Over the time she’s been gone, nearly a year and a half now, I have often thought that had I just paid closer attention to her marginalia, to her stars and underlines, to all her bits of paper tacked to so many walls, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble, and a great deal of pain.
Those scraps might have served as warnings, rather than thin decoration.
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.
It may be that we can reassemble a person this way. Or, really, assemble them correctly.
God knows I have tried.
Surely there is a formula to be written, an algorithm to be employed. There must be a way to input all of the variables and have returned to us the woman herself. If we take the library of a true reader, as Tess is, and evaluate all of the books, plus all of the markings, would we not have some fundamentally truer version of that person than if we were to do the same with her spoken language, or even her letters, her journals?
Take all of those well-ordered books there on our great wall of carefully crafted shelves. Take the texts themselves, and then add to them whatever has been inscribed in their first pages.
Tess Wolff. Seattle. Washington. 1995, for example.
Add then the drawn lines—vertical and horizontal, doubled and tripled, plus their various flourishes—finishing hooks, upticks and down, plus power of pen stroke—depth of impression, plus considerations of paper stock, plus all the notes and stars, asterisks and brackets, exclamation points and question marks, plus stains and bookmarks—blood and coffee, insects and flowers, photographs and train tickets and sand. Take all of it and I am certain that out of the right machine would come the very truest portraits.
We are so much better told by the sentences of others.
It may be that I am doing a better job of telling your story than I am of mine.