Work Text:
I. Who are you and whom do you love?
I am Moxie Mallahan, and I love so much that it hurts. I love my father, even though he has not taken care of me in a very long time. I love my mother, even though she has become a distant memory, a hope I will never attain. I love my friends, and my associates, the people I've filled my life with, the people who have solved mysteries with, those that I write with and those that I write to. I love a girl with green eyes and an ever-changing heart. I love the people that I miss so much my soul aches, even when I can't explain why. I love my town, even though it is a dying one, because it is my home.
II. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
I was born in Stain'd-by-the-Sea. I arrived in a busy place, full of love and joy, the neverending bustle and noise of running the town's only newspaper. I lived my whole life in the Stain'd Lighthouse, and I can remember what the water sounded like when it crashed into the rocks in the mornings. My life is quiet now, and sometimes I still miss that sound.
III. How will you begin?
I will begin the same way my parents did, with words. Perhaps I will watch my town grow again from its own ashes. Yet even if the town cannot grow again, perhaps I can find a springtime within myself. I remember my mother showing me the machines used to print newspapers in the lighthouse's attic, showing me the wide, blank sheets of paper that would come to be printed with the darkest of inks, and telling me how much possibility was held in each single sheet.
IV. How will you live now?
I hope to live now through the undeniable truth that family is all around us. I can imagine myself, waking in the morning and walking along the cliffs with a girl I've learned to trust, or exchanging letters with a boy I haven’t seen in a very long time. I can see myself spending afternoons drinking tea with a scientist at the counter of an old friend, and trading typewriters with a newer one. I don't expect things to be the same, but life never truly stays the same, however long one might be able to pretend it does, and I’ve begun to think that the best I can do is accept it.
V. What is the shape of your body?
People always told me that I looked like my mother. Everyone else could see her in my face, in my hands, in the shine in my eyes and the words that I wrote. I spent years running from that, hoping that I could become something on my own, without the ghost of someone that I still wish had stayed. Yet even though she has been gone for a long, long time, she is with me in the shape of my body. I grew without her, and yet her absence never stopped me from growing into her.
VI. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
My mother suffered because when they drained the sea her love was drained as well. She felt that it was unbearable to watch the town she'd once loved dwindle away, and found herself unable to find the meaning of the words she wrote in a town where there wasn't anyone left to read them.
VII. What do you remember about the earth?
The earth was never familiar to me, not in the way the sea was. When I was a child, I would rise early every morning and sit on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the sea and imagine things. While in reality, the ground was beneath my hands and the sea was too far away for me to touch, that didn’t change the reality of what I felt closer to. When I close my eyes, I am still there, surrounded by the cold breeze and the rushing sea.
VIII. What are the consequences of silence?
I saw the consequences of silence when I looked in my father's eyes, when I watched his vitality leave him like water leaves a swiftly draining sea. I saw what could happen to a person when they are alone, because he was unbearably alone, and even when he said at first he could bear it, he never truly could. He had me, of course, but a daughter who is too young to understand why her mother had left her is nothing compared to a wife, a newspaper staff, a passion, a home.
IX. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
I felt my own body being torn apart as my family shattered. I spent the latter part of my childhood sitting between my father's chair, covered in thick, austere volumes, and the empty spot on the floor where my mother should've been. I spent countless hours exploring the assortment of books in our living room, and remember reading about a man whose head was speared by an iron beam. He lived, yet everything about him changed. It was as though the person he'd once been had been replaced with a newer, sourer version. Sometimes, I feel as though that is what happened to me, when my mother left, when my father slowly but surely let go of the duties he tried so hard to keep up with all on his own. Sometimes I imagine my own iron beam, pushed through my skull, forever severing myself from the person I once was.
X. Describe a morning you woke without fear.
This morning, I woke up to the sun shining through the window above my bed. Outside, the space where the sea had been stretched out, wide and strange, but it didn't feel as empty as it once had. I smelled coffee wafting up from the kitchen, and I heard the girl I love, humming along to Ella Fitzgerald. My parents had gone, but I was still there, and perhaps I could still save the town if I worked hard enough.
XI. How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?
I prepared for death when I watched the light die in my mother's eyes, when I watched the life slowly drain from my father. I’ve steeled myself for the fate that we all must face when I watched my best friend kill a man, and it took me a month to reach out to him again, and another to even ask him ‘why did he do it.’ Yet I've started to find that sort of preparation to be less important. I find myself preparing for life instead, in small ways. I make tea, and fill endless sheets of paper with words, making myself up as I go along.
XII. And what would you say if you could?
It’s strange, how finding home again feels somehow part and parcel with telling the truths you’ve hidden for so long. Last week, I wrote to my best friend. His letters have grown few and far between, and while I’m happy hearing of trips to the mountains and his organization and the girl he feels himself beginning to fall in love with, I sometimes miss the way things were when he was in this town, but I can understand why he wouldn’t feel ready to return. I wrote a poem, folded it and left it in a bouquet of flowers by my father’s grave. I typed a page of notes to give to a friend, and he typed his own for me, and even if we still aren’t as good people as we’d hoped, we still find ourselves helping each other to be better writers. I wrote a song, and heard a girl at the standup piano on the ground floor of the lighthouse, singing in a low, lonely voice. And so I find that for now, at least, what I feel I must say has been said, and perhaps that is enough.