Staring Down Upon Pages After Hitting My Head On the Machine I'm Attached To

After dinner, we sat for a few hours by the fire. The wind moaned in the chimney, mother sighed on the sofa, and father, whom I’ve never seen seated except at a table, paced up and down the enormous dining hall until it was time for bed. He wore a white woolen shaggy robe, and a cap of the same material. Once he was a certain distance from the center of the hall, lit only by the flickering fire in the hearth and a solitary candle, he began to disappear in the shadows, and, once he was completely immersed in the darkness, all I could hear was his footfall until he came back like a ghost, in his peculiar attire.

Now, they are so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these words; they are like children, I know them all like a bird knows the shady spot of the tree from which its song emits, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them.

Friday – January 31^st, 1779

We had nothing worth remarking to day except we kept ascending all day and we are now at the very top of the mountains. The guide says that this is the worst day that we shall have the whole journey.

It is dark inside the house and I am here. Lightening flashes outside the window – there is silence, raindrops, I am waiting for the clap of thunder.

In the kitchen the light turns on. I walk through and go outside for a smoke. The rain drips from the wood boards above my head – I stare at a brick wall, a window.

I hear the train rumble by through the open windows. One of many houses in a long line backed up to the tracks, each one of us wakes up to its presence. Just rumbling, no light. I am within this house that is inside of nothing. And inside of me there are dreams which are memories which are nothing.

My mind sounds like a voice next to the beat of my heart. A voice that will never live inside words. The rain picks up. An early fall breeze enters through the window. Who is sleeping on this night that I write instead of dream? Not the sky, not the train conductor, not the bartender not the drinker, not the rats under the shelter of the neighbor’s air-conditioning unit, not the bus drivers on ephedrine plummeting down Western Avenue forgetting their children’s first day of school starts in five hours, not the man whose room in Greektown was broken into the night before nor the Oaxacan dishwasher whose two boys he sent to see their abuelos but cannot afford to fly them home.

I do not know why I cannot sleep – the ripple through time that bends the world back to me, ugly and unforgiving of my vulnerabilities.

Tuesday – November 30^th, 1779

To day a middling breeze from the S.E. or SSE. At 12 o clock to day being at the Pump there being very little water the beam struck my head and hurt me a little.[1]

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[1] The remainder of the page in the Diary contains a drawing of a bird.