11am. Nayirr is playing on the floor and I’m thinking about:
The tremendous mundanity of the diary as a form, my own preoccupation with accessing the dailiness of life, not because of any supposed uniqueness inherent in my perspective but rather to try to find and hold the quicksilver moments where the daily slips into the divine. This is true of all my attempts at literature to date. I always come back to the three months I spent in New York, years ago, and how I forced myself to write every day while there. I would walk by the Hudson every morning and every night, sit on a bench somewhere, and do my best not to think, to jot down lines as the world offered them. I wrote at the library. I wrote in the laundromat of the building I was subletting a room in. It was an endlessly generative and freeing practice. I love recording what I see, and the way this transcribing is immediately apparent to me as fiction, as selective, and created. You can’t put anything in language without knowing intimately that words are imprecise vessels that fall terribly short of what we see.
In writing my novel, I felt this need to attend to the dailiness of life, the ebb and flow of thought, to dive in and out of time. Basically, to try to replicate the experience of consciousness, the careening from day to day, the cruel indifference of history. There’s something about the “scene” as staged conflict, as obvious cinema, that irks me—the way you can almost pass from one paragraph break to the next and hear the writer saying, “And action!” I want more than a play, and more than a film, I want it all. I want the excess, and the mess, I want the humdrum of the bus ride, and the stink of the people, I want the smog and mire of the city, I want the absurdity of memory running amok throughout. I have a particular focus on movement, the getting to and from places, because I grew up poor, and don’t have a license, which means I’ve spent a significant part of my life on public transport, or figuring out how I’m going to get somewhere. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t believe in the underlying premise of scenes as pivotal moments that cause people to change—to feel, sure, but to change a person’s nature, or story? Nah.
The fact that my aunty forgot my birthday yesterday, which she has never done, and that my mother remembered, which she has never done. Mum told me a few days ago that kholto has early-onset dementia, but I didn’t believe her, not until this moment, and grief has once again risen to blanket my mind. I’m tempted to call it pre-emptive or anticipatory but the reality is that grief is as timeless as trauma, it lives in the past and the future. Look how easily I disprove my own thesis, how swiftly these sisters, my two mothers, swapped roles after a lifetime.
I’ve ordered banh mi from Uber. I’ve been up since six and I’m so fucking hungry the force of it keeps inching its way into my thoughts. Hunger is annoying! Sometimes I oscillate between extremes like, “The only thing worth living for is food, all I want to do is eat!” Or as now, “I wish I never had to eat again, and could think uninterrupted!”
I bumped Nayirr’s head against the bassinet this morning and he started wailing immediately—he’s fine, but the wail lives in my heart now forever—and the ache of this guilt is so intense I want to leap into my grave. It’s too fucking much. How can anyone stand a lifetime of this? How is it possible anyone could intentionally hurt their children when even accidental harm makes my spirit recoil? How could my aunty have beaten me so savagely, so often? How could my mother? My uncle, my elders, my family. Each and every instance a betrayal.
This is my inner child speaking, my inner child crying. He will never understand. To him and to all children is extended the grace of innocence, which, absent knowledge, lives in the sensation of the present. My sister and my brother have both told me of moments like this—that experiencing the love they have for their children enabled them to know all over again, on a deeper level, the absence of love in our upbringing. Every effort they make to attend to their children’s needs reminds them viscerally of what they never had. And now I too am experiencing this twofold parenting: of my son and my childhood self.
I have a job interview tomorrow. It’s so strange how these little meetings have the potential to radically alter my life. I remember this feeling from a decade ago, the desperation that clouded each interview, the hope I might suddenly be able to stop worrying about how I’ll pay the bills, or if I’ll have to go back into the closet to stay with a family member. It’s different now. I have my own family, and the idea of not being able to pay for our needs is unthinkable. And yet, I dread both succeeding and failing at this interview. I might be able to pay the bills, but have to stop writing. It’s hard enough already to write with a baby and nothing else but my own self-directed practice—it’s difficult to see how I could manage with a full-time job on top.
Either way, fret not: I won’t be doing these daily, though I will try to write as often. I’m still figuring out how regularly I’ll be sending newsletter. Let me know what you think! I’ve turned on the Chat feature so I can annoy you between emails, isn’t that neat? Lmao. The safe bet is once a week, but it will no doubt depend on how many subscribers opt to pay, and whether I get this job or not. Stay tuned, habibis x