Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: creative nonfiction

  • Drowning in Ink

    I have journals everywhere.

    Some are stacked on shelves.
    Some are hidden inside drawers.
    Some I have carried with me for years
    without opening.

    Every once in a while
    I pull one out
    and read a few pages.

    Sometimes I recognize the handwriting
    before I recognize the person.

    I know I wrote it.

    I know where I was living.
    I know what was happening.
    I know the names.

    But I read the words
    and wonder

    What mental state was I in
to write this?

    The thoughts contradict each other.

    One sentence believes something.
    The next one destroys it.

    Nothing stays true
    for very long.

    The language is abstract
    conflicting
    irrational

    as though the words
    were dropped from the sky
    and I spent entire pages
    trying to arrange them
    into a life.

    Sometimes, honestly
    it makes no sense at all.

    I used to think
    that kind of writing
    was profound.

    Maybe some of it was.

    But some of it
    was simply confusion
    given a pen.

    And sometimes
    I feel sorry for her.

    I look at the handwriting
    the words pressed too deeply
    into the paper
    the sentences running
    into one another

    and I almost want
    to reach through the years
    and hug myself.

    It is surreal
    to feel tenderness
    for someone
    who is still you

    but no longer exists.

    Back then
    I never imagined
    I would see myself differently.

    I thought the way I felt
    was permanent.

    I thought every thought
    was the truth.

    I could not imagine
    that one day
    I would open those journals
    and read them
    from the other side.

    That was a different stage
    of my life.

    I understand that now.

    Every stage asks us
    to become someone
    we cannot yet recognize.

    And maybe the purpose
    is not to erase
    who we were

    but to look back
    recognize her
    forgive her

    and keep moving.

    Sometimes I want to tell her
    that she will not always
    feel this way.

    That one day
    she will read these pages
    without falling back into them.

    That healing will happen
    so quietly
    she may not notice it
    until years later

    when she opens an old notebook
    and realizes
    she is reading the words
    of someone she once was

    someone she still loves

    but no longer has to be.

    She would not believe me.

    Back then
    I could not see beyond
    the next sentence.

    I kept writing
    because I thought
    the words might save me.

    But the more I wrote
    the further I disappeared.

    I was not writing
    my way out.

    I was drowning in ink.

  • Hallways

    For as long as I can remember, my dreams have had architecture.

    Not mountains. Not oceans.

    Hallways.

    Hospital corridors. Hotels. Schools I have never attended. Houses that belong to no one I know. Fluorescent lights. Closed doors. Numbers I cannot quite read.

    There is always another room. I am always trying to find it.

    Sometimes I know what is behind the door. Most of the time, I do not.

    Lately, I have begun to wonder whether I have spent my entire life this way—not in rooms, but between them.

    A hallway is not meant to be lived in. It exists only because there is somewhere else to go. No one chooses one as a destination. No one says, this is where I will stay.

    And yet, so much of my life has happened there: in waiting, in becoming, in the long, unfinished passage between one version of myself and the next.

    A few months after my father died of lung cancer in 2014, I had a dream.

    I was inside a hospital. People were moving quickly through the corridors, rushing in and out of rooms, carrying papers, calling to one another. There were doors everywhere.

    Someone stopped me and said they had pulled my father out for me. He was in a room down the hall.

    Room 214, maybe.

    A woman in scrubs caught my arm before I reached it.

    They had found a cure, she told me.

    Not for every cancer.

    For his.

    They had brought him back.

    Even in the dream, I knew this was impossible. My father had been cremated. I remember thinking it clearly.

    He was cremated.

    But I followed her anyway.

    Hope has never required evidence.

    He was lying in a hospital bed, thin and fragile, the oxygen cannula still beneath his nose. He looked exactly as I remembered him near the end.

    But he was breathing.

    That was all I could see.

    He was breathing.

    I went to him as if I had been handed a miracle and was afraid it might be taken back if I asked too many questions.

    I told him they had found a medicine. I told him it was saving people. I told him he did not have to die anymore.

    He looked at me.

    Then he reached for my hand.

    He had very little strength, but his fingers closed around my wrist with surprising force.

    “Let me rest,” he said.

    Then he turned onto his side.

    Underneath him were the ashes.

    All of them.

    Ashes beneath the body that was still breathing.

    I woke terrified.

    For years, I remembered the dream as a message about death. Now I am not sure it was.

    Maybe the hallway had been there all along.

    There have been many of them since: the corridor outside my father’s room, the hallway outside my sons’ bedrooms when they were still young enough to need me, the airport passage where one of them walked away in uniform and did not look like a child anymore, the narrow stretch of my own house after everyone has gone home, a restaurant after closing—chairs turned over, lights lowered, the day emptied out of it.

    Even now, I am often standing somewhere between what was and what comes next.

    Not grieving as I once did.

    Not free of it either.

