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

because sleep and forgetting are both chain reactions, cascading failures. Hypnotherapy was not covered by my health insurance.

I remember when I was little, I made a den in the cupboard under the stairs. The stairs—the ones that presided over my aunt and uncle’s house. Echoing the shape of the staircase in reverse, the cupboard ran from a full-size front door in the kitchen to a small, dark cave with a foot-high wall at the back. My aunt and uncle filled it up with things that in their opinion did not belong in plain sight: an ironing board, mops, brushes. Further back, tins of old paint and varnish, hammers and spanners, nails and screws, buttons and things in boxes. All this took up the front two-thirds of the space, which was as far as an adult could comfortably go.

Right at the back of the cupboard was a second door, a tiny side door that gave access to the cave from the hallway. This door was just two feet high at its tallest point, and slanted down with the slope of the staircase. I was small enough to crawl in that way and use the leftover space, which smelled of old varnish and dust. I stashed my red and brown fleur-de-lis blanket in here, with a torch and a little pile of Agatha Christie paperbacks, purloined from my aunt’s bedside shelf. Some are born to Endless Night.

Hypnosis is another way in.

Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his little brother, Find things beautiful as much as you can. Not “find beautiful things” because that’s not how it works. Beauty, magic, meaning—same thing. Like how we don’t make meaning. You can talk that way—I mean, you can talk however you want. I am not the boss of you or the queen of language. But what it comes down to, the mechanics of it, is repositioning one thing relative to another. It’s more a kind of a gear slip, motion through that subtiler Medium. The other Aether. It happens involuntarily as we shift our attention between the very large and the very small—that’s why our best stab at knowledge isn’t quite getting the traction it wants. Science vs. art is a stupid distinction though. This is what Aristophanes should have said: Zeus divided not us but our attention, so that we should never be able to deal with the whole situation. We get stuck at the edges of one or the other, without realizing how its ideals are limit concepts. Limiting.

Linette the hypnotist said I needed to unlearn some things that were deeply ingrained. She said she wanted to reset me.

“Return to zero,” she said. “To the origin, okay?”

As she guided me through the process her voice was mechanical, ticking. A rhythmic flow of beats that came in waves across me as I lay stretched out on her sofa, my feet tucked comfortably into a cozy throw.

Linette asked me where I was, what I could see as she talked. Most of the time I did not know what to tell her. I was falling through nothing, I could see nothing. I wasn’t sure it was helpful to keep repeating that, though. So I made up some other things.

The problem was I was already zero. I was already nothing. And I knew that would never change. I didn’t want it to change. It was much too late for Linette.

Anyway she was too expensive. When I left her office, everything was quiet inside me.

The little shit is here because of the night we got unlucky. There’s no moral if there’s no story. He was just an overgrown fuckboy. Do you understand? It doesn’t mean anything.

Now he’s always on TV, always talking, always. Empty talk. Not TV. I know. Mathematics and physics and spacetime, people are static worms in spacetime, but when I knew him he wasn’t a public intellectual. He was just a philosophy teacher, and not the black-polo-neck-and-a-Gitane sort of philosophy, the other sort that pretends it’s a kind of science and secretly wishes that was true. Analytic, that’s what they used to call it. As in not continental. Oh my god that used to be such a big deal, at least it did in Cambridge. Yes yes, if you insist on a story we can always make one up. Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t. Let’s play that once upon a time he was my teacher, and once upon a time I looked up to him, and once upon a time he got me pissed in a bar, I think it was in a bar, not a pub, not in Cambridge, and once upon a time I forgot the rest of the story. He did it again and again and he just got unlucky with me as it happened, because there was no one else whose little shit this could have been, because I didn’t like men. No we didn’t call them fuckboys then, that word came later, but it’s what he is. That’s right, assholes, language is coming. It’ll catch up. You must sing A-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes you!

Chapter Twenty

And now in that quiet, in the darkness, all the floating stones that defined my path have fallen away. What now? Where now? Who now? When now? Perhaps I just let go, tumble with them into the lava ocean. A blaze of glory. The internet loves to watch a woman burn. The brighter the better. Maybe I’ll make a good show. Why do we say “the internet”? That’s a euphemism. A light-polarizing filter we use to screen off moral glare, hide the disgusting reality. The internet is people! People like watching women burn.

But up until now those stones were floating. Weren’t they? Somehow. How? If I could understand this, discover how they did it, whether I can do what they did…They appeared unsupported, but that might only be because from where I stood I couldn’t