is it over???

are we done here?

(spoiler alert: we are not done.)

(also CW: trauma, gendered violence)

i find myself wanting to fast-forward, wanting to read books about her that have yet to be written, books by people who have yet to live. “future people” as mitt romney called them in a presidential debate in 2012.

(“future people”! “women in binders”! sweet jesus, what a cultural giver.)

but we do not always get what we want.

i am in morocco for five weeks. the only jackie book i have brought is my own.

i brought it (the banged up copy i use at readings; not the pristine copy that is the first one i ever saw/touched) because there’s this thing that i want to write, about trauma and biography and violence and writing and stories and the way we tell them.

this thing i wanted to use my own book to talk about, to tear my own book, my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own brain apart for.

because this is what my phd trained me to do.

i completed a critical/creative dissertation. what that means is you write the thing, and then you put this product of your own brain through the incinerator of your own mind.

in a critical/creative dissertation, you are invited to violate your own work.

you are not being asked, you are being told. this is what you have to do. this is how you get the grade that isn’t a grade so much as a letter you pay for from someone in great britain attesting to the fact that you completed work that is equivalent to a u.s. phd.

this is a condition of the experience. you are going to do your best and then you are going to wreck yourself.

and you are going to wreck yourself without clear criteria.

you are going to inflict your own violence and witness violence being inflicted upon your own art.

and to what end?

(i would suggest this is may be not the safest methodology for people who have experienced abuse.)

(for all my former students in the house: photos of young oline = appeal to what??)

it’s not clear what to do, so we’re just going to wing it. this is just the way it is. you’re going to wing it. you are winging it. to pass, you must do this, wing it. because you are a pioneer.

oh how i prided myself on being a pioneer. how that appealed to my american sensibilities.

oh, how fecking hard we pioneers worked.

true story: being a pioneer is not all it’s cracked up to be.

the thing is, you’re just gonna go out there and do your best, with your broken brain and your faulty self and the book you alone believe in and see what happens.

feel it out.

you’re an unfunded international student, but we’ve got all the time in the world.

we’ll just play it by ear, see how it goes, see what they say.

this was a phd in life-writing. we were talking about lives. we were talking about how we lived them versus how we wrote them.

from this experience, i can attest, the gap was immense.

bridges? i have none.

they were never built, much less built to burn.

you must tear your whole self apart.

though the people in charge don’t quite know how it should be conducted. it is not clear what is being asked.

it hurts, that. all of it.

but i’m fine, it’s fine, it’s cool, we’re cool. i passed, six unfunded months later, working three jobs, i passed.

that sounds bitter. i’m not bitter. i just want better, for us all.

i was very numb then, in an abyss of repressed trauma. i was thrown to the wolves then, and it’s alarming how normal that felt. how at home i felt there, with the wolves.

maybe it’s because i was raised by collies. i do not know.

we all of us come from somewhere. maybe that is what gets us through. the collies and the fear and the chutzpah. they carry us on. forward motion, always.

after my viva, at the drinks party being held in my honor, i asked a friend if she thought i had passed. because it was so unclear to me, what was happening.

i was so unclear. everything was so unclear. life was so unclear. it was unclear what was happening, what had happened.

i struggle to know what is happening now because i did not know what was happening then, and some cord was cut, and i am no longer myself. i am bits and pieces of someone else, some other self i have put together in the interim.

the other night, i cooked pasta on what i thought was the glass stovetop but which was actually a glass cover that was meant to be lifted prior to use. i closed the kitchen door and had yet to set the bowl of pasta down when the explosion occurred, the glass shattering so loudly that dogs across the street cried out.

that evening, i experienced it as a major inconvenience, playing into my lifelong fear of accidentally eating glass.

it was only the next morning that it occurred to me that, but for three minutes, i would’ve been in that room, shattered by the shattering glass, and getting first-hand experience of the moroccan hospital system.

everything is so fragile. everything happens so fast. i suspect we are only any of us ever bits and pieces.

at least that is my experience. i could be very wrong. i am often very wrong.

i’m always bits and pieces, words and bone. and yet, still, i never know what to say. never say what i mean. never know what it is i’m trying to say until three days later.

i come in slant, on a delay.

i brought this copy of finding jackie also because i feel we are close, so close, to that moment– so sweet, such alchemy– where i can read my own words as though they were written by someone else. which is, i would argue, one of the top two reasons to write at all.

(the other being, quite obviously, to be read, to communicate, to illuminate something verging on some sort of truth– if you are very very lucky, vair, vair.)

i am not writing. i’m reading, alternating between giant, multi-generational sagas from the 1980s and writing on psychoanalytic thought.

