Since I was a teenager, I have aspired to a practice of creating art and then burning it before it can ever be seen. The image of a writer burning her pages every night, but continuing to write in the morning with the knowledge that the words will not persist, that there will be no record, that no praise will ever come, there will be no reward, comes forward again and again as an artistic ideal. This is connected to a belief that the essential is found in the act of creation itself, a specific interaction between the self and something vast, and that the results should be abandoned. There is also a mistake in this though, because it isn’t the art that needs to be burned, but the artist. Results themselves are not a problem, but the hope of a particular outcome is.

Hope of results leads to anxiety and paralysis. My ideas about the effects of my actions, the very ones that I use to justify non-action, are oversimplified and mistaken.

Often I find myself keeping everything hidden, even from myself. If something slips out of my grasp, I try to hide the evidence, shoving it out of sight. I’m afraid to look at these little fragments. They’re stashed in corners, scrawled on the backs of envelopes I happened to have in my bag. They’re in undated, truncated text files with odd names that will make them hard to identify or search for. They’re thrown away and forgotten.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in painful confusion, surrounded by people who could have used my help, but unable to reach out to them, holding myself so far at a distance because I was so certain of my ability to infect. Usually, but not always, I’m aware of my own confusion and desperately want to erase it or at least hide it. I’ve closed myself off in a tiny box because I believed that was the best way to protect the world. I’ve assured myself that silence is a virtue, because I was so afraid of being wrong and misunderstood. I’ve submitted to inertia and allowed precious connections to fall away. I’ve refused to listen to anything else but a listing of my offenses played on repeat. I have wasted so much time indulging in guilt.

In times like these, I often have the thought that I am not alive, not hooked into my own experience. It’s as if everything is dulled and obscured, both memories and present experience of the world. The inability to recall details of my past is even more noticeable to me than my lack of attention in the present. And there is also a sense of being erased from the future. In order to preserve this illusion, I cannot speak, cannot take action, because that might prove the existence of who I am. This should be an lesson that past and present and future are also simultaneous, they all collapse together.

I have a sense that something has been ruined, and sometimes it seems that the cause is familiarity. Once a space has become crusted over with habits, I can no longer see it, I cannot move inside it. The same applies to my own body — How do I delete these extra layers, or at least stop adding new ones? New ideas about what cannot be done, new reasons for doom. I build the boxes and insert myself in them, folding myself up smaller and smaller, with a goal of total disappearance. I cannot remember that I must be beyond the box in order to construct it and to see it, and therefore the thing in the box cannot be all of who I am.

The stories I have the greatest desire to tell all deal with secret things, with love, and sex, and violence, moments of pain and vulnerability and death, with seduction and abandonment, with fragile worlds that disappear. I’ve argued for the value of trauma and suffering, that the path can be found in the very mess we hope to be lead away from. I think this is true. But the line between mysticism and masochism, if it exists, is thin, and my obsession with the intersection can pull me away from reality.

When it becomes a memory, even lightness takes on an incredible weight.

Standing, again, at the threshold, I am filled with terror. I am afraid that, this time, I will simply decide that door is locked, so I will not have to open it.

I can’t write about love anymore. I can’t write about sex anymore. I can’t write about tragedy anymore. I can’t write about God anymore. I don’t know anything. I wish it were Sunday. I wish it were Saturday afternoon. My mother thinks I am going to get married. Sometimes I think that, too. Sometimes I think we really will have a baby. Sometimes I think I don’t know him at all. And whether it’s been 8 years or 4 months or 3 months or I don’t know, I’ve never known him. He didn’t reply to my letter; he didn’t even say he got it. Maybe this is the next sad story in my list of sad stories. I told him I was so desperately sad over the winter, that I thought if I didn’t get out of New York I’d never have another normal, healthy relationship again. And he asked me when I ever had a normal, healthy relationship. He doesn’t know the half of it. He asks me why I don’t trust him and the answer is obvious. We both say we want monogamy, but we are both cheaters. We were cheating most of the times we were together, until now. I remember when we first met, the exact moment, in a class. We spent months wanting one another, knowing it was inevitable. He told me stories about New Zealand when we were supposed to be studying molec and cell. We went on a walk in my first New York snowfall and got soup. I was 18. My life was already falling apart by the time we finally had sex, and I still remember what it felt like, it was the first time I ever really enjoyed it, and I walked across Washington Square the next morning feeling like a completely different person, and in a matter of days I was gone. I never told him I was leaving. He was interrogated by the police. And eight years later, we were lying in bed together on my grandparents’ farm in Georgia, having dated for less that two months, talking about having a baby. And I asked him if he realized that it meant we would be in each other’s lives until we died, that it would be a stronger guarantee of that than marriage. And he said, yes, of course. And I asked him if that scared him and he said no. Just no. Then later he said this probably wasn’t what I imagined when I imagined falling in love and getting married and deciding to have children, that one day I’d be making an agreement with someone, that it wouldn’t be a disaster. And I didn’t say anything, and he rolled over and hugged me. I moved to the West Coast. Because I was never going to have a normal, healthy relationship in New York. And now I am on the West Coast, in beautiful, beautiful, Portland, missing him. Which is just what I said was going to happen, every time I said we shouldn’t do this, that it was the wrong timing, and don’t you understand how much you could hurt me, I asked? The first time, and he said he wasn’t going to hurt me. And he said he wasn’t wasting my time. And he said when he was in Mexico he tried ecstasy for the first time and he hugged a pillow and it was the softest thing he had ever touched in his life, and he just wanted to stay there hugging the pillow for ever, and that that was what it reminded him of, sitting on my couch in New York with me.

(Final paragraph of a 5-page story, unpublished.)

I saw the stairwells of the hotel, the walls covered in with pictures and frames, the ceramic girl in the swing hanging from the ceiling of the lobby, the marionettes in the corner, the key cubbies, the generations of artists and writers and musicians milling in the hallways, the dead in the suicide rooms on the lower floors. I saw it all more clearly than I had ever seen it before. I saw the dirt and the bedbugs and the beating heart of New York City. I saw it all, and it was beautiful, and then I saw it all burning. It burned and it burned, the walls of the hotel grew black with ash and crumbled away until there was only me and the man and then we burned and there was only the fire and then the fire burned away and there was nothing left.