Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Writing now feels like scrambling at the edge of a tall pink cliff like the ones in Utah I saw as a little girl, like the world itself is in my grasp but just barely. It feels, and I know it’s wrong to say this, it feels like when I was a little girl dangling my hiking boots over the pink cliff and thinking of jumping, not because it made sense, but because gravity promised warmer embraces. My uncle had to coax me back to earth, because I was rising up on my toes, trying to see all the way back home -- a thousand miles.
Writing used to feel like what it was: scratching ink on paper, words devoid of meaning. Do you ever stare at a word for so long that it stops making sense as a word, even as a jumble of letters, and becomes something separate and useless and strange? That’s how it was for me, and not just when I wrote about dragons and talking cats as a child. Everything I wrote became another language as soon as it left my pen. No matter how tightly I grasped the words, they slipped away, like when I cup my hands in the shower just to watch water slip through my fingers.
Once my uncle caught me writing on a napkin, and he took it from me to read. He wept, one hand clasped to his face, sitting on the end of the narrow motel bed. I thought he didn’t understand it -- tried to explain the talking cat -- but when I pointed at the napkin all the words seemed jumbled to me. I was too young to understand.
In college, the first time I wrote for other people, I abandoned the talking cat in favor of more literary themes: death, love, mortality. What a stupid story. All the red marks from my professor were like cuts on my skin, and when I tried to read them, I couldn’t. All my letters were backwards. All the red was question marks. It felt like, and I know it’s wrong to say this, when I cut myself with a razor blade in the shower, then watched the blood wash down the drain and vanish. All the red meant nothing, leaving me holding a razor, a paper, illegible.
My uncle fainted at the sight of blood. Once when he had me, he tried to trim my nails but cut too close, and my thumb bled. Lightheaded he fell over backwards, prompting me to get the motel’s receptionist. By the time he got back to the room, my uncle was standing up, hurrying the man away and drawing me back inside. I thought he kept turning his face away because he was embarrassed. I was too young to understand, too young to understand when half a dozen police cars came to the motel, when my mother screamed at my uncle and grasped me tightly to her breast like she would never let go of me again.
Every time I try to write about that it just comes out as nonsense. I’m just confused, with red question marks everywhere I look. Confused why he would take me, why he wept at my writing, why he took me to the cliffs of Utah and let me clamber among them unchaperoned while he smoked. He saved my life when my footing slipped; caught me by the leg, prevented my collision with a chalky pink boulder. I can’t think of my uncle without thinking of those cliffs.
Falling then felt like flying. I was free, disconnected, and no words attacked my mind. There are no words in the sky. Now when I go to those cliffs I shudder, my toes tingle when I look down. Falling feels like what it is.
I never minded blood. It was meaningless, what I’d done, down the drain in an instant. It felt the same as crumpling up my stories and throwing them in the trash, and it was the same, for those words are part of me just like blood and bone, and with a razor blade or a pen I just want it out, out, out of me. My mother thought that was because of my uncle. She thought he put something in me, poisoned me. She told me I should try writing about him, to help me get it out.
“My uncle” and the rest illegible. Diligently I constructed a clear narrative, a meaningful arc, and when I looked back at my page it was a foreign language. Like the cat wrote it. How stupid, to try to make all of life a skeleton of plot. Writing felt like cutting. It felt as stupid as hoping that standing on my toes would allow me to see a thousand miles.
“My uncle” and the rest illegible. That’s this, isn’t it? I don’t remember. Writing feels like remembering, like remembering something dead that you can never get back. For me it’s remembering 3 my uncle’s hand around my calf, swinging me up from certain death. My mother thinks he ruined me, but he was nice to me. A week after I returned home, I asked when he would visit again. My mother and my uncle, they weep the same. Both tried to speak to me through their tears but I couldn’t understand it.
I hate the scrambling. I want to fall. And I know it’s wrong to say this, but I hear things I shouldn’t, all the time, words pounding in my head over and over and over. They’re like a thousand swords hacking at my brain until I don’t feel it anymore, until none of them mean anything anymore, they’re all just separate and useless and strange. If not for my uncle my tiny nine year old skull would have cracked open on the pink cliffs, spraying spaghetti brains and made-up words everywhere, like someone opened up a dictionary and shook it out onto the chalky ground. But no one would be able to read them because of the blood, which I never minded, but which made my uncle faint.
Standing on my toes feels like a pale imitation of flying. When did gravity’s embrace turn cold? No matter how much I try, I only see pink cliffs. In my imagination they take the form of blocky letters, lining up in a row to spell out a word, a message I can’t read.