To Coetzee
photo by Mike Marciano
She wants to write about oblivion. She says writing is forgetting. A paradox, but she doesn't care—forget to remember, remember to forget, round and round, a loop in the head, a record skipping.
She’s been thinking about her mother these days, the way she shifts between silence and exhaustion, and then the eyes go wild, the mouth opens like a wound, and she is shouting, sobbing, full of something that spills out and fills the room. And always, always, she is upset with her—you’re too much like me, she says, like it's an accusation, like she is some bad echo of her life. What a wreck you are, pretentious, shallow.
Her mother wants depth. She wants her daughter to be deep enough that she won’t be washed away, deep enough that she won’t disappear. And she, of course, believes in God, the way she believes in walls and doors, in things meant to keep you in or out.
Once, she told her mother that she thought she was Jesus. Didn’t know much about it, but she heard Jesus meant life itself, the reason for breath, the great I am that people read and hear and see. I want to be life! she said it, wide-eyed, meaning it, because why not?
She went quiet. Then she laughed—loud, sharp, like glass shattering on the floor. A laughter that was trying to bury her words, kick them under the rug, smother them before they took up space. She watched her mother laugh, and in between the breathless bursts, she saw her thinking, and she knew what she thought.
You are me, but not me anymore.
And that’s what hurts her. That once, she was hers, a piece of her, an extension, and now—she is slipping away, becoming something else, something she doesn’t recognize. Time does that. First, it carries us forward, then it pulls us apart. One day, we’ll both disappear, swallowed into the earth, unremembered. The doors she dreamed of, the angels she saw—gone, dissipated, like mist wearing off from the air.
So she tells her: leave something behind. Inscribe yourself. Make a mark so deep the world can’t erase it.
And so, she writes.
But the more she writes, the less she feels her body, the more she forgets the weight of it. Words stretch out in front of her like roads, and she walks them, chasing some echo of herself. But is that depth?
If writing is how she stays alive, then one day, she might vanish into it entirely. A machine that thought it was human, now just ink and movement, an engine running on memory. She used to feel things, the simultaneity of pain and pleasure, but the words smooth them out, turn them into something else, something distant. You write because it hurts, and writing makes it hurt less, and you keep going, again and again, chasing the rhythm, the movement, the pulse of it.
And when it’s done—when the page is full, when the machine stops—it/she rewinds, traces the words, follows the path backward.
Well, now, it/she thinks. Wasn’t that a story?
