i finally read giovanni's room
and reread the transformation of silence into language and action
It feels like a waste to suffer a summer without any secrets. When the air is wet and hot as breath, nothing’s better than plotting towards some lopsided and humiliating end. A good secret stimulates the ear but cloisters the tongue, until the tension between them enshrines the keeping and telling that must come. The trap is set, the gears are turned. The players thrust into motion as soon as their fingers slip from the catch.
In Giovanni’s Room, time moves back and forth like the ticking of a clock, a linear progression bound to eternal binary. David recounts his ill-fated relationship with Giovanni, who’ll be executed in a few hours, knowing that he is at fault for what occurred, that he has deceived everyone about who he is. His self-knowledge and reflection do nothing to stay the execution or free David from his grief, and with every second closer to Giovanni’s death, he mines deeper into what was and what no longer exists. Desperate to be free of Giovanni’s room, really, of the truth, he instead traps himself there for good.
What does it mean to languish? To really be alone? How many summers can pass without anything changing at all?
This season, this latent mood, a pestilence regrouping in the shadows. Heavy on my back, on I who gave every piece of myself away. What was it, about 4 months or so ago, that I woke up and finally asked: How can I feel so empty with all the secrets that I keep?
Like cicadas beneath bare feet, like white nymph bodies or buried teeth, what’s hidden sucks down sap and sleeps through time better than the sun. Gone and quiet until some ring, some distant alarm.
And I? No matter how many times I wake up in the middle of the night or how many bugs crawl out of the sink, I sit on my stoop and watch people pass, the people with real lives really living in their lives. And I hate anyone who believes, but even worse, the non-believers, hate the goals they chase like meals or the times they deem ”unprecedented.” I hate their faith in nothing, hate that it’s stronger than mine ever was, and I hate that it keeps them sweet and happy and sleeping through the night. And I, I who have opened myself up to the world like a hundred doors in a thousand houses over a million domains? I mouth a mango ice pop and watch strips of colored mylar tangle in the wind.
Still, it would be a lie, to say I haven’t known this whole time. Still, it would be the same.
And still, how would I be if I hadn’t waited this long to speak?
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