On the 1st of June we drive to your family’s house, you think it might be good for me to leave certain things in the past but you don’t specify what exactly. It’s always been this way between us. In the car I read two books about journeys, back to back, because summer is supposed to be a new start and I thought it might be good to mirror this effort to surge forwards in what I’m reading. My feet barely touch the ground I am trying so hard to make myself smaller, to become something more like myself. Or something more like what you need?
I can’t identify with the narrators in these books because they seem to be able to accept that things slide by without meaning, but Keroac does seem to ask the same questions that I might in a month’s time when I leave you on the side of the road - or maybe it is you that might leave me, I’m not sure yet / ‘What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks disappearing… it’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye’1.
All of my goodbyes are done in transit. My legs can barely keep up with the speed at which things disappear from my sight, with which I disappear from them. She paints an image of my leaving and blurs the figures with oil so that I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be in my likeness or his.
The day my dad drove me out of London he told me how much I would miss it, he felt the same driving out of Berlin for the last time to Bittersweet Symphony. I wanted comfort over wisdom, rubbing my fingers over the rusty prison bars before wishing them well, smelling the salt on my cheeks already.
My clothes steamed up the windows of his car, leaving that morning was too rushed and they hadn’t yet dried. It was a tender thing really, the house finally sterilised from my scent.
We arrive to an empty home. That night I wonder if the woman across the street notices the light from my tall candles as I fold the pages of my own personal Bible. A tall girl, dressed in black and all alone, she would think that she’d seen a ghost. Or a kindred spirit. The painting in my room frightens me, a monk with his head covered in a shapeless cloth / please stop there he tells me and I know that my sleepwalking episodes have returned.
In my dream that night I scream that I have forgiven you.
Meanwhile, the air outside my room is quiet while I sleep, so peaceful that it makes me doubt whether the noise that I’ve felt before here was real or in my head. Despite this I still wake to deep grooves in my door: desperate, animalistic scratches, and the soil of my garden is completely overturned. Each day I am followed by shining, silent corpses as I put everything back to rights - a morning ritual, you could say. The cold, damp earth flows through my hands like water and stains my fingers for the rest of the day, look at this damaged one, they might say, look where her roots have been uncovered.
My writing slips futher into unreality, no one reads over my shoulder any more. Half way through June I realise that I have been alone for a long, long time. By the time you return my skin is almost completely transparent. You are barely able to differentiate my figure from that of the house, for example, or maybe the boat floating silently at the bottom of the garden, the travelling vessel that we have all become.
There’s something that I am trying to exorsise with this bleeding ink on this bleeding page but in June I doubt whether I will ever know what that is. A shapeless and self-pitying lament. The woman living across the road finally comes to ask me if I have ever got everything I wanted. No, but I once got very close.
By the end of the month the future is all determined, I feel it in the half of my body that has turned completely to stone. I can barely summon the strength to keep writing, but that other half, that molten half that you always believed in, keeps me moving. Try to hold it lightly, she tells me. Don’t be all hardness. I say that I feel like a child again with all this silent screaming and she whispers wait for it to pass.
In these final days I fly through dark streets, these houses that are almost home: somewhere along the line, the journey has ended, but it’s always hard to know when. A figure in the passenger seat flickers then disappears completely.
The 31st of June passes without ceremony. I bury it in the garden we once shared.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Your writing is so beautiful Caitlin, keep going!