Okay, Enough
by Véronique Darwin
She said Valentine’s Day was a weight off her shoulders. She said people said she had a nice ass. She said, “Who should I like now?” She asked questions of herself like this. She said, “I am wheezing and I just poked a pimple.” She’s so silly, but she knows she’s silly. She’s talking to self. She’s writing for posterity. It’s so odd! Why did she not stretch out of herself a little, then, if she knew time would be going on as it was, but longer, and longer, forever even? Why couldn’t she just take a second to go away? Couldn’t she have left a diary sitting somewhere and gone and done something, for a while?
She thinks remembering is a song or a thing someone said to her. She doesn’t know the mind already repeats what happened that day, any day, and that it will only be in its eternal recurrence that the first time will mean anything. Life’s not on paper. She thought each moment would only be a moment if she recorded it, but that didn’t need to happen in a journal, always. No: it can happen in life too. Life can be life, not just the writing of life, of course. Maybe you knew that. Her? She needed to learn that.
Take the time when she tries to talk about the war. The war! She counts the channels the war is on—nineteen of sixty. She racks her brain, like this is where the war is. She recalls a pun she made earlier while watching Gilmore Girls (so did she even watch the war?). She cranes her neck to try to locate cleavage. She accuses herself of everything but does not turn toward it. Because what is it? She doesn’t know what it is, a war she calls the war. See, she was writing her way past the world already. She was not curious; she was ironic. She had chosen a position and it was outside of the world: the war! She does not even name it. She does not know what a war is enough to name the one that started on the day she recorded it.
*
My first journal I was five; my last I was eighteen. Which one’s worse? I think the last. The last one’s worse. She was closer to me then, and that’s how things get sticky. Who am I now, that’s any different? Is this the kind of writer I am: looking inward, asking questions of myself?
She wanted things then and I want them now. They’re not that different—the things or the pulling toward them. If I found something I once lost and had to climb across all my new things to get it, I would do that. I would do it gladly and still I’d long for it, even as I held it. Because, of course, it would be about who I was then. It’s so obvious I’d be holding onto myself.
*
She was always trying to prove she was not a baby. I’m not even thinking of a baby. For the past seven years I took care of kids living in that awkward stage, between baby and adult. They were growing but they didn’t want to talk about it. They had bodies they didn’t know they had the day before. We were not talking about their bodies, but they were living in them, so it was hard to avoid them completely. So, they exploded out of their brains! Their brains were kind of the safe thing to move through. My brain was in the diary I used to talk to my self.
That girl was so strange-feeling. She had curly fuzz all over her head she wore in a bun. She never wore her hair down because she thought she looked like a baby. Today I piled my curls on top of my head to avoid looking like a baby. What is a baby? I was a baby then and now I’m an adult. She and I are looking at each other through the many journals I’ve transcribed to Google Docs and, still, I think I’m a baby and she does too. Did she think I would feel like a baby, or have one? Instead, I have her.
*
I don’t know why I’m still embarrassed. I’m standing with her when I think about her and we’re squirming. We’re so squirmy! Did she have glasses and braces all at once? I still feel that awkwardness, like I’m standing there with her.
I write about being a pen person but now I’m a pencil person. This is a recent change, and now I’m afraid. I’m concerned it means I’ve turned a tide. I’ve turned against myself. But I need to keep reminding myself I am self, not her. This is my self, here, kneeling against the bed, reading her like prayers, asking her to forgive me, though she’s me. Is she? She’s someone I’ve been trying to get rid of, and now recovering, now recycling.
*
I’m still arguing with Cancers. Today it was a Sagittarius. Friends continue to challenge me. I choose friends who challenge me. I feel challenged by my friends. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. That’s the thing I always talk about. Is it enough that everything, which was nothing, happened and I recorded it and I can relive it? Is it enough, to say: this was a moment, and here it is, here it is again? What would be the point of meeting again, today? To say, “Oh, I still watch French movies?” Or to hold the year up, say 2003, the war, alongside the 9/11 documentary I’m watching now? To say, “hello?” And what would she say back, really? What would I even say after that.
Of the things she said she wanted I got one. I got unlimited internet. I didn’t know to dream of unlimited music, or television. I did not know about the limitlessness of limits. I thought at camp, when we danced the South African song next to the Narnian lion, I thought that was freedom. I thought “religious” was something you said in quotation marks. I grew up with parents who had turned from some parts of the world and so I thought you turned from the world. I did my writing. I did my reading. I really liked doing those things and so I did them. They didn’t come from, or lead to, I thought, the world.
