Response to a Disturbance

We read History of a Disturbance about a man who decides to give up words in English...two responses.

My response: (Warning: Unedited Stream of Consciousness ensuing)

I’ve been here. It’s that moment when you’re asked a question, but you shrug, because it’s not worth responding to, and your mother presses you with more questions because she’s frightened that you don’t talk and maybe you’re ignoring her and what kind of child does that? It’s that moment when your friends all stare at you and wonder what’s wrong, but they learn to leave you alone when you get that look in your eyes because maybe you’re searching for the real meaning of something or the silence and your thoughts are all you want or need. It’s that moment when you feel a concept or an idea just sitting there, like a box that you just can’t open, and your mind wraps around it, like little silver tendrils around a great light nothingness, trying to penetrate it, but it can’t. It’s when you try to capture an essence, and so you write poetry, because maybe the juxtaposition of a few words, and the white spaces, can convey that essence in a way that a description or an explanation can’t. And it’s when you’re wholly alone—but you don’t want to leave others in the dark, because you can’t communicate with thoughts and even if you try so hard maybe your eyes and your smile can’t…maybe your thoughts can’t push all the way through to the look in your eyes and the person you’re with, but you love them, you want to know what they’re thinking, you want them to know how you feel, but it’s all a twisted game anyway as you dance around with the words because you know you can’t break the conventions, the societal norms, even if you want them to know the truth, the real truth, whole and untarnished with all the good and the bad, so desperately that it’s making you crazy…

Elena's Response:

I would that I were anything other than desperately unhappy. I would that I could be anything other than frightened, confused, abandoned, angry, indeed, all of the things you perceive in me. And perceive them you do—understandably, as you say, because you believe that your silence allows you to understand all as it is.

Your description, your narrative, your not-explanation, is clear. Logical, rational, easily followed. But you who were once my loving husband, you who have been successful in nearly everything you have wanted to do, you see so clearly with an eye trained on your objective and yet turn blind to all other things. You believe yourself empowered, and perhaps you are. For you.

But as for me, I am set adrift. In you I hoped to find a partner I could trust forever, a person I could love forever, a man that would support me and love me all the same. To love and to cherish always—did we not vow this upon our marriage? And you believe, perhaps, in some strange way, that you still do.

They always speak of love as something more than words. But how can I connect to you when I do not know what you are thinking? When I am not reminded of you in everything I do? You have left your work, and the burden is on me to support us. Yet I am holding up nothing but thin air, because for you it is us no longer, but you. I do not even know what you see when you look at me—you who have left words behind. Do you even see your wife? Someone you love? What does love even mean for you, if you cannot speak of it in words?

For we are human, and we cannot communicate in rushes of sound and essence. Flawed as they may be, words are powerful. Words can move, if you are willing to go beyond the bare minimum. It has never been about exactly what they say, but what they mean. It has always been about what they mean. And if you knew me anymore, you would have known exactly what I meant when I asked, “Do you love me?” at that time, in that place.

But you don’t, because you have become so caught up in what is on the face of things, in the inconsequential details that are not the details that make life worth living, and I cannot touch you there. You have made a vow deceiving yourself that it will make things better, when you have willfully dropped out of the realm of things I and those close to you know. What you have called a stammer is that in truth. You believe you are sure. I know that you are, and falling because of it.

My strength of feeling is not any less because I speak to you in words. Can I feel in words? It is an impossibility—therefore know that my feelings are not dead, but yours have altered, altered beyond recognition. I say all this now because I loved you. I love the man that you were, and the man that you could have been, perhaps could still be. And now—now, you are changed, and it is a type of madness so rational and so lucid and yet so frightening and alien that I do not even know what to say. All I know is that you have left me behind.

Maybe you will come back one day, come back to the place I will have kept for you in honor of the vows I made and the love I had, come back from the white solitude you have left me for and free me from the black solitude that you have caused. I write this as if you may, but my heart is empty of the hope. What you call patience, I call despair. I am past waiting, waiting for my heart to be full again. I can only dream in the white hours of the morning, and then face the darkness waiting in the day.