"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." – Ernest Hemingway

I have forgotten how to see myself. Perhaps I never possessed the ability. 

Others' problems, demands, anticipated desires seemed more important to master for survival. Taking out insurance against collapse. 

Nowhere in there was a clear vision of what I needed. I never even posed the question. It seemed indulgent when there was others' needs to think of. So they'd stick around. 

That is a hard thing to admit. I do not know what I need. What I want. All I know is what I should acquire to remain acceptable to those around me. The desire for those acquisitions replaced real wants and desires. 

Asking yourself what you need necessitates familiarity with oneself. With the channels of feeling that we traverse through time. An approval system of acceptable feelings, the should of experience does not help here.  

Even this idea of writing one true sentence about the self seems too much. Its not so surprising that Hemingway's distilled prose is not easy to repeat. He must have laboured over that one true sentence for hours, and days and lifetimes. 

So perhaps its worth starting small.

One true sentence. 

One true sentence. 

I am tired figuring out what I should want. 

Right now rest and sleep. 

Tomorrow I don't know. 

The day shall reveal itself and perhaps with it some latent desires.

Today was a patchwork of sun and biting wind, of spring-time indecisiveness. Of others' tragedies that skirted the borders of my heart. Of moments with loved ones. But even those I find hard to pin down. To describe. Perhaps I should become a keen observer of my own existence. That may be a portal into me. Let me try and convey the small things:  

The thigh of a woman I stroked while she was going through the pain of loss. The words falling from her as if they didn't matter: it won't work out. An unwanted pregnancy she may have wanted after all. Her laughing daughter breaking the silence with gurgles of promise. The dark blue denim of her thigh that I gingerly reached for in sympathy. That thigh which hid a phantom baby disintegrating into nothing. 

The mould on a piece of cake make by my grandmother. Struggling to dress and care for herself, let alone observe the safety of the food she kept in dirty plastic bags. The decay which repelled me and made my heart fill with love and pity in equal measure. Her little bony frame supporting her as she pottered around serving me and my son tid-bits of food. Both him and I keeping our eyes peeled for signs of decay. My son's inner feeling of the old when he kept asking to go home. And my resting back into their worn couch, relishing these people and this alcove of unconditional love that existed within their ailing souls. I would risk the mould for this repose. 

Then, the sunshine of meeting a friend at a playground. The hidden realisation that seeing her was defiance against another friend letting me down. Leaving me in the lurch again. The shrieks of our children as they tried to find a common ground. My son wanting to show up her little girl, but quietly pleased with her adoring glances. Our gentle reproaches to each other, but also the pleasure of sharing some of our lives. Providing glimpses into lived experience. Her story about a Micheal Kors coat turned inside out, and wrapped around her waist as she climbed through a barbed wire fence outside of Oxford. Wishing she had rubber boots to insulate her against the bog of a meadow she had wandered into on a whim. Her lovely soft voice filled with the timbre of pride about saving the coat. Preserving it in the face of innumerable challenges of living outside the norms of what society demanded of her. 

And the pain of the absent friend. Where detachment was sorely needed, but resisted by me. I was still attached to a fantasy of us and our unborn children, together, as a rebuke to seven years of unaligned lives. The pain of letting that fantasy chip away. And realise that it was perhaps no-one's fault. 

Tomorrow….

Tomorrow, I will search for more true sentences within myself. Perhaps I shall be able to describe my own inner world. 

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