I have terrible dreams but I fret more about the whispers I hear as I walk into a space of normality. I fret about the dust. I watch and listen to the tired drawl that comes out of me and yet is so removed from me. Do I hear the many voices carefully breaking off as I scratch off marks on the table of a cafeteria? The voice in my head, my voice is very different from the one that comes out. I have three voices, the third is quiet and I’ve never heard it.
As I write this text, I know very well that I’m not a writer. ‘I’m not a writer’, the drawl says. I’m not all the supposed women I should become and not all the things that sound like dream or murder. Both demands torment me all the same. The ordinary life that demands I become ordinary; the terrible voice inside that demands I become out of ordinary… both songs torment me all the same. I have three songs and the third demands I become nothing.
I am not a poet, not a painter, not intelligent. I am not a nurturer, not a laborer, nor a trophy. I am not my mother who is a housewife I do not desire to be a housewife. I am not bukowski, or picasso or neitschze or some e-boy on the internet who writes flowery poetry about broken girls and glamorizes pain. Hold up Holden Caulfied. I have three kinds of people I should look up to, the third is someone I do not know yet.
To an extent I don’t even feel like a girl. What claims do I make? I don’t think I can make any. I don’t think I desire to be any of this and yet here are two poles that strain to kill who I really am. Who I really am, I don’t really think I am anything. In this world perhaps it is best to be nothing, to produce nothing. I have three desires and the third is a lack of desire.
It’s not as if I do not see you, Adrienne, Sylvia, Virginia, Audre and it is not as if I cannot see who or what I want to be. But this third pole is also situated somewhere between the other two and it exists as a negative. Like a festering wound that ties me to a still place in another way. To not want, to not desire, to not make any claims of intelligence, beauty, love, labour. To simply unremain. There are three poles jammed inside me and this one is negative.
I named this third a drawn out longing for safety, for protection, for a space without harm.
