“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” ~William Faulkner
A woman I served at the Warrington said hello to me on the street today. I was walking to Starbucks to get started working. I thought, as I saw her: She drinks gin and soda and fresh lime, loves a man who drinks London Pride ale. They’d both be so much handsomer if they didn’t smoke so much. I don’t know her name, offhand.
We exchanged a little holiday small talk. Then, pause, and she asked me the question everyone seems to, finally, ask:
“So how’s the book coming?”
It’s just a question about work, really. “So Elizabeth, how’s your job?” only more specific. My job is something tangible and intangible all at once. “Elizabeth is writing a book. I’ve seen loads of them in Borders. I am even reading one right now. Well, actually, its a magazine.” Like knowing the local weatherman, stopping him on the street, then asking him how the weather is. Only slightly less interesting than that.
So, Elizabeth, how is the book coming?
The book is coming. The book is here. The book is written. The book is waiting for me to find the answer, to stop dawdling, to decide that I, in fact, do know what I am doing, since I have been doing this for 15 years. The book is living, and lives in my memory and actions, a part of who I am. It died over the summer, or so I thought. It wriggled itself out of its cocoon and is sitting on the branch now, fluttering its wings.
It is memory, carrying it forward, and me backward, on the days I am working. I remember scents, and patterns and voices and numbers, and I want to write them. I want to write about the texture of a back of neck under my fingertips, or children’s bodies crammed on a carousel spinning, or the sound of a heart, straining toward love.
“It’s fine. It’s going really well, thanks.”
She wants to know when, of course, and so do I. I have to practice answering that question, while not listening to it. It is all here, in front of me, and trapped, behind my eyes.
“Was there ever in anyone’s life span
a point free in time, devoid of memory,
a night when choice was any more than the sum
of all the choices gone before?”
~Joan Didion
