it's not a bone: notes on absence

I’ve been thinking about how daring writing is. It’s almost inevitable that the relationship between you and your work might grow shadows and lose language for understanding but we do it anyway. Maybe the cost of preservation is growth.

I wrote the majority of this book during a profoundly lonely time in my life. I felt like I had a well of anguish in me, and yet I was the only one who could empty it. So simply put, writing was helping me compartmentalise my feelings and experiences while reminding me of my ruin. I knew I wanted an established, complete time capsule of this wave I was trying to not be drowned by, so the idea of a book had been in my peripheral for a while. I view this book as a first and final signature with a grief specific to my latter teen years. A kind of extended letter to the things that I was haunted by at the time. Sometimes you just have to honour the suffering before you relent it.

When I was 18, I began my first year of university in South Africa, and halfway into the year is when a lot of writing of the chapbook took place. I remember going on evening walks to the gas station to buy a drink carrying a kind of loneliness that feels specific to you. This usually happens when you’re submerged so completely in your solitude you forget how big loneliness is. Big like air all around us is big. And subsequently the one you carry feels like it’s the only and right way to carry such a thing. I would look at passersby and wonder which one of them could love me. And at the time the extent to which I thought I could be loved was more of toleration. In essence I wanted only to be had and not known. This is how the beginning of problem with miracles came about. The writing of that poem was accompanied by an inward shift. My peripheral had contracted in on itself.

At the time my life felt very empty. Very devoid and starved of anything good. I couldn’t be made whole by anything. As much as my life was empty of the outside world—it was empty of me. There was a sense of overlooking that I approached myself with and I anticipated others did the same with the aim that I could be proven right of my innate decaying. I used to think of absence as a permanent state, but now I see it as something to be worked around. It’s not a bone.

I have a strange relationship with dreams. I either have terrible nightmares or arbitrary bits of nothing. Three of the poems in the book are actually about a recurring dream I was having about my father. Up until now they are some of the most horrifying dreams I’ve ever had. I remember waking up with my eyes leaking, very determined to not let my terror escape me. The best part of writing for me has always been the holding. Ache, longing, memory and love to name a few are mine to hold afterwards. In the same way this was a letter to me, I give it openly to the reader. I hope that these poems find you in the bleak winter, when the sun has no warmth to it. I hope you feel your ache being held by the words on the page.

In our collective loneliness, there’s enough room for all of us.

From this side of the bone with a big smile,

Jessica