"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
She is sitting on the beach eating a chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war. The day is hot, and the sun melts not only her and her fellow beachgoers’ skin, but also the chocolate chip cookie housed within the metal canister whose history she can only imagine. She touches the melting chocolate chip cookie with her finger, then touches her cell phone’s liquid crystal display screen, which therein contains a facsimile of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter written in 1941, just after World War II began.
Dearest, the letter begins. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
Virginia Woolf did not do the best thing to do in the ocean. Rather, she did it in the River Ouse in Lewes, East Sussex, England. Three miles away, in the nearby village of Rodmell, she and her husband Leonard—to whom her suicide note was addressed—owned a weatherboarded cottage. There, she wrote Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway. In 1910, 31 years before her river death, Virginia Woolf—then Adeline Virginia Stephen—had been institutionalized after attempting suicide twice, once by trying to jump out of a window, and once again by overdosing on Veronal. Woolf may have had bipolar disorder, sources purport, but words make things name themselves (a poet once said), and I distrust that we can precisely language anything our minds do, seeing as no mind is the same, despite the ways our minds all spin out from time to time.
The waves are now lapping against the shore, and the girl on the beach is re-reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter with my finger. As was aforementioned, this letter was written to Leonard—her husband, not Cohen nor Bernstein. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you, she wrote, reaffirming the myth that anybody can rescue anybody. But maybe love can save—meaning to keep safe, to avoid the need to use, to preserve the soul from damnation—a person, or maybe another person’s attention can save another person, or maybe if adults failed to tell us good job and I love you when we were small, nothing can save us but ourselves.
After reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter on the beach, whose sand is hot and therefore makes her skin stick to body, she walks back to the train past the bar where an elderly man is drinking. Hello sweetheart, he says, and she winks at him, but he cannot see her eye because it is covered by plastic meant to protect her irises from the sun, and she cannot see what he is drinking because her vision is tinted. On the train, she misses the elderly man, not because he is memorable but because there is no one else to call to mind.
A lie?
A lie.
First, she thinks of her former beloved, and then she thinks of the elderly man. He was sitting at a bar without sitting at the bar, for in fact, he was sitting outside of the bar where he was drinking. Scanning the train with her tinted vision, the girl considers the straight line of energy required for the train’s bars to extend from the train’s ceiling to its floor, much like the elm tree behind the weatherboarded cottage in a village where she has not yet moved, and which she cannot call to mind because she will not move into the weatherboarded cottage for several months and thus has not yet made its acquaintance. But we know things before we know things, she intuits, and so somewhere within her consciousness she lets herself visualize it and subsequently feels quiet and adrift from her present reality, though she does not let herself know what she knows despite the fact she knows it.
In the past, when she was eating a homemade chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war, she did not feel adrift in quite this exact way, nor did she feel out of tune with her consciousness’ registers of knowledge. In other words, she did not feel the detachment of her mind from her body, nor did she fear the repercussions of exiting the beach to re-enter the world. Nor did she imagine herself to be anywhere but on the beach, albeit now, writing this, she feels an ocean in her torso, and this ocean provokes her to once again return to the actual ocean, into which she might step without clinging to reality; into which she might wade with the insistence of one who has also made peace with her grief. In this wading, she will let the water carry her away until I, too, am asleep near the bottom of it.