Completely Lost and without My Torso
I mailed my manuscript off on Friday and ever since I have been lost, lost, lost, empty, desolate, lonely; it feels exactly like when someone breaks up with you for no good reason. It’s so quiet in the house. No blinking light on the answering machine. No messages from the book, no little distracting ideas for sentences, scenes, cutting. Nothing. The wire is dead.
I feel as though I excised my torso and mailed it off. I’m head, and feet, and absence. I wander around my house thinking I should meditate more, ten minutes isn’t enough, especially since I drink tea during it. Or! I should sort out the winter clothes and summer clothes (they’re commingling now in unholy fashion), separate the hostas (also commingling and clumping in overwhelming ways in the garden). I keep thinking I should be happy. I should be organizing. I should be relieved. I am not. Not at all. I want my book back.
*
I met D., my writing partner last night, as I do every Monday night, and she said she was surprised I was so bereft. “Isn’t it a huge relief? On some level?”
Nope. It is not a relief. It’s a re-grief. It’s another ending. (I know the work will start again on this book but no, it’s not a relief.) I want to still be working on it. Working on this manuscript is how I know where to find myself. I want the illusion that I am moving it forward, engaged, alive. Rick Moody says “I am never 100% content. That keeps me engaged in the work.” I don’t want to feel relief. (This is the root cause, I fear, of my insomnia, but that’s another topic for another day.)
We ordered our wine, and then my writing partner, D., was talking about how hard it is now that her son is at college. How empty the house. How rarely he called. She compared it to the end of a love affair. She knew they would never have the same relationship again. Something huge was irrevocably over.
That, I told her, is exactly how I feel about the book. I’ve sent my only child to college. I am happy for my book but not happy for me. I can only think of how much better I could have done by it, if only I had tried harder, been more focused, if only I had driven it all the places it wanted me to take it. If only I’d kept my mouth shut. Ruined, and gone.
Plus: season change. In these days since the excruciating mailing, it’s raining cold assertive needly rain and I am not riding my bike. And people call me and tell me the world is falling apart and I should have done this, should have done that. And my book’s topic is this tiny, tiny part of the brain, fusiform gyru 12. It has nothing to do with banking or greed. It has everything to do with love and poverty and the very essential sub-economy of the torso. And I stand by it. I am standing by the work, the process of this work.
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