Violeta Noir

I have been accused of speaking in riddles.

This is not entirely unfair.

I once told a man that he needed to stop asking me questions that made sense.

He didn’t understand.

So I corrected myself.

The right questions… to you.

That was what I meant.

You have to ask the right questions.

I don’t believe every question deserves an answer simply because someone had the audacity to ask it.

I don’t believe proximity grants unrestricted access.

Neither does time.

Neither does marriage.

Neither does sex.

Neither does love.

There are people who have slept beside me for years and continued asking questions about a woman I had never been.

Eventually I stopped correcting them.

This made me considerably happier.

For a long time I thought that made me difficult.

Mysterious.

Secretive.

Complicated.

Those were words other people gave me.

I preferred selective.

Although, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the Archive, I should probably admit something here.

Sometimes I was just being a little shit.

There.

The Archivist has entered it into evidence.

Sometimes I knew exactly what someone thought.

I knew they were wrong.

I knew precisely which missing piece of information would rearrange the entire story inside their head.

And I left it right where it was.

Missing.

Not because it was particularly dangerous.

Not because I was protecting some sacred secret.

Sometimes I simply wanted to see how long they would keep talking.

I am curious by nature.

And occasionally an asshole.

Both things can be true.

I have watched people construct entire versions of me from remarkably little material.

A look.

A sentence.

A dress.

A silence.

Something I did once.

Something I refused to do twice.

A story I told them three years ago.

They collected these fragments, arranged them into something recognizable, and proudly presented the finished woman back to me.

See?

I know you.

And sometimes I looked at her and thought:

Who the fuck is that?

I used to correct them.

I’d explain what I meant.

Clarify what I wanted.

Provide context nobody had requested.

Translate myself into increasingly precise language until surely, surely, this time there could be no misunderstanding.

It didn’t work.

In fact, those were often some of the unhappiest periods of my life.

So I stopped.

I said what I meant once.

Then I lived accordingly.

People called this mystery when they liked me.

They called it secrecy when they were angry.

I found that interesting.

THE MARGINS

Everybody gets a margin.

Very few people seem to understand that it is a margin.

They see the woman at work and believe they have met me.

They see the mother and believe they have met me.

They see the woman in bed and believe they have met me.

They see the writer.

The lover.

The friend.

The wife.

The ex.

The woman laughing too loudly over cocktails.

The woman sitting quietly in a room taking notes nobody realizes she’s taking.

Every one of those women is real.

That is the problem.

People expect contradiction to expose deception.

I have never understood why.

I can be responsible and reckless.

Tender and cruel.

Generous and selfish.

Private and exhibitionistic.

Soft and absolutely fucking impossible.

I can adore you today and decide tomorrow that I would rather never hear your voice again.

I can tell you the truth and still decline to tell you everything.

Those things do not cancel each other out.

They simply make a person.

But people love coherence.

They want the woman they met on page twelve to behave predictably on page two hundred.

When she doesn’t, they begin searching for the lie.

There usually isn’t one.

They just mistook a margin for the manuscript.

And I didn’t correct them.

Sometimes because I didn’t care.

Sometimes because they hadn’t earned anything more.

Sometimes because experience had taught me that information given in tenderness could return later sharpened into a weapon.

And sometimes because I am, apparently, a brat with excellent impulse control who enjoys watching a confident man be spectacularly wrong.

I contain multitudes.

Some of them are petty.

THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

This is where people misunderstand me.

I don’t want someone to read my mind.

I want someone to pay attention.

There is a difference.

Everyone has a language.

Most people seem to believe language is composed entirely of words.

It isn’t.

I have spent years learning people through shoulders.

Breathing.

Silence.

The speed of an answer.

The temperature of a room after someone enters it.

The tiny expression that crosses a face before the socially acceptable one replaces it.

I notice when someone’s fine means fine.

I notice when it means leave me alone.

I notice when it means please ask me again.

