A Strange and Unyielding Place

A journal of recovery and retrieval

“Use your words.” He said. 

I remember the setting. In a car, back seat or front is fuzzy now, all these years later. I can name the year, because it was the year before our wedding. The year I was muted. The year I finally broke, the last fiber snapped. 

I was scribbling... no. I won’t let him win. I was writing in a notebook. 

I was writing. My mouth is untrustworthy, my memories as fleeting as rice paper in warm water. I was writing, because I could think that way. I could have a record of what I’d said. I forget. I forgot much. I don’t trust my brain, can’t trust it, pierced through with traumas and scars, mended darns in the fabric of my reality that pucker and pull in painful directions to unseen wounds. I was writing with a pen on paper, and he pulled it away. 

“Use your words.”

 

Like the ink on paper wasn’t a word. Wasn’t a thought, a sentence, a paragraph. It wasn’t a communication. He wanted me to forget. To be unable to trust myself, so when he said something, anything, then it was an immutable fact, and whatever I said was nonsense, folly, lost in the winds of time. 

I may still have that notebook. I might. I won’t remember, of course. That, too, has gone. I have the dark car interior, but I don’t have his face. Just the words. 

“Use your words.” 

I stopped writing. I used my mouth. I don’t remember anything else. Just that. Like lightning struck, and piercing me, etched it into my brain for as long as the minute pulses fire my neurons. Ironic. 

Even if I knew which notebook, I wouldn’t be able to find the page, or remember what the fight was about. I couldn’t trust myself to choose the words to say ‘this, this is the one.’ 

I didn’t write for a decade. Longer. The words eluded me. The poetry was and is gone entirely, burnt out in that flashing moment. Stripped away from me in terrible swift punishment for wanting to remember. 

I forget what I was trying to say. 

Perhaps, if I write it down...