Hello
by Sarah Jane Souther
Hello?
Sometimes I’m crazy, but everyone thinks I’m sane. This disconnection might be the most maddening thing.
I’m pulled too tight in opposing directions. The part of me that wanted you to think I was classy? She won. What you see now is this composed woman in a black dress, black shoes. The raving-imaginative inside me will, once more, take her seat and stew.
Hello.
A poet I know said that he reintroduces himself to people after he sees their art. He reads their poetry, gazes on one of their paintings, and whispers, nice to meet you.
Isn’t that art on art? Poetry on poetry. Poetry on people we thought we knew but found out we didn’t.
Phillip Roth, at the beginning of American Pastoral, wrote this thing I’ve been thinking about for years. He says that we mangle each other with our ignorance every day. That we get each other wrong and wrong and wrong again.
What a privilege to do that. To get you wrong and wrong and wrong and to still not give up trying to know you.
And you, if you have the patience or the grace, might get me wrong too and still choose to stay. And still let me be insane and then sane again. Absolutely mad with my psychotic imagination and then totally calm in my little black shoes.
Hello.
But perhaps I am an unreliable narrator here. I do want to be classy. But I also want to be insane. Only sometimes. Only mad in the best way.
And there are other contradictions too—you know there are. Less pleasant ones. The ones that make me sharp and confusing. The ones that create dissonance for both you and me. I’m sorry about that. I’m working on those.
You’ve got them too. I’ve noticed but haven’t pointed them out yet. And anyways, would it help? Better sometimes to hold each other softly. Encouragement is often more useful than advice.
But most of the time, it’s nice to think we can contain oppositions. I’d like to be a person with range. Wide as a canyon, thin as thread. Unpredictable and still safe.
I’d like to not reduce you to who I thought you were at first. I’d like you to keep on expanding in all the right directions and some of the wrong ones. I’d like to see what it is you have to show me in that infinity within you.
The only thing I’ll ask is that you don’t tell yourself lies and that you don’t hide anything. Don’t let secrets stay all dark and hidden in the corners of you. Show me your universe with all its dusty stars. I can take it.
We’ll be little infinities within an eternal infinity some day. You and me and God and everyone. Might as well start getting to know each other.
Let’s make some art. Let’s reintroduce ourselves.
Hello.
— SJ