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When I Say I Have a Novel Inside Me
It’s like a rock and will take a couple thousand years to scan
That novel that’s still inside me, waiting for me to write it — someone once wrote it on a scroll.
“I haven’t written since then.”
“But I see you writing every day, Amparo,” I said, unable to avoid another burst of laughter.
“Oh no,” she said, “that isn’t writing.”
“Then what is it?”
“That is only remembering.”
— Cristina Rivera Garza. La cresta de Ilión (2002), translated as The Iliac Crest by Sarah Booker (Feminist Press, 2017), about which I’ve written before
The scroll was left in a cave for a long, long time.
Does anyone out there know how to decode it?
“I have a physical sense of myself as a bale of compacted books, the seat of a tiny pilot light of karma, like the flame in a gas refrigerator, an eternal flame I feed daily with the oil of my thoughts, which come from what I unwittingly read during work in the books I am now taking home in…
