Here

Here I am.

I am always here.

I am here even if nobody notices.

Even if nobody cares.

I am where I’m supposed to be.

I am here.

I read those phrases over and over. I copied them and reread them. They were always in the same place, which is where they were meant to be. I was not worried, since after so many years I felt they had no place else to go or to be. Still, I wanted to know why those words seemed so settled when my thoughts were not. 

My thoughts were scattered like common pins when you knock their box off the edge of the table and they litter the carpet, defying you to recover them without stabbing yourself or leaving any behind to do damage in the future. This wasn’t about dropping pins. It was about the words that knew where they should be and assumed their positions just as naturally as we take a breath or blink.

Where, I asked myself, was my sense of place? Where did I belong? Did I even have a place that, for me, was a perfect fit? I thought it was a possibility and set about studying the matter. I would adapt the idea or embellish it like we do when we attach buttons or lace to fabric. My sense of place would be mine and mine alone. 

I set out to find it. To find out, too, what made it that way. It might turn out to be autobiographical, if nothing else.

The first thing I did was to learn about autobiography, and the first example I found was Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, published un 1937. Surely such a brilliant, worldly writer, friend of many other writers and artists who visited her in France, would know. I was thinking about my childhood home when I read:

It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.

This was not going to be helpful, but I’m not one to give up easily. I read on, only to find this observation by Stein, who truly knew how to put words in their place:

… what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there…

It bothered me that the politicians in Washington had had a phase of saying ‘there’s no there there’s to deny any incriminating circumstances involving one of their own persuasion. Nobody seemed to know or care about who had created the phrase, which was about the meaning of home after living in France for thirty years. Her ‘there’ seemed to be Europe, despite the political upheaval and war.

Stein no longer had something she had as a child, but I know I did, because day after day, night after night I return. I had fled from it once because it was old and damaged, but now I return and remember, not like her, because all she had is what she’d forgotten: “That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” 

I’m skeptical, because I remember everything. I remember too much, in fact. I remember all the people who nearly died, who were very ill there. My home had two numbers; the original one remained, but the subsequent one never replaced it. The house was enormous and has grown over the years. I’m constantly putting new additions on it as well as discovering new areas, hallways and rooms that weren’t there when I was there.

The house holds all those first words and I can guarantee you they are there still. Lots of words, for pointing out and remembering and locking things in place. The walls bulge and the floors slope, but the there is still there for me. I see all the walls in their original colors and every color after that, even the wallpaper that concealed uneven surfaces. The words are still in their tiny bookcases. Other words, spoken ones, roam through the rooms and poke into closets, some adhering to the surfaces they touched when I was there. 

What I’m trying to say is that my there is still there and every word or footstep or scream accompanies it. I haunt it and it me, as Gertrude might have said if she had found her there when she went back after an absence that was too long. At the same time, the walls have a river running through them. It’s a big river with nice colors, rocks, and islands. It’s immense and runs right through the house, I say. I can see it now and it’s there.

This makes no more sense than Gertrude’s point about identity being only a thing one does or doesn’t remember. It’s all in the not forgetting. Perhaps she needed to enter her house again to have it fixed in her mind, to allow it to have a place. She’s a hard writer to decipher. I’m not hard. I know my place. I mean, I know the place that identifies me and cringe at how well it knows me. Since my parents are no longer around, nobody knows me better. 

Unless it’s the river. Although the river has some iffy spots…

Before I bring this reminiscence to an end, I need to tell you that this house with its river keeps me alive. If it were to disappear, I would do the same. My only goal now is to keep it alive as long as possible, breathing words and water into it, moving it into the here where I sometimes find myself gasping for breath, speechless, abandoned. It lives in me even if it is dead to the rest of the world, which includes the current residents. They don’t matter. 

The house. Is. A book. Is still. Is written into and on these pages. Another book. One I wrote once and am rewriting. The words are mine, even though they slipped out of another mouth that is no longer there. They are all written down, in indelible ink. 

I am the words on this page that is a book, here as well as there.

There is none other like it. Do not ask for my address, because I might give you the wrong one and you would never know where I am then, never find me. However, I will always be there, in the house, on the river.

Look at me now. I am here, and I have an ending.