*
There is a time when we all write poetry, and some go on to write poetry. I did my publishing early. I’ll say just that: I did my publishing early. So, what did that leave me with, afterwards? Knowing that my words could appear in print? Hearing from others that they had read my words? Knowing, in fact, that my words were ink? Because it should have turned me inside out, right? It should have left me breathless. I might have, you would think, turned to the world and looked at it? Not just beat my friend in tennis with my hand because there weren’t enough rackets? Not just think the birds were chirping to the beat of my anxiety? Not only walk sweaty in my sister’s blouse down the rich suburban main street, dropping off wrinkled resumes? I could have maybe made my writing something that turned me toward the world. We could have turned toward the world together, but I just kept spinning.
*
She stopped writing so much. Apologies, apologies. She’s so busy. But at least now she has some perspective. She likes to think she’s jaded or something. She’s learned to wear her irony and straighten her hair. She goes on dates—dates! She identifies holes in her life and looks in them. Calls them empty. Says she doesn’t even feel them. Pokes at them, but can’t get through to who she was before. Wait—who was she at that point, if she was someone else before? Who’s she now? I’m honestly scared right now she’s me. Because she’s about to do some things I’m not proud of.
She’ll learn, of course, to hold her wallet and keys in her hand like the friend she still has who now lives in Edmonton did that day on Granville lsland. She’ll come to trust things and call them “already-made decisions.” She’ll do this so she doesn’t have to make new ones. She’s likeable, she thinks. Intuitive and taller than before. Her mom will commend her on her new posture and she’ll like that. She’ll remember it. She wants to write important things, but she thinks those things are philosophy. She thinks the important things are still in her head. She’s taking a bit of a break from thinking them, but she thinks they’ll be there when she’s ready to dig in.
And are they? Because now’s the time and I’m not sure I got them. I don’t know that when I didn’t travel to Europe or didn’t do the exchange or didn’t break up with him or didn’t ever really give that a go or didn’t think through my choices or didn’t learn to—I didn’t do those things, so what’s really in there? Did I get everything I needed, before I began again?
*
I wanted to bring the camera to the party. I wanted to read Macbeth. I wanted to finish the fashion show review and hang up clothes that were in the dresser and buy things to slip paper into. I don’t know if I did any of these things! I’m guessing I did them all, but what if I missed one? What if I missed a key step from there to here? How to retrace such a fraught path, through her writing, through mine?
Because think about it: I didn’t put a dollar into a shoebox every day as planned. I didn’t review and learn to speak Spanish and Swedish. I don’t know a bit about each of Shakespeare’s plays. I didn’t become “someone else,” or did I? Maybe that one I did—did I? I wanted to wear the mask of glory we passed around in theatre class. Did I? I don’t remember.
So that’s where I met him, I notice. We had only met once before but he acted like we’d always known each other. Well now we kind of do. We talked on video chat last year. It’s like we’ve always known each other, I hope I said. In twelfth grade, I wanted to fall in love in October. I fell in love in October when I was twenty-four, but twenty-four is not twelfth grade. I dreamt there was a baby at my house and he wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. Here I am now, talking back. I’m talking back to the baby, to show I’m still not the baby, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to just not be the baby.
*
I was not sure, upon returning from Christmas break, whether I looked more forward to seeing my boyfriend or my science teacher. I asked whether that was weird and I know now it is, but I hope I did then too. I hope I was writing things down as jokes—jokes reserved for me now. “Am I sarcastic?” I wrote. “Never.” I hope I was winking, and, in so doing, writing about something completely different, something only I would now have the key to. Maybe I was writing not about science, not about that teacher, or that relationship, but about my mind. Maybe I was asking: is it okay, that I ask this question? Is it enough, that I remember that I am only myself, thinking? I have curly hair that makes me feel like a baby, and is it okay, that I’m confusing my teacher and my boyfriend? Is it enough, that I am looking only a little bit at the world?
*
And here you might fill in yes or no. It is not okay, or not enough. It is okay; it is enough. Just know that I got Converse high tops. Know that I ended a poem with “variation to my experimentation.” Know that I became “cool.” That in my own understanding, I was no longer what I playfully called a “troubled youth.” And know, too, that I trust this will not comfort you. It is for me. It is me thinking the same thought I did then—how just this last weekend I pictured the literary salon in a certain apartment, and since it was in a different one (a real one), the imagined one still lives on, as a ghost of a night I had in preparation for the night I had, long after I had it. It brings me comfort to see I did that then and I do it now.
I am this person here, the one who ate cereal at the thirty-hour famine, who left a page blank to plot her summer novel, who was given the role of park ranger, and had the word SECURITY on her back, and a radio. That’s still me—shocked and laughing about myself. Maybe this time, if it’s okay and enough, I’ll put her story out in the world, and let it do something else. Here’s what we’re doing: standing behind our story, looking out at you.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Photo by Larry Doell
Véronique Darwin recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing in Toronto through the University of Guelph. She lives and writes in Rossland, BC. You can find her words in EVENT, The Literary Review of Canada, Porter House Review, PRISM, and Geist. On Twitter @veroniquedarwin.