To: Things I Have Said Out Loud

From: The One You Haunt

Re: You Refute Me Thus

09 • 23 • 06

Dear Things I Have Said Out Loud:

You are really piling up. There are more of you every day. One small mercy is that you don't all stick around. Some of you, once spoken, float off into an indifferent sky, forgotten forever. These fleeting utterances tend to be the upstanding ones: the respectable observation, the pleasant greeting, the uncontroversial quip.

Those of you who stay with me after I have spoken you are different. You are my less fortunate utterances: the inane question, the thoughtless declaration, the inadvertently offensive voicemail message. Yes, while your more successful siblings strike out into the world and don't so much as visit, you, my ill-considered words, remain with me. Like doughy adult children mouldering in the basement, you set up camp in my memory with a perfect sense of entitlement. Some of you are new; I only spoke you a few weeks ago. Some of you have been here for years and show no intention of leaving.

My foolish remarks, you loll about in the back of my mind, wheezing softly and waiting. You wait for me to stumble upon you and wince. Or shudder. Or retch.

I believe I wouldn't mind your mere presence if you would just keep to yourselves a little more. But that is not your way. No, in the soft moments before sleep, you set upon me. "Remember the time..." you begin, breathing wetly onto the back of my neck. Remember the time. Which mineshaft of shame we will descend thereafter is never certain. Shall we revisit a recent pronouncement of mine, shot through with ignorance, uttered at too high a volume to too many strangers? A penetrating undergraduate insight I recall generously sharing with a mid-sized auditorium? A joke? Ah, a joke: allow me to delight you.

Things I Have Said Out Loud, how long must this go on? How long must my own teenaged voice ricochet about in my skull? How many times will I hear myself ask a friend about the health of his dead relative? How often will my warm congratulations on an acquaintance's sudden weight gain (or "pregnancy" as I would have it) return to me? Oh, my hideous words, stand and face me! Face me and settle this: do you plan to stay here, with me, forever?

I have considered the idea that, like spectral children in some horror movie, you will haunt me until I have absorbed Your Lesson. So be it. I am ready to study at your knee. But what would you have me learn? Your lesson is as obscure as your pedagogy is humiliating.

Perhaps you wish me to realize that I shouldn't speak. This cure for foolish talk, it seems to me, is freighted with even greater potential for social awkwardness than the disease itself. Moreover, while in a monastic setting speechlessness may afford opportunities for dignified self-denial, in any other context it is surely the most aggressively self-absorbed behaviour of all. How much more sympathetic Holly Hunter would have been in The Piano had she expounded on the apocrypha or given overlong accounts of her "off the hook spring break." Anything at all would have been better than the jaw-clenching, the scribbling, the brooding, staring sex. No, surely you cannot be advancing silence as a means of improving my character.

Another lesson you may be trying to impart: don't say stupid things. Believe me, I am trying. But I think I would be trying even if you didn't sneak up on me in the shower. I don't want to say stupid things. My own human drives--vanity, a need for social belonging--would keep me in line without the humiliations you visit upon me so pitilessly.

Perhaps your lesson is that I must consider my utterances more carefully before I make them. A modest enough proposal on the surface. But please understand that this seemingly obvious teaching bears its own complications. Some day, Things I Have Said Out Loud, I will introduce you to your sad, wispy cousins: the Things I Wish I Had Said Out Loud. These unborn utterances will be strange to you. You are raucous and self-important: you couldn't wait to get out and be heard. The soft creatures to which I will introduce you are of a quieter breed. Among them you will find professions of affection, admissions of failure or wrongdoing, statements of gratitude, an army of apologies. When at last you face these mute shades, you may be moved to show me some compassion. For you will have seen how narrow is the line we speakers must walk between the regrets of speech and the regrets of silence.

I understand that the emperor Augustus wrote down almost every word he ever spoke, including private remarks to his wife. This is all fine and well if you are the emperor Augustus. You have plenty of time to hone the perfect sentence when a whole civilization will wait deferentially while you ready yourself to intone the grocery list. But most of us, my little words, must speak when an ear is available--and they don't last long. We must express our little sentiment, make our little claim, venture our little joke. Especially among strangers, we only have a moment to convince people that we are worth standing beside. Those of us without social status to burn must generally, as they say, spit it out, however half-baked it may be. No rehearsals, no editing. Do you see, my words? You were forged hastily in a crucible of social risk. There was no time to make you better than you are!

Oh, my lamentable statements, I know that I birthed you, and I know that you did not ask to be born. What's more, I know that had you been able to choose your own form, you would hardly have come into the world as smug platitudes, idiot rejoinders, limp quips. You might have belonged to Gandhi. Churchill. Johnson. Had you been of better parentage, you might have lived on in some wise volume, or been gathered into the bosom of some cheerful archive. Alas, you were mine. You are condemned to live here, on my shoulder, on my pillow, on my conscience. My poor words, I know: this is not what you wanted to be. Forgive me. You are not what I meant to say.

Or so I tell myself. When you worm into my head at night, I protest again and again: Not what I meant. Not what I meant. I have imagined you, my sad words, as betrayals of my intentions. I have thought of you not as lost in translation from cortex to sound wave, but as kicking my true meaning in the crotch before darting out into the air to do your mischief. I have believed I sent you into the world with messages of goodwill and that you misrepresented me: you offended. You confused. You flopped. Admittedly, I was involved somehow: my tongue or my memory slipped. But however it came about, I knew you were a perversion of me.

But I wonder, Things I Have Said Out Loud, was there ever a time before you were spoken that you hovered within me perfect and whole? Are you distorted representations of a shimmering self, or--alas--spotless windows onto a self not altogether suitable for public hearing? Am I that deluded student who is baffled and annoyed when the graceful essay he assumes is within his breast refuses (by some procedural glitch) to show itself on the page?

Things I Have Said Out Loud, perhaps you have not betrayed me at all. Perhaps you have been brutally loyal, ruthless in your service to my meaning, violent in your fidelity to my truest self. Perhaps your lesson has nothing to do with how I might do better in the future. Perhaps you, like the horror-movie children, are merely waiting patiently for me to see my own reflection in your pancake-sized eyes. Perhaps you had to be spoken aloud that I might hear faint whispers of the reptile self I dare not touch even with my silent thoughts. Perhaps, after all, it is I who must stand and face you. I mean me. I mean you. Wait. That came out wrong.

See you tonight,

The One You Haunt