

He says: I’m better than I was.

She says: do you want to talk?

He says: not yet. Just hearing your voice helps.

She says: I’m here.

He says: I know.

They talk for twenty minutes about nothing in particular — the garden, a show she has been

watching, a neighbor who is having a difficult time. He listens. He asks questions. He is present in the conversation in a way that the night before did not allow for presence.

When they hang up he sits with the phone in his hand for a moment.

He goes to the desk.

He writes: He is still here. That is the whole story. Everything else is just how he fills the time between then and now.

He means it as the truest thing he knows.

* * *

He has a specific memory that returns often, not as a trigger but as orientation: the first time he read his own work to someone else.

He was sixteen. The someone else was not a classmate or a friend — he did not have the kind of friendships at sixteen that accommodated this kind of vulnerability. The someone else was his older cousin Dante, who was twenty-two and visiting from Worcester for a holiday weekend and who had a quality of attention that Vincent had always found different from other people’s attention. Dante listened fully. He did not multitask or drift. When you spoke to Dante you

understood that your words were being received by someone who intended to keep them.

Vincent waited until the second evening. Until after dinner when the adults were in the living room and he and Dante were on the back porch with sodas and the specific quiet of a November night in Holyoke, the kind of cold that makes the stars look closer.

He said: I write poetry. I’ve been writing it for a year.

Dante said: can I hear some?

He read three pieces. He read them from the notebook, sitting on the back porch with the cold pressing in and his voice steady because he would not let it shake. He read the one about the walls and the one about the canal and the one he had written about this exact cousin on a summer day three years earlier, watching Dante fix a car engine with the specific patience of someone who has learned that some things only come apart correctly if you are gentle.

Dante listened.

When he finished, Dante said: you should keep doing this.

Not: these are good. Not: you have talent. Just: you should keep doing this. As if the continuation was the obvious conclusion, as if

the only possible response to hearing these poems was to instruct their maker to continue.

He has kept doing this for eleven years.

He thinks about Dante on the back porch sometimes, when he needs to remember that the work has always been worth reading to someone. That the choice to share it rather than keep it has always been the right choice. That someone has always said: keep doing this.

He is still keeping doing this.

He will keep doing this for the rest of his life.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. Time is what publishing costs. He has learned to divide himself. Writing on one side. Everything else on the other. He does not love the everything else. He does it because the work demands it. He would rather write. He always does both.

His hand finds the pen.

He stays with it.

He holds the pen still and looks.

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 editing. First: is this the right thing? Is it going the right direction? Is the language alive? He reads it back slowly. The day is somewhere else now. The apartment has gone quiet. He rolls his neck. Breathes. Ghost opens one eye from the couch. Closes it. Vincent puts his hands flat on the desk. He looks at what is there. The language survives the moment that made it necessary. That is why he does this. That is why he does not stop. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

The pen is back in his hand.

He puts down the next line.

He writes. He always writes.