Things

The triggers are not always the things you expect.

He has made a list, in the notebook, of the ones he knows. Not for publication — for himself, for the practical management of a life that includes navigating spaces that do not know they need to be navigated carefully. The list is longer than he wishes it were and shorter than it used to be. He has been working on the list for four years, since the pamphlet in the waiting room gave him the clinical vocabulary that let him begin identifying what had previously been unidentifiable.

The obvious ones: loud voices that have the specific frequency of anger, not all loud voices, the particular frequency. Doors slamming in other rooms. Raised voices through walls, even when they are not angry voices, just voices that don’t know how much space they’re taking up. The smell of a specific cleaning product he has not been able to conclusively identify but

encounters occasionally and always in the wrong moment. The particular chord progression of certain songs from the mid- 2000s.

The less obvious ones: the quality of light at a specific hour in October, late afternoon, when the angle is low and everything has a quality of impending. The sensation of sitting in the passenger seat of a car being driven by someone he does not entirely trust, which is a category with more members than he would prefer. The specific feeling of waiting for something to happen that he cannot control and cannot prevent, which he also encounters in airports and in the moments before receiving news he has been anticipating and in the act of publishing something and waiting to see how it lands.

The most private ones, which are not on any list he would ever show anyone.

* * *

He is managing.

He has been managing for years, which does not mean he has solved the problem or transcended it or arrived at a place where the problem is resolved. Managing means: he has

built a set of practices that reduce the frequency and intensity of the difficult moments. Managing means: he knows the protocol now and the protocol works most of the time. Managing means: the gap between the trigger and the return to the present has gotten shorter over the years — from twenty minutes, to ten, to five, to the four seconds in the grocery store in August that felt like thirty.

He is not cured. He is skilled.

He does not know if skilled and cured are related. He thinks they might be on a spectrum. He thinks the skilled might be, if not the destination, at least the direction.

* * *

He reads about PTSD the way he reads about everything that matters to him — thoroughly, obsessively, until he has absorbed as much of the literature as is available to a person without clinical training who is reading primarily at 3 AM on his phone. He has read Van der Kolk. He has read Peter Levine. He has read Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk and a hundred papers he found through links in the papers he found through links in other papers.

He knows more about the neuroscience of trauma than most people who have not studied it formally. He knows about the amygdala and the hippocampus and the way traumatic memory is stored differently from ordinary memory — not in the narrative part of the brain but in the body, in the physical, accessible through sensation rather than through narration.

This is why the writing works, he thinks. Not because writing is narration but because writing is also physical — the pressure of the pen on the page, the movement of the hand, the breath that regulates itself as the words come out. Writing is a body practice in ways he did not understand when he started doing it but understands now. The pen is not just a tool for recording. The pen is an anchor. The pen is a way of being in the body while also being outside of it, both at once, which is exactly what healing a body-stored wound requires.

He is not a doctor. He does not offer this as medical advice.

He offers it as what has been true for him.

* * *

August 12, Saturday.

He is at the desk early — 5:45, which is the hour when insomnia decides that it might as well be morning and the body agrees under protest. The fan is going. The cats are asleep. The city outside is its quietest.

He writes for three hours.

What he writes is not about the insomnia or the hour or the specific restlessness that has been present since Thursday. What he writes is about the writing — about what it means to show up to the page on days when the page is the last place you feel capable of showing up to, and to do it anyway, and to find that the showing up produces something, always produces something, even if the something is not good or useful or publishable.

The showing up is the practice. The practice is the healing. The healing is not a destination.

He writes: He has learned to breathe through it quietly. To let it pass like a storm he did not cause and cannot stop.

He means this as information. He means: the storm passes. He means: he is still here.

* * *

He has a collection of objects on the desk that are not functional.

A small stone from the Portland waterfront that he picked up on a January morning, cold and gray and perfectly smooth, rounded by water and time into something that fits exactly in the center of his palm. He holds it sometimes when the writing is not going, rolls it between his fingers, lets the weight of it do something that he cannot fully explain but that works.

A photograph, printed small, tucked under the corner of the laptop. His mother’s garden in Holyoke, taken three summers ago. The tomatoes were doing well that year. He does not remember taking the photograph. He found it in his phone and printed it and put it there and has not moved it since.

A bus pass from Portland, Maine, expired. He kept it for reasons he has not interrogated.

These are the objects that share the desk with the notebook and the pen and the coffee and the laptop. They are not aesthetic choices. They are talismans of a sort, though he would not use that word. They are things that anchor him to specific coordinates in time and space — Portland, the January cold, the waterfront; Holyoke, his mother’s hands in the garden; the bus he took through Portland when he was

learning the city by walking and sometimes riding.

He works in the presence of these objects every day without always consciously noting them.

He notes them now.

He writes: The desk is also a map. The objects on it are the coordinates of the life he is living and has lived. He is here. He has been here. The objects say so.

* * *

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. The practical meaning is this: time. Publishing costs writing time. He knows this. He has made his peace with it. The peace is imperfect. He will always prefer the page to the process. But the process is part of it. He does it anyway.

The pen comes up.

The pen moves.

He stops and reads what he has.

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. This is not revision. This is the question before revision: is it honest? Is it saying the true thing? He reads it again. Outside the window the day is changing. The light on the desk is different. He is aware of his body — the shoulders, the neck, the hours in the chair. He stands. Moves. Returns. Ghost has not moved from the couch. Vincent looks at the desk. At the notebook. At the card. The work outlasts the pain that produced it. He knows this. He always comes back to this. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

His hand finds the pen.

Another line lands on the page.

The next line always comes.