    Not the woman I was.

    Not yet the woman I am becoming.

    A hallway.

    The cruel thing about hallways is that you can still see the door behind you. Sometimes you can still hear voices through it.

    But you cannot live there anymore.

    I have spent years trying to return to rooms that no longer exist: the room where my father was alive, the room where my sons were children, the room where I believed love, if it was deep enough, would eventually become honest, the room where I knew who I was.

    But memory is not a key.

    It opens nothing.

    It only lets you stand close enough to remember the shape of the handle.

    Maybe that is why my dreams keep building hallways.

    Rooms suggest arrival. They suggest certainty. They suggest that something has finally been decided.

    Hallways do not lie that way.

    They admit that we are between things. They admit that the person who enters is not always the person who comes out. They admit that sometimes there is no revelation on the other side.

    Sometimes there is only another corridor.

    Another number.

    Another door.

    I used to think transition meant I was lost. Now I think it may be the most honest place a person can stand—not where she was, not where she is going, but in the long passage between them.

    And perhaps that is why my dreams never give me a destination.

    I have spent so much of my life becoming someone else that my subconscious no longer bothers building rooms.

    It builds another hallway.

  • Every Word I Wrote

    I could not hear him.

    I stepped away from my friends and pressed the phone closer to my ear.

    New Orleans continued around me.

    Music through an open doorway.
    Rain shining on the street.
    Someone laughing nearby.

    I asked him to repeat himself.

    I still could not hear him.

    Later, a message arrived.

    Something close to:

    I can’t do this with you anymore.

    I have forgotten every word he said.

    I remember every word I wrote.

    I had always been the one who left.

    I knew when the air had changed. I knew when affection had begun to turn into something else. I knew how to reach the door before anyone could close it behind me.

    But I had known him for decades.

    He belonged to the long history of my life, and I had mistaken history for proof.

    There had already been reasons to leave.

    I knew them.

    Still, I stayed.

    That was the part I could not forgive.

    Not that he ended it.

    That I had remained long enough for him to.

    That night, I went to Chuck’s Bar.

    I sat outside.

    By then, the screen had begun to divide itself in two. I remember closing one eye, trying to make the words stay where I put them.

    Chuck’s Bar

    I long to be something
    stronger

    than a woman

    who once loved you.

    September 6, 2015

    Four lines.

    Nothing about New Orleans. Nothing about the call. Nothing about the message.

    Only the wish to become someone else.

    For years, I believed the poem was about him.

    It was written against the woman who had stayed.

    I thought she had failed me. I wanted to become stronger than she was because I did not yet know how to forgive her.

    Years passed.

    He asked me to forgive him.

    I did.

    Today, we are friends.

    I still see him tenderly.

    That would have been impossible to the woman sitting outside Chuck’s Bar, closing one eye against the doubled screen.

    She hated him.

    God, she hated him.

    But time returned him to his proper size.

    When I read those four lines now, I no longer hear a woman asking to become stronger.

    I hear a woman leaving herself a way back.

    I have forgotten every word he said.

    I remember every word I wrote.

  • Point of Entry

    People ask me about technique.

    I disappoint them.

    I have never sat down
    to write a poem
    thinking about meter
    or form
    or whether the line
    should break here
    instead of there.

    That does not mean
    those things do not matter.

    It means they were never
    my point of entry.

    I don’t write
    because I understand
    what I’m feeling.

    I write
    because I don’t.

    I don’t know where a poem begins.

    I only know
    that sometimes
    I write a sentence
    and spend years
    becoming the person
    who can understand it.

    Maybe that is where the poem begins.

    Not in clarity.

    In the private disorder
    language has not yet learned
    how to hold.

    The poem arrives before the explanation.

    Before the lesson.

    Before the clean version
    people prefer
    after pain has been made useful.

    I do not trust that version.

    I trust the fragment.

    The unfinished sentence.

    The line that breaks
    because something in me
    cannot continue
    without silence.

    That is technique too.

    Not the kind I studied.

    The kind the body invents
    when the mind
    has no argument left.

    The poem knows before I do.

    It knows where I am hiding.

    It knows what I am circling.

    It knows the truth
    before I can survive
    saying it plainly.

    That is why I write this way.

    Not to confess.

    Confession suggests
    I have arrived somewhere
    with evidence in my hands.

    Most of the time
    I have not arrived.

    Most of the time
    I am still standing
    inside the question.

    And the poem—
    if it is honest—
    does not answer it.

    It simply stays there
    with me

    long enough
    for something true
    to recognize itself.

  • Nothing to Say

    I have nothing to say.

    Which is strange,
    because my mind
    rarely gives me silence.

    I’ve been away.

    I’ve been thinking.

    And whatever happened to me
    is still happening.

    Maybe that’s why
    I keep reaching
    for words
    that aren’t ready
    to belong to me yet.