NOBODY
IS EVER
MISSING

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Texts

Adapted from the novel by Catherine Lacey (2014, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Part 1

1. 

The sky was a good sky color and the air was healthy feeling. Occasional cars sped around the road bend, and I ended up frightening drivers the way that wild animals do. The cars would slow or swerve or honk, and I wished I could honk back—I know, I know—why am I here?

2.

There had been no discernible or obvious reason behind anything that I had done— leaving my husband without a word and wandering this country for so long.  I was just out here, all huddled in my nothing. I had a general feeling of needing to leave. Of needing to barricade myself from living life the way that seemed obvious, intuitive, clear and easy, and easy and clear to everyone who was not me … When I think about you now it’s like you’ve turned into a sound or a color …no harmony, no pattern, no sