For a long time, I was sick. How will you say it? For a long time, sick, sick and unemployed - how to say it? For a long time, sick, I was unable to speak. For a long time, unemployed, speech abandoned me. Months passed, and then a year; then another year, but time could not be marked.
Fallen, lying on the stairwell, afternoon sun through the window. Shafts of light, dust motes, and you with the cat who lay herself in the light. With her, seeing that her black coat was full of grey hairs and brown ones.
A notebook open. Notebook with cat hairs. What did you write? Nothing of consequence. Nothing significant. It was enough to write. Enough that writing was possible. Speech, of a kind. Directed to whom? I reread nothing. I wrote without rereading. No certainties. This voice was not mine. It was a voice, and that was enough. A voice, not mine, to which writing abandoned me just as I was abandoned to time.
Writing, enunciated by no one, possessed by no one, just as when I spoke, I only quoted others who spoke, and I tried to live only as I thought others might live. A voice, a life, the one abandoned to the other. One abandoning itself to the other. But it helped. It drew me back to life.
Helped - words were not indifferent to me. Was that it? But I want to say, too, that it was their indifference, the way they stood up, apart from me, the way they might speak to anyone that helped me.
A notebook without significance, closed, unread. And yet it spoke in everyone's language; words remained, even as I seemed not to remain. Even as I lived like a series of people, and not a person.
Reborn without coming to myself, reborn, but differently each time. Out of phase, always that. A series, not a man: always that.
And the notebook? Words without worth. Unread words. And yet - a single notebook. A single sheaf of pages. And word patiently after another. One word - another, abandoning itself in my notebook. Pages that lived for me. Pages in which the days consented to be marked.
Worthless words, long forgotten. I never reread them. But to write. To be dispersed by the infinitive, to write. Dispersed, but in a way, now, that affirmed my fall, the dispersal of time. The stairwell, the cat in a patch of winter light. I wrote; sentence bound itself to sentence. Wrote, and by that binding, time caught up with itself.