Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

of the mountains, as if someone had just pulled them from the fluff filter of a tumble dryer and let them fall where they would. I could spend whole days staring at the sky as it worked itself into strange, fantastical shapes.

I didn’t exactly go to places. I couldn’t come home and say, “Today I went to Mount Rainier.” I just went to spend time with the sky, to stare at it, see what I could see. People use all kinds of things this way, as a reflecting pool, a mirror. The way tarot cards look to you is about what you see in them. Half of that is what you put in there. It’s not supernatural, just a very old technology. Never try to cloud-watch with another person. The second they tell you, “This one looks like George Washington in profile!” that cloud snaps shut. A multiverse, an abundance of possibilities collapses and you’re left with one dead white man.

I had begun to spend large portions of my days in a strange state of mind, a sort of quiet condition. The world faded a little, if you know what I mean. Became smaller, further away. Less intensely coloured, like the spines of old books bleached by the sun. Since settling in Seattle my migraines were less intense, and rarely accompanied by the bridge-shaped auras. I found, with practice, I could sometimes stop collapsing all the symbols around me into meanings. Text, for example, I could sometimes see as mere shape. Spoken words could strike me as simply sound. Peculiar, mouthy, resonant.

This is important, the way meaning works. Back in school we sometimes had to write poetry for English lessons. I remember the first time: Miss Minchin told us that, for homework, we were to write a poem that expressed something important from our childhood. I tried hard to do what she asked. I hated to fail at schoolwork. But I could not do it. For a week, I stared at a blank page until its whiteness became my entire mind. At last, in desperation, I copied out a page from “The Red-Headed League,” rearranged some of this wordstuff into lines that approximated the sorts of poetry that had been our exemplars, and handed that in instead. I got an A+, and this became my solution to the problem of poetry.

In class, when Miss Minchin handed back the work, things were a little more complicated. She paused over my page, and then she asked me what my poem meant.

Miss Minchin was a thin, soft-spoken, slightly giggly woman with grey hair. She was not at all threatening or scary, I just didn’t know what to tell her. I was quiet.

“What…is it about?” she tried again.

All I could think was: Why does she want me to ruin it?

My silence was making Miss Minchin nervous though, and I didn’t want to upset her, or make her look bad. So eventually I just started talking. Like how I talked to my mother. I said I had been “going through a lot” with “a boy I used to like” and I hinted that the poem was to be read as a confession, a cry of pain. The other girls snickered but Miss Minchin seemed quite reassured.

Once you close something down like this, force it to mean something, opening it back up again is not easy. Try it yourself. Listen to someone speaking your language without hearing what the words mean. Or look at a line of English text without reading it. Can you? Even Latin will reanimate itself in my brain. Its dead speakers have that power over me: their symbols, their tools, still operating from beyond the grave. But I handed this power to them. By learning. By agreeing to their rules, as Mrs. Schmidt laid them out on her blackboard, all the while regaling us with cheeky tales of Zeus’s bad-boy antics. By copying all this into my blue-lined notebooks and my brain. How dead must a language be before its zombie words run out of brains to consume? To be able to fight the meaning-zombies off, that’s the thing. To unlearn. A negative capability. Most of the time we’re stuck with the meanings we have, even if they’re not only dead but killing us.

Take Cambridge. Cambridge opens doors for me, but that’s exactly my point: walking through doors that are already open is not much of an achievement. My career is considered to have gone brilliantly. Cambridge plays especially well in America. Even sounding English makes people think you’re clever. And evil, of course, but that helps, too. People can respect evil. With that kind of momentum you keep moving in a straight line with continuous speed unless a force acts upon you. I had solved the world’s easiest rat-maze: one tunnel, and I was trained to trot straight along it. There were sugar pellets, a steady stream of little rewards. The good job, the nice house, the train rides. You can’t live on sugar pellets, but you can die comfy, and it takes a while.

My problem is I can’t escape from other times. Other places. They are as real as wherever you are, but worse, because you can’t do anything about them. You can only watch. One Seattle summer night a year ago, a woman stopped me on my way home from the bus stop. She was sitting in a metal chair, outside a pizza café. She didn’t get up, she just started talking, and suddenly we were in conversation. This was a skilful performance, though that didn’t occur to me at the time. She said she was new to Seattle, and a single parent, and she’d been fined a hundred dollars for jaywalking, and now she couldn’t afford the ingredients she needed to make spaghetti this evening. Would I be generous?

I gave her five dollars and walked away wondering what had happened. Is jaywalking even illegal here? I do it all the time and nobody cares. But then I probably