(the word saga always brings to mind the woman who would wander into daunt books in london late night, after the cinema, and ask me, do you have any new saaaaaagaaaaaaaaas?

i was indifferent then; i laughed. now i understand her hunger. saaaaaagaaaaaaaaas!!!! bring them to me!!! all of them, i want them NOW, please, thank you.)

this is the part of writing that i always stress to my students. the part of writing where you are living and reading and eating and breathing rather than putting words on a page.

trés trés importante. maybe even the most trés trés importante part.

my life with jackie is like a nesting doll, time is like an accordion, words are like…

the hairs on our heads? numbered by god (reportedly), fragile, brittle, repeatedly tampered with, changeable?

is this… working? i do not know.

my life with me is maybe also like a nesting doll. with various components twisted shut, the wood immovable, the nests all stuck within.

my words feel ever-so-slightly broken. not that i’ve wholly run out but we are running on fumes over here.

my hair has been dyed red for over a decade now. i do not know what it looks like underneath.

in my early 30s, i had a brief flirtation with a german who lamented, very germanically?, that he’d been bearded since his early 20s. at that point, in his mid-30s, he felt he would no longer be comfortable with his own, unshaven face, so removed was he from it.

vibes.

(go ahead. applaud me for the ambitiousness of this intro! because this has all been an introduction! because we are in no rush, we are taking our time.

lol, here, here, heyyyyyyyy, you are very welcome, shukron, shukron bzef.)

when my father was about 4/5ths of the way through finding jackie— in his second of three days of reading– he told me he wasn’t sure how i’d pull it off. intrinsic in this statement was the assumption that i somehow would, but the specifics remained unclear.

(later, he would, of course, tell me i had pulled it off.)

i am in morocco. as i write this, a nine week old kitten sits upon my right arm.

i brought a nesting doll with me.

filled with the trés trés importante little things of my own life.

because as many places as i’ve traveled alone, i did not want to be alone here, without my people, without their memories.

the doll went in my carry-on, because it seemed like the sort of thing one should carry on. it just felt instinctively that that kind of baggage should not be handled by others. it needs must be carried. you have to bring your own.

(needs must! whoever had antiquated language on their bingo card, bully for you 😘.)

i got her at georgia avenue thrift for 65 cents.

she was empty. an empty nester. i filled her up, with a sampling of my relics, of people here and gone.

i’m painting in morocco, every day. not well, but most days.

it’s a practice. (there’s so much in life that is a practice. [maybe life itself is a practice?])

it’s a practice in a lineage of jackie’s painting and my mother’s painting and all those horse-themed paint-by-numbers i did in the late 1990s, which now bedeck my parents garage.

the horse-themed paint-by-numbers i did in the late 1990s, the biggest of which joe affixed this note one memphis summer morning….

CAROLINE: 

DOING GOOD-

WILL TAKE AWHILE, BUT

YOU WILL DO

IT WELL

Paw Paw

i mean, he wasn’t wrong.

i did it and, for years now, it’s looked really good in the garage.

we used to say that joe and burvil had the direct hook up to god. if you really wanted your prayers answered, have them put in a good word for you.

it’s a way of seeing, painting is, if not feeling (reading is also maybe).

writing is also a way of seeing, and a way of channeling feelings into something tidier, more manageable, more livable. it’s a bypass from feeling to representation of feeling, at least for me.

i struggle with feelings. ironic, for someone who writes what they call “biography with feeling.”

my life with jackie has been a light in the dark, a way of seeing and being, if not feeling.

there are so many things i would never have done, so many places i would never have been, so much experience i would not have were it not for her story. were it not for the availability of her story all the way back in that summer of 1994.

i joke i medicate with biography. but it’s no joke.

i’ve written multiple academic articles on the subject of how we use celebrity lives– or even, more simply, visible lives– to navigate our own.

because we do.

i do.

i write about trauma and how we live in and through and with trauma without the language to hold our experience.

jackie did not have the language.

never have i ever.

i read about her when i was younger as i lived in and through and with.

the manuscript was done for five years before i submitted it last march and it was only last december that i told someone what i was writing was “trauma-informed biography.”

which i’d not known i’d done. now it is all i can see.

when you’re in it, you cannot see.

i’m in morocco looking after five cats for five weeks, three blocks from the ocean.

it’s right over there, i think a cab driver says to me in darija, as he points westward over the atlantic after i tell him i live in DC.

it’s just right over there.

i just mistyped that line as: it’s just write over there.

would that i could write my way across. would that the words were sturdier, reliable. alas, they are not.

at the end of every semester, i give my students a final word. for five years it was galvanize. this semester, it was ballast.

