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Tamburitza Lingua
Violet
And everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can,
But one breath at a time is an acceptable plan,
She tells herself, and the air is still there,
And this morning it's even breathable...
Forty-year-old women shouldn't keep journals like fourteen-year-old girls, C.J. thinks. She works among writers with a real way with words; she knows she's not one. She can't express herself that way. But she can write letters, and she doesn't have to send them every time.
She writes on looseleaf paper and blank sheets from the printer and handmade paper with dried wildflowers pressed into the pages. She writes with a thin Sharpie or a cheap Bic or the silver-blue Tiffany's pen her mother gave her for her last birthday. She writes to her mother, to her brothers and father and longtime friends and people she's lost touch with completely. She never addresses them directly to herself. She writes during the twenty minutes that pass for her lunch hour, on nights when she can't fall asleep, when she's soaking in a near-scalding bath. She writes letters, filled with things of no importance and things that mean the world.
Sometimes she analyzes her own handwriting. Mostly it slants forward, traveling boldly across the page, leaving the margins almost perfect. Sometimes, though, a 't' or an 'm' juts oddly back to the left, askew and out of place. These awkward marks show up in strange places, not in sentences where she's trying to explain the ordeals of her job or the uproar-and-hush of her sex life. Instead, the hesitation is there when she writes down mundane daily details: her grumpy landlord who speaks in monosyllables but always takes his hat off to her; the adorable baby she saw when she was buying chocolate.
This makes her wonder when she became so one-sided, makes her worry that tragedy has distilled her personality. She's glad no one reads her letters; they would probably think she's a terrible person. Sometimes her handwriting degenerates into loops and scrawls that are next to indecipherable. This happens when she's hurrying or when she's tired, and these days that is all the time.
Her victories are small, these days; her free time is smaller. She can't remember the last time she vacuumed; the last time she spent more than twenty minutes outside. The same CD of folk music from around the world has been sitting in her car stereo for three months. She skips most of the songs; listens to Croatia again and again. She doesn't exactly like it, but it does something. The eerie strings jangle rapidly from the speakers, speeding up her heartbeat. Caffeine isn't strong enough to do that anymore.
She writes letters because there's no way out, no other place to put it. She can't talk to outsiders; she'd rather die than open up to many of her friends. All she can show them are tiny pieces of the sharp, brittle struggle she's harboring. Sam knows which bar she spends three nights a week hiding in. Toby knows that stress can make her bite her lower lip until she tastes the tang of blood. Josh knows that sometimes her throat turns dry and raspy during a briefing, and when she steps away from the podium she can't speak until she gets some juice down. Leo knows that she can feel burnout four steps ahead of her. Nobody but her cat knows that sometimes she wakes up crying.
In the car, there is this kind of gypsy guitar that ripples into her. The rest of the time it's CNN hovering in the air, Carol murmuring into her ear, the Press Corps calling her name. Silence can be threatening, but sometimes she cannot stand any more spoken words. She gets to work in the morning, parks in a garage, and has to convince herself she can go inside without falling apart. She gets home at night, parks by the curb, and has to do the same thing.
She turns on enough light to see by. Then she sits down on her couch, and finds a pen, and a hardcover book to serve as a flat surface. She braces it against her knees and leans back against the cushions, writing with a shiny purple pen that can defy gravity. And she sends the ink across the paper, scribbled and unsteady, halting here and there and then plunging ahead. Though she talks all day long, there are infinite things she cannot say.
She writes them down. She writes that she is terrified. She writes that she is no longer sure she trusts anyone. She writes that there are no maps she can count on following, that she's been let down by her world and herself. She writes down guilt. She writes down blame. She writes that she wants out, over and over again, in all the languages she knows. The pen runs low on ink, and it becomes a battle to scratch the words out, but she can't stop. She confesses sins, betrays confidences, strips herself down. She opens her veins. She names names. She crosses things out, viciously and without a second thought. She writes in swift streaks that run together and stutter across the page, like chords fingered fast on a tamburitza, like dancing around a fire.
Then the pen dies, and her eyes are blurred almost to blindness, and the paper is damp and tattered and worthless, and her hand aches almost as badly as her spirit. She crumples the letter, the salutation long since forgotten, and buries it in a desk drawer. She does not need to look at it again, but she will never throw it away. And her pulse pounds, and she has to keep her body busy.
After a drink or two and maybe a bite to eat, after she's gone through her notes for the morning and showered and thrown on a bathrobe, after she's made phone calls or gone out with her friends, she may be able to settle down. There are a small notebook and a yellow pencil on the stand by her bed, and she curls up on her pillows and takes them in her hands.
Her world is complicated, and sometimes claustrophobic. Her victories are small. But she writes them down too. She writes down the laugh she got from thirty people in a briefing (and if Helen Thomas didn't laugh that's her problem, the old bat). She writes down the good idea she had in a staff meeting that saved them all a few hours' labor. She writes down the fact that she has friends who are brilliant and brave and talented, who have stood by her, who she stands by, at least so far. She writes down that they have made some marginal but meaningful improvements in the world. She writes down that she is good, frighteningly good, at her job; that she will never be as good at anything again. She writes down that there is a man who sometimes lets her fall asleep with her head on his shoulder, that he is sometimes still there when she wakes up. She writes that she has power. She writes that she has faith.
Forty-year-old women with sensitive political positions can't keep journals, C.J. knows. But they can write letters, and not all letters need envelopes and postage to get somewhere. And when things are at their worst, when she is trapped, the note of possibility rings clearest of all, strummed high and strong from the strings of her frayed nerves.
So there are letters, on scraps and on stationery, smeared with stray ink and sweat and release. There are letters, and there is music, and there is hope.
And for a second the relief is unbelievable
And she's a heavy sack of flour sifted
Her burden lifted
She's full of clean wind for one lean moment...
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