Vastness Is the Sweetest, Hotel Tiger, Belgrade, RS
You, that is, does not know the way your hands move when you speak – excited, conjuring images your mouth cannot. It does not know the last time you asked to be forgiven, or whether it rained the night before. It does not register where you would like to travel, or escape to, and perhaps, one day, call home.
Spoken elsewhere, you could mean almost anyone. In an essay like this one, you could mean the general you produced through writing: an addressee constituted by the possibility – even a wish – that somebody might read it. I would like you to read it.
Perhaps you is like a single raindrop, announcing the coming rain as it falls into a train station, landing on the cheek of a passenger, one among many spilling through its doors. They are returning home, some of them, if they are lucky enough to have a home, that is. Some might be running away from it. Some might have had it taken from them. The rain does not know the difference. It falls and, for an instant, makes an address of a surface – a face, a memory, a road – on which it lands.
You is of and for multitudes. It is almost empty until somebody says it. How many yous would those train passengers utter before the train leaves again?
I can write you here, as the smallest possible address, and you can read it without knowing whom I mean.
And yet when I say you, I also mean you.
I returns to you.
Maybe it is like us standing opposite one another, extending our arms. Our palms approach but do not touch. There is still a small interval between them, a centimetre or slightly less, enough air that neither hand quite reaches the other. Maybe you lives there. Not in you exactly, not entirely in me, but in the distance an address crosses.
Longing, as a psychic landscape of unrealised – perhaps unrealisable – possibility, seems to have the same structure: interstitial and vast. It exceeds whatever object I tether it to. And yet I never experience it abstractly. Longing arrives addressed. It says: this place, this wish, this moment, you.
The difficulty begins when I ask why. Meaning – why you? Not as a grammatical necessity, a syntactic position called into being by the speaking I, but as this person before me, looking back.
I might know that what I want from you began before you.
There was a storm once that uprooted a maple tree and left it lying across the main road in the place of my beginnings. The next day, early in the morning, five years old or perhaps a few months either side of it, my small hand clenched in my mother’s fist, I walked to see it. Its large trunk – which I had perhaps thought immovable – lay across the road, its dark, soil-covered roots exposed, still trembling in the wind, though less now: both dying, the storm and the tree with it. There was no one who asked me why I wanted to hug that tree. Or why I thought about it in the nights that followed. Or why, three decades later, I dream it now.
I still might not know, and yet I might wish you to give me the answer. Which is to say that there might be – there are, in fact – things I want you to answer for me, at least with me, that rippled long before you. Their starting point – a single drop – I might not know myself. Perhaps we recognise beginnings only afterwards, by what has fallen.
I could trace one falling after another, accumulating explanations for why I turn towards you now. None of those traces is you, though. You.
This might be another way of asking you to trust me – if trust is not too large a wish to ask of, and from, a speaking subject – when I say that what I want from you, having begun before you, does not make you incidental. It does not mean that I might discover you were only the latest surface onto which something older has attached itself. As though, if I understood enough about what came before, I might unearth that my longing was never really at all for you.
What I want to say is that exceeding an object is not the same as being indifferent to it. After all, it is your face before me and not another.
In English, I miss you makes you the object of a verb. But in Portuguese, tenho saudades tuas: I have saudades, and they are of you. This does not mean that speaking Portuguese makes someone embody longing differently. But the grammatical construction gestures at where longing might be differently located. Longing is something I might have – that is, contain a psychic structure for – while its address is something it acquires.
Which is to say you did not lodge in me, nor are you responsible – at least not in a way that I would need to forgive, or perhaps be grateful – for the yearning that I notice, especially when I am lucky to be home when it rains. You do not exhaust what is already there.
But something, nevertheless, in this partly inherited and partly remembered capacity turns towards you. This is what an address does: it gives direction to a movement, both pull and push, without explaining its origin. If this essay were written as a letter, its envelope would have an address that said nothing about why the letter had to be written. The address tells it where to go – whose hands might eventually receive it. It says nothing of the hands that wrote it.
There is a difference, after all, between an address and a destination. A destination promises, even if we only know it to be a wish, an arrival. Or a return. An address makes no such promise. A letter can reach its address without completing its journey.
I can arrive where I thought I wanted to be and discover that arriving has only brought me back to dreaming old maple trees, falling. And falling.
Maybe this is why being the object of another person’s longing can feel like both intimacy and a crate of stones. I – the addressee, in the form of you – become the recipient of a feeling I did not entirely engender. Some of it may belong to what has happened between us. There is no clean line between two pronouns: when does a beginning end, especially when it is retold as memory? Perhaps this is also what you and I establish, our palms touching: not two self-contained histories meeting, but a relation through which what precedes us becomes, for a time, addressed.
I cannot ask you to become the destination of that which I may address to you – a prayer, a complaint, a resignation. To say you is not to say: you must make this end. It might mean only: this has turned towards you.
For it is you that I speak to.
And still nothing inside those three letters distinguishes the person I weep in front of from a stranger passing through a train station.
Yet address does something that the word alone cannot do. It makes grammatical necessity and psychic possibility into the here and now: they fall, but they fall on you. I can know – I do know – that what I want from you began before you. But none of this makes you interchangeable.
That you cannot contain what I long for does not mean that my longing is not for you.