Vestibule A: Appendix 1.
I write the book before falling apart.
I fall with the pages.
I sway with the dirt.
I coddle the failure until it's become a bird.
Until it crashes in a field.
Until it's become a race.
Until it becomes until.
These sentences are creaking with the way they hold water.
The weight dispersed between the book and the body
holding the book I build a tension to let go.
I forget how we approach writing and start with what's missing.
I get lost.
I tell no one.
I let the book sink until it is another form of emptiness.
I'm more interested in its lack.
The scene erodes with a violet fragility.
I soak in a bath of rose petals.
The water goes from pink to dark bruise.
I lose track of the continent I'm writing in.
I forget the frame of the novel.
The language grows wild.
I give up haunting all my failures.
I work them into my skin like a poem.
I burned the book so many times the manuscript exists
as a form of condensation.
The sky opens up and pours out another book
that you'll never read.
I wish I could still speak it.
I wish I could remember what we say.
And every yesterday piles itself into a dendritic agate pose.
In repose, the novel writes itself into my sleep.
I dream of many airports but never of a plane.
I say the word sky, and the window becomes a doorframe.
I don't have the strength to pick up the phone.
The book is dead, and I'm dragging its entrails
across a continent.
And I smash the book against my face.
And I weep when I can't read the words.
Our longing is our legitimacy.
That's what Cecilia Vicuña told me,
documenting detritus from a summer creekside performance.
Several people die in the writing of this novel.
Or they died while the novel is being written.
I lack a language to communicate.
I wish I could tell you the color and breath of a flower.
I wish I could explain lavender to you.
I make a dark midnight from the sound of my living.
I boil water and shed from stress.
Infinite realities blurring in one.
I am two centimeters to my left.
Nothing comes together.
And all archival components fail.
I forget what I'm talking to you about.
The book stops writing, and the dreaming feels further away.
I interrupt myself with living.
I have visions of bodies on beaches holding flares.
It's sunset, but that's not important.
When the book is not happening, I
find lost time trickling in through my wrist.
I resist the urge to be specific.
I dream the novel upon landing the novel.
That was never a novel, but an orchard.
The manuscript was always just a hole in the ground.
The sun snows until rain overtakes
the creek in the flood.
I abandoned the book under the cover of escape.
I make my way sniffing the lilt sky for signs
of light-- a dim become bright.
The language exhausts itself in the repetition
of thinking before reading.
You should know.
I thought of all these words for weeks and pages and planes
and places until I could finally open my mouth.
But something like flowers comes out.
Something like a thick light of lavender milk.
I am dreaming right now.
We burrow home into our blood.
In the house of your heart, you start a small fire
to bring back with you.
The continent rains for 10,000 days.
And nothing ever gets done.
The book grows roots in a glass of water.
The somnambulist drinks nothing but light and wine.
Grass grows thick in the cottage of your liver.
And you try to drown the weeds out with color.
You saturate the rhythms of your blood
until there is continuity.
Like veins, you recall becoming a river.
You recall swimming against the current,
until there was no strength left in you.
And the river drowned.
In your memory, you wake up six months later,
find yourself still grieving the side of where
your paw marked a grave.
You read the language, but don't understand.
You make the gestures, but the movement is all wrong.
You stop writing.
I forget how to write and give up before the book is written.
Your hand touches a semblance of time.
You remember the scent of 3:00 AM.
Locate the ocean within your tongue.
I keep riding through exhaustion, until I
write something else instead.
I wake up with a sprig of sun stuck in my lungs.
I cough lavender and form visions of the obstruction.
I try to remember my dreams, but often, I
remember a big black nothing, the lack
of image, the unconscious meandering void.
It's several days until I am finally
able to bring myself back to myself, to write anything down.
The dream falls through the window, and pollen corrupts it.
My eyes grow red and heavy light waves.
The blood thickens.
My lips become dry.
In the daylight that presents itself beyond us,
there is the inevitable.
We try our best to hold on to the hope of it.
I retrieve the semblance of a dream
and ruin my skin with sunlight.
Sometimes, we are flying over the moon and its desert.
This flight is as long as you want it to be.
And I'm not reading any more of that.
So that book is dedicated to my grandfather, Jose Asuncion
Dominguez.
I knew him as [Xixan?].
I knew him as Xix.
So when you read this book and you see XIX, it is not 19.
It is my grandfather's name--
his Yucatec Maya name.
When I was born, he called me his Xix.
And Xix, I later learned, means residue.
He explained it to me as being the last little drop of tea.
And when I was a baby, before I could speak any language,
I said [Xixan?], and that meant you are also Xix.