Luke White

Seven months ago I decided to stop writing. I’d kept an online journal since the age of twenty-four that remains, locked behind filters and passwords, the lone remnant of the years. Eventually my writing and thought and my image of a particular girl from the desert became all the same thing, a knotted-up bundle that when I unknotted it was really just knots after all, and when she was gone the vacuum pulled far western cross-country drives and dreams about dragons and songs and ghosts of millions of steps through the canyons of Manhattan into the same formless singularity of loss, which isn’t a vacuum to be filled after all but a dark, small impossible gravity that erases all color and differentiation within its inescapable orbit.

Stopping was easier than I expected; the first few weeks without words put me through a withdrawal I could chalk up to the loss of the slight lovely yellow-haired proximal cause who I knew, unlike words, was not coming back. After that the methadone of medicine kept me calm, if numb, and I could replace the little lightning-arcs of thought that words had sparked with numbers and drips, sodium and epinephrine and the constant titration of coffee in the morning before sunrise that by the end of the day I had alchemized into comfort and cure.

But no one is really cured; it’s a delaying tactic we use to clear the cobwebs of disease just long enough to buy us a few more decades, or a month, or twelve hours to figure out what we need to say and then to say it and then flint-faced deny death the triumph of surrender on terms.

I’ve been thinking about Alexander in India, elephants which Pliny says are the natural enemy of dragons, Viking rhymes that mask as puzzles guessed from silences, the ten second stories that unknot themselves as I cut past them through the miles of Manhattan and leave them implied behind me. I’d like to write again, not so much because I’m thinking about these things but because writing makes me think about these things, and these things are good to think about.