you stared.

quotes from ana patova crosses a bridge by renee gladman

"the crisis took words out of my books and
strung them together, put them in
envelopes, and mailed them to my
friends, appalling them with obscenities
and abstraction. the crisis made me
give up architecture, drawing up plans
for building, and sat me roughly in
this chair from which i did not leave
for years. it was ten years, the despair,
and it was five days, and it was your
childhood, and the time it took to cross
a bridge; it was the love you could not
have of the woman who called your name;
it was while you were farming, while you
built a circular home. the crisis tied you
to a chair and said, 'write!' then took
your sentences as they landed. i farmed
from my window."

"we were making chaos with our goodbye notes,
and it wasn't as though leaving wasn't
happening but that it just wasn't ourselves
who were doing it. no one could name names.
we all knew that hausen wanted to go, and
when he finally vanished, many of us felt
relief. we missed him, though we didn't
know him (we knew his confinement), but
we celebrated his departure as a threshold
crossing. 'hausen finally made it,' we'd say
and clink our glasses. so, we knew that leaving
was possible and that in many corners of
our neighborhoods people were preparing
to depart, and did depart. but, we couldn't
call out to them, even when the time came
and the deserter was someone we loved or
someone with whom we worked and drank.
our mouths would empty, for a long time,
would be dry, and when saliva came back
to us, it was only to ourselves that we could
point. 'i'm leaving,' i would misspeak
without knowing. 'i've left too,' would say
luswage."

"i wrote this book in a circular home on a hill, overlooking
the city, which roams while we are sleeping; i wrote it in
a cafe with my friends; i wrote it as i looked for hidden
streets, while sitting in desolate and lush spaces. i wanted
to say language leaves a trace, makes a simultaneous trail,
of us and of the crisis. my walking leaves a trace, also my
saying i have walked. and, this is important, because,
though these marks do not render precisely the picture of
our crisis, they do show where there are still people. the
day fills up with monuments, and the book attempts to
erect a fence around them. the book wishes to end a crisis
by the sheer fact of existing. but, rather than a history, the
book becomes an index. it shuffles our bewilderment. it
does not tell our story. it cannot do that. nevertheless, it
opens toward you."

"for one second, i spoke 'sentence,'
which confused her, since all this time
i'd been saying 'paragraphs.'it was a
moment of our mouths missing one
another. her mouth was emitting sound.
she seemed to be calling my name,
breathing heavily, she seemed to put her
words inside me. 'writing my frightening
paragraphs,' i said, involuntarily. 'your
paragraphs grow on the walls of your
books.' we were inside an argument. i
resisted my torso toward the ceiling. i let
my hamstrings rise, something caught in
my hip. it was an interruption. i was
correcting her about my books: they did
not have walls, they had holes dug deep
in the earth. 'it's frightening,' she blew
in my face."

"he was a man
who swam at night in empty buildings.
the man went home to someone who
did not seem quite like a woman, but who
also was not identified as a 'man.' the
man coming home lay on top of this
person and swam and told a story, which
was a confession, and the body gasped,
but we did not know if the man's story
was causing this gasping or whether the
cause was his writhing. the reader couldn't
hear the story, but hausen had the language
around the story crack and drop heat on us.
and the body writhed on top of the other
body and whispered to it about something
done and undone in the city, something
sitting under water, something terrible."

"the west was not available to me. my
country was in a state of unspeakable
emergency. you could lift your eyebrows
when someone said so-and-so had left, but
you couldn't put shoulders to it. you
couldn't bend and show how your heart
hurt. you couldn't answer questions from
finland. but finland called and i said
something non-committal to keep finland
around, because it felt good that someone
was looking in. i had no need to curtain
the space in which i wrote, in which i
worried. in fact, if i weren't able to look
up from time to time to catch a neighbor
steal a glance through my windows, i
would not be able to progress in my
work. i waited for interruptions. i waited
for the feeling of eyes on me. finland felt
that i should reconsider. i felt simply that
i should be seen."

"i met luswage in an alley
when the 'moments' began, and would
stand there and would stare at her. we
would stand close and would stare at one
another until our eyes hurt, until the skin
beneath our eyes tremored and beyond
that point. luswage amini stood next to
me. nothing in the world could deter
this, no storm, no regulator. hausen had
gone, relations were strained. we feared
the worse, which were the moments that
tore you away from the city. for love,
you met in alleys, you bowed and
gathered in your hands someone's hair,
you hid when you heard voices, and you
stared. you stared. and at the end of it
sheets of paper were exchanged."