because i’d written it on a notecard and taped it to the wall in my apartment some months before. in november? december? august? i do not remember. i do not know when. and i do know why i wrote it. but it meant something to me then, whenever then was.

and sometimes that’s enough. the forgotten meaning in whatever forgotten moment. there was a reason, there was a feeling, however distant, that has brought you here, now, in this moment.

when i arrived back in morocco, the thing i felt was tremendous relief to be back in morocco. why? i do not know, but i remember the feeling, the relief, the sensation of being fiercely present.

so much of writing is done in the attempt of being present– whether to the present or the past– of bearing witness to something, some truth, some feeling, some hope, some disaster.

i struggle with feelings.

because people disappeared when i was very young. because when i was very young, i fully believed i would be murdered in my bed. because i was sick most of the time, and doctors sent my parents from the room. because i did not have language for pain and the church i was in taught me my feelings were of the devil and my whole value as a human being lay in belonging to a man.

jackie struggled with feelings. she likened herself and jfk to icebergs.

someone else likened them to a pair of cocoons, reaching out to bridge the gap, but ever failing.

my nesting doll is not empty. i filled her up with griefs and pieces and stories, and brought her with me.

i’ve not yet unpacked her for fear the cats will toss her treasures all about the flat.

she remains nesting. until i’m ready.

i’m in morocco doing all of the therapies.

EMDR on wednesday. bodywork on thursday. art therapy on friday.

it’s a lot. all this being alive, being well. to say nothing of feeling.

feeling fucking hurts.

but what can you do? c’est la vie. there comes a time where it gets you. where you can no longer look away from yourself, from what has happened and what has been done to you. it hunts you down and it eats you up and here we are, face to face.

where are we going? what are we doing? what is that stinky smell? it’s a disaster!

these are phrases i have learned in darija.

mon darija schwiya, 3la kareeta! is the frarija melange that has now made multiple cab drivers laugh.

(the kitten sits on my lap now, resulting in random punctuation errors throughout my typing so i have to go back and correct. the punctuation for this period of my life is …. but when is it not?

…. is kind of the punctuation of lived experience, yeah? when we do not know what will happen. when we are staying tuned [worst ever conclusion to a “sorry, you didn’t get the job” email i have ever received, fyi.])

i did not know i needed a kitten in my life at this juncture. reader, i did. the cuddling! the love! the big cat energy from this tiny, flea-infused bundle of fur and bone and muscle and flesh.

which is what we really all are in the end, non? minus the fleas. hopefully.)

my life with jackie is evolving. we are going places.

in therapy, i go round and round in circles. occasionally, we arrive in places. occasionally, we wrap things up.

but i tell stories as they exist in my brain. deeply tangled and deep fried.

they come not in ones or twos but in fives or tens. in our years of work together, my EMDR therapist has come to expect this. we seem confused, she says.

and i always appreciate the first person plural. because i love the first person plural. it is my favorite of all the narrative perspectives.

because (1) it’s really fucking tough to pull off, and (2) it is the perspective of gossip, the communal.

in the context of therapy, it makes me feel less alone. we are both of us on this journey, trying to figure out what the fuck happened, and how the fuck it operates now.

after twenty years of carrying secrets and suffering from that, how lovely in the extreme to be a we. and how lovely to feel safe as such.

my sense of jackie (as a biographer, and therefore merely as someone who pretends to know her rather than actually) is that she suffered alone a lot.

curses upon the cousin who said, one month after she looked into the eyes of her husband as he was murdered, that they were surprised she’d been so deeply affected.

there were no frameworks. there was no PTSD.

even today, we as american people do not do death well. or grief or loss or even feeling, really. imagine back then.

one month. after a murder.

that is not enough.

there is maybe never enough.

time is like an accordion. sometimes it stretches long, oh so long, and we wish it away, wishing ourselves through it and out on the other side. other times, it’s like a blink. still other times, it’s both– like a cat stretching length-wise in sunlight, slowly, luxuriously, but somehow still also only but a blip.

and we go on and on, we get through, with our shattered selves in bits and pieces, we arrive in the here and now, the just passed, the already over.

how to write that though? how to write that? i ask myself every day. how to feel and put feelings into words and write that without ripping one’s whole self apart?

i do not know. i do not know. and that’s ok, because that is maybe life and also the exercise. of a writer’s life. the not knowing that we all share. the not knowing that is a part of the condition of being alive.

and the writing of a life, in the absence of such knowledge. fumbling away in the dark, trying to make the fumbling mean something, trying– at the very least– to capture in art the feeling of the fumbling. to capture in art the feeling and texture and fire beneath the skin of having, once, been alive. of being here, of being present, of having been, once upon a time.