The closest I’ve come to time travel is sitting backward on the MTA train, moving so slowly the seconds seem to rewind. Accustomed to the momentum of high-speed rails and MRTs, I can feel my soul peel away from my flesh and hover about, dizzy with vertigo in a timeless dimension.

I stare at the notebook in my lap, its hardcover bulging with receipts, photo prints and an autographed napkin. Each blank page feels claustrophobic: ‘what makes you think you have anything to say?’ Having never once succeeded in separating the art from the artist, I love reading the diaries of great writers as much as their magnum opi. Every night, I flip open the “Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”; I intend to grow up with her — well, until the age of 30, that is. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I outlive her mind.

Yet when I attempted this therapeutic practice, journaling became performative, a one-woman show for my ego and my ego alone. As if memory wasn’t volatile and subjective enough, I wrote not to remember or reflect, but to reinvent, overcompensating for what I felt was an unremarkable life. Rereading past entries, I often could not distinguish between the real and the fabricated. Call it what you want — manifestation or self-gaslighting — but if those pages ever saw the light of day, they would be categorized as historical fiction.

—

The train jolts and screeches to a stop; time seizes and spasms like one of those boomerang Instagram stories. The intercom buzzes.

“Harlem, 125th Street.” 

The station feels at once familiar and alien. Remembering that it was the setting of one of my poems, I didn’t dare step off. I once tossed around random station names, searching for near rhymes and a lulling stress pattern, until 125th glided off my lips onto the page. Here it is — not merely scribbled into a forgotten couplet, but engraved on a metal plaque outside my window — a split reality of two Harlem-125ths. A writer’s hubris is to think that the pen can birth anything alone; it will always be a surrogate for the world. 

The doors close, and I breathe. My double vision fades; I have kept my poem sterile from reality. I think of the characters Sandra and Samuel from “Anatomy of a Fall,” who share their names with their respective actors. Ironically, Sandra the character is a writer who thought her job was to “cover the tracks so fiction can destroy reality.” Surely this screenplay calls for an intimacy coordinator; I wonder how Sandra the actress survived the film.

—

The train accelerates with the tides of time, the current of the past, the eddies of my mind. Memory smells of rust. As a child, my favorite hobby was sitting beside my grandma’s calligraphy desk, furiously grinding ink sticks in a mortar-and-pestle motion. The charcoal-like particles dissolved into liquid ink and stained my sweaty hands. I would rub the ink dust on my wrists and neck, wafting its incense towards me the way I had seen my mom apply perfume. I was certain that with enough pressure, the world would pulverize into ink dust. 

This faith haunts me to the present: everything — the breeze of the Hudson in my hair, a nail chipped while brandishing my thrift haul, the nook of my neck carved out for a snoozing friend — sparkled of ink dust. There is shameless beauty in our lives; in the proof that we are born from the same mother — the Big Bang — made of the same matter — stardust — and converge towards the same end — heat death of the universe; in the god of our minds, who turns electricity into dreams, coincidences into motifs and waltzes into iambic trimeters. We use stories to declare ourselves. But if a tree falls in the forest, if the world forgets we ever were, if our lives persist unwritten … do we still make a sound?

The next time I grit my teeth and submit a clinically unsalvageable essay draft, or show up to a spoken word rehearsal with mere concepts of a plan, or reconcile with the fate that my greatest literary legacy may be publishing this very rant in the YDN, I’ll remember that a wise man once said that only “inferior poets […] live in the poetry that they cannot write.” 

For art is only the beauty that can be tamed. The rest — felt, but not understood — forms the universe of all our stories untold.