Sometimes it takes months.

Sometimes years.

But eventually, if I love someone, I begin learning their language.

I have always wanted someone curious enough to learn mine.

Not collect facts about me.

Not interrogate me.

Not demand access to every locked room and call the lock dishonesty.

Become fluent in me.

There are people who have.

Most of them are dead now.

Some are still here.

And because I have been known that way before, I know the difference between someone possessing information about me and someone actually knowing me.

Once, after my head injury, I was lying in my room struggling.

I wasn’t okay.

I couldn’t speak.

In my head, I screamed for my son.

He was in another room.

Then he came in.

He asked me:

Mom, did you call me?

Later, he told me he’d heard me calling him.

I hadn’t made a sound.

I don’t know what happened.

Maybe there was some tiny noise I didn’t realize I’d made.

Maybe he noticed something else.

Maybe it was coincidence.

Maybe there are things between people who know each other deeply that I don’t have language for yet.

I don’t know what he heard.

I only know that he came.

That is the closest I can come to explaining what I mean by fluency.

I don’t expect anyone to hear thoughts inside my head.

I want to be known closely enough that someone notices when my language changes.

FRESH WATER

For years I wondered whether I needed to become easier to drink.

Easier to explain.

Easier to understand.

Easier to reassure.

Easier to know.

I thought perhaps intimacy required this.

More disclosure.

More clarification.

More access.

More translation.

Here is what I meant.

Here is why I did it.

Here is what I am feeling.

Here is what you misunderstood.

Here is the missing page.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Take everything.

Now surely you know me.

But I had mistaken consumption for intimacy.

The people who knew me best never required me to become fresh water.

They learned how to swim.

They stayed in the water long enough to recognize the currents.

They learned where it was warm.

Where it became suddenly cold.

Where the bottom disappeared.

Where the tide could carry them if they fought it.

And while they were learning me, I was learning them.

That matters.

Because intimacy cannot simply be one person standing naked beneath a microscope while another takes notes.

Recognition has to travel in both directions.

THE PROBLEM WITH ARCHIVES

Which brings me to an uncomfortable problem.

I am the Archivist.

I observe people.

I remember.

I collect details.

I notice contradictions.

I preserve conversations.

I examine patterns.

Then I sit here, safely behind the page, and write people into stories.

I have spent years resenting people for constructing a woman from fragments of me.

And then I built an entire Archive from fragments of them.

That seems worth examining.

I can tell you what someone did.

I can tell you what he said.

I can tell you what I remember feeling when he said it.

I can tell you what I believe it meant.

I can show you the pattern I see when I place one memory beside another.

But I cannot crawl inside another human being and retrieve the objective truth.

Neither can you.

Perhaps that is the arrogance at the center of every archive.

We preserve what we saw and eventually begin believing we preserved the person.

We didn’t.

We preserved evidence.

Memory.

Perspective.

A margin.

Even the Archivist does not possess the entire manuscript.

Which means there will be moments in these files when I am wrong.

There will be people I understood beautifully and people I understood only through the shape of the wound they left behind.

There will probably be moments when you think I am cruel.

There will certainly be moments when I am petty.

There will be omissions.

There will be contradictions.

There will be things I knew and declined to say.

There will be things I didn’t know at all.

And occasionally there will be a woman sitting quietly behind the glass, watching somebody arrive at precisely the wrong conclusion and deciding:

I’m not correcting that.

What can I say?

I’m a vixen.

A brat.

A vampire.

Occasionally a menace.

But I am trying to be an honest Archivist.

And honesty does not require pretending I am an objective one.

Maybe none of us ever gets the whole manuscript.

Maybe knowing another human being isn’t finally possessing every page.

Maybe intimacy is learning someone’s language well enough to recognize when you’ve reached a passage you don’t understand.

And instead of filling the blank with whatever makes the most sense to you,

you look at the person standing in front of you

and ask

the right question.