how to write when your bones are broken.

I spend my day sitting.

And sitting.

And sitting.

At noon I take a break to stretch – my bones click and grind and pop back into place, they breathe and remind me for the briefest of moments that they like to move, that they like to be free, that they would break out of my skin and run forever if only they could find the exit. But they are bound to my muscle, I remind them. They are bound and cannot move without me. Their freedom is conditional on mine.

And I am sitting again.

My laptop perched on my knees, my work email open, a little green dot – “Active” – perched in the top right corner of the window. I mouse through tabs, left to right, right to left. Everything useless. Everything a repetition. Check the to-do list – surely something’s been accomplished. Surely more than a rent payment is coming from this.

Under my arm, my phone buzzes, once, twice, three times. Five. Seven. My friend sending me message after message about the newest attack. Message after message about what he plans to do for the world — what he needs to do, what he will do, is doing – for people he loves, whom he has never met, who are dying left and right and what can we do? An image. A video. One horror after another. And what can we do? Money [if you have it]. Prayers [if you know them]. Anger [if you can control it]. Bound up in our bodies over here on the other side of the world. Bound up in our fears and our limits and our means. Bound up in the ways we think and the ways we feel and a thousand other things we don’t even know we’re bound by but which hold us all the same. Ghosts over our shoulders. Fishing line at our throats.

Skeletons, all of us, gripped tight by muscles atrophied by everything and nothing at all.

I read his messages. Snippets of a reality I know is out there but could scarcely imagine from my Boston apartment if the videos he sends with them weren’t playing. If his words weren’t here. Each one is beautiful. Each is tragic – not even the right word, what’s a worse thing than tragedy [Apathy, I think]? Each is a knife-cut from his soul into mine.

In each one, I can feel him moving farther and farther away.

“I can feel myself becoming a monster,” he says. He’s said this so many times, about so many things, some of them bigger than others. This one the biggest of all. I don’t know what to say. There is nothing left in my vocabulary but platitudes. Nothing that can follow what he’s already sent me. Nothing he wants me to say. Nothing that will fix anything at all. I do not know how to ask if he wants me to respond to these things because of course he does. That’s the whole point, isn’t it. But what I really need to know is if it’s enough to just witness what he’s doing here, knowing it’s probably not. But I read them all, watch every video, look at every horror and leave them on read, little blue check marks that prove I’m on the other end, hoping that’s right. Hoping that’s alright. Feeling like I’ve failed some test I never had the wherewithal to study for. Knowing there is some other inarticulable thing I’m expected to say. That maybe neither of us knows. That maybe no one does except the child screaming on my phone screen. Except the women buried under their homes.

I do not know how to explain that I do not have those words. That my brain cannot hold the right words. That, these days, I barely have enough words to say my own name, and even then, my mouth runs dry.

“No one is doing enough,” he tells me. “Why aren’t people doing more? Why aren’t organizers organizing more? Why aren’t writers writing more? Why is it only me?” Why aren’t you? is what he means. He used to tell me that he didn’t mean that. That I wasn’t his target.

He doesn’t say it this time.

What he doesn’t say: You are a part of the problem.

“I think we’re different kinds of people,” he does say, and he’s right. Like an arrow, he’s right. He is someone always in motion. He is always stepping, trying to take strides, make tracks. He wants so badly to take others with him, but he will not be held behind by those who can’t keep up. He can’t afford to. I can’t blame him.

[“I’m not alienating you. You know that right?” he says.

“I know you’re not trying to,” I write, and there’s a bitterness I don’t like in it. “I know you’re not,” I send, two blue checks, and the bitterness is still there.]

I am slow. I am steady. When I move, I feel my pieces spinning around me, an icy moon just barely bound by my planet’s gravity. When I move, I feel myself falling out of sync – if I move far enough, I will be undone. I will shatter. And the fear of that binds me up, body and mind. It makes me a skeleton; it makes me a ghost; it makes me sit and watch and hope and cry and think and hold myself together by my fingertips, and my muscles don’t know how hard they can strain without snapping. My bones don’t know how far to bend before breaking.

“What’s holding you back?” he asks me. “What obstacles can I remove?”

[My bones. My muscles. My mind.]

And I’m not sure what he’s asking about – the war over there; the war in my head; why I’m me; why I’m not him. And I don’t know how to tell him that it’s not that kind of obstacle. None of it is. It’s not something that he can “fix” in me. It’s not something I’m sure even I can “fix”. Something to be “fixed”. It’s not something I want or will or can name, or maybe I can. I don’t know how to tell him that either.

I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t know how to be what he wants me to be. What he thinks he needs me to be.

Because he’s right. We’re very different people.

“I’m a very good teacher,” he says.

And he’s right again, with that.

Like an arrow.