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Amy's Side |
Mysti's Side |
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Good walls make good neighbors, the poet said. I am hoping a corollary does not prove the rule: a good distance makes good writers. For years, Mysti and I have been writing together—here in the mirror, of course, but beyond it, too. We’ve written, revised, and kvetched over conference proposals, syllabi, and epic-length emails, stretched along the electrons between Texas and Pennsylvania. We met in person perhaps twice a year, laughing over drinks and conference programs in hotels packed with professor-types. Today, Mysti ‘s office is perhaps fifty steps from my own. Weird, the poet said. Now, I don’t believe that the distance between us has been the Iron Chef-esque secret ingredient allowing us to work well together. Still, I find myself wondering how our collaboration will be affected by the sudden abridgment of space. Will I pause in my writing, I wonder, fingers hovering over a word hidden amongst the keys, in the knowledge that I will likely pass her in the hallway later in the day? Will I search her face for some comment on my prose, some critique she could choose not to write, but can’t quite keep out of her expression? Mysti and I both define friendship, in part, as the comfort and freedom to be honest, so I tend to think we will continue to be both support and critic for one another, no feelings hurt. No, I suppose my real worry is that the writing will simply . . . stop. When we can chat and rant and wrestle with ideas in person over a post-yoga class Chinese dinner, my tongue may be looser than my pen. Of course, talking with Mysti still gives my mind the equivalent of the most complicated stretch that our yoga instructor Mary Beth can dish out. As with yoga, mind-stretching-with-Mysti often leaves me with some insight into my inner life that had eluded me before. (As I stood in mountain pose last night, Mary Beth encouraged us to exhale with force, tongue sticking out: stretching the neck, she explained, but also letting go of unspoken words caught in our throats. Later, over fried rice, Mysti deftly interpreted the tears of a student who, earlier in the day, handed me a letter explaining her learning disability.) But the writing. Yes, it still matters, because the writing gives me something, no, many things, that the conversation cannot. It allows me, even forces me, to reflect on each word. It connects the writing I do elsewhere—in articles, conference papers, student assignments—to the principles of style and voice that I honor here with ease. And while my memory, notoriously bad, keeps only bits of conversation, writing stays. I can revisit our written exchanges, reflect, reconsider, smile or cringe. For all that, I would never wish the distance back. I would much rather learn to write to my friend while she sits just down the hall, or to send an email through the mere five miles between our houses. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall--or 1300 miles of highway. |
I am more influenced by the spaces which I inhabit than I care to admit. More than one but less than two thousand miles away from where I used to write (and teach . . . and stretch . . . and walk… and bike… ), my pen, like a hydrofoil, hovers above the page, not exactly remembering how or why or when I used to write. But I do remember where: on the patio of the Burger King-turned-Starbucks, on the deck of my pool-less house (the pool was replaced with a gorgeous garden), and at the desk tucked into the attic alcove a mere three steps from the curled feathers of my bedroom pillow. My new apartment is twice the size as my old one but feels like four times as big since the ceilings loom towards thirteen feet. As the heat rises, so do my thoughts, my words, my syllables, bunched up in the southwest corner of the great room like a dozen white helium balloons waiting to be released at a funeral. I planted a desk beneath this corner, just in case the balloons deflate and the words fall out. Yes, I've tried to recreate the past by reading he muse at three nearby coffee shops, but none of these seem to be working out—they are either too quiet or too noisy, too anonymous or not anonymous enough, or quite simply, I don’t like the coffee. Perhaps everything is still too new, and I can’t hear the words that swirl in my mind because my body is still on a tilt-a-whirl ride, sling-shotting from Texas to Pennsylvania not once but twice this summer as I had to move my daughter to college in Montreal a mere month after I had unpacked a 24-foot Budget Rental truck (thanks to the Fleetwood Elves who helped with this!). And my new office at the university—though quite spacious—is a shared suite, so I can’t always count on the privacy a writer needs to write. For some lack-of-reason, the thermostat is stuck on “Freeze your ass off.” Yet here it is that I now sit and type. I sound like a Goldilocks whose fickle tastes can’t be satisfied by o.p.s.’s (other people’s spaces). Yeah—maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to do this last month or so: make rural Pennsylvania my home. I thought this involved burning a lot of incense and accessorizing with the right rugs or curtains. But now that I think about it, it took me at least a year to call my last apartment “home.” And it took me four months to feel comfortable creating new walking routes in that slightly dangerous ’hood. I feel much safer here in Fleetwood than I ever did in Port Arthur, and the smell of the soybeans filling out their pods marking the end of summer and the beginning of fall catapults me into the goulash of memories that includes both my childhood frolics and my father’s funeral. So why do I feel as rootless as David Carradine’s character in Kung Fu, traveling from village to village looking for his purpose—which I guess was his definition of home? Every day that I drive the six winding miles from home to work, I pass at least one person wearing suspenders and no helmet while riding a bicycle. Once I get past my knee-jerk reaction that every cyclist should wear a helmet, I can’t help but ponder that maybe these Menonites are on to something: maybe I shouldn’t travel any farther in a day than I can propel myself. If that were so, then it would have taken me twenty days or so to ride from Texas to Pennsylvania—sans books and clothing and furniture. But when I got here—all of me might just be in the same place at the same time—unlike an incomplete “Beam-me-up, Scottie” signal that prevents the beamed from fully being reconstituted on the mother ship (the nearest I can come to describing the feeling of my brain bouncing off the roof of the rental truck with every visible and invisible highway bump). If I am not fully here, then where am I? And when will all of “me” have finally arrived? If Kant is right, and space and time are “elements of a systematic framework which humans use to structure their experience,” (thankyou, Wikepedia), whoever is assigned to structure mine has called in “tired” for the last two weeks. Though part of me still identifies my present workplace as “Amy’s University,” every day I take another baby-step towards calling it home. And right now—I feel grateful that I can walk down the hall and hand Amy a book, imploring her to read it so that I don’t feel so alone in this university so bustling that I can’t seem to find my space on the sidewalk. |
| Reflections | |
| With all my friends and family feeling very far away due to distance or the fact they they are actually still employed down the street while I have changed my whole life to stay home, I envy your routine and the close friends it brings you. If you need a writing friend, please send some words my way. In my world, adult conversation has been replaced by the steady kicks and jabs of the future inside me. -Meg (mdcarbine@hotmail.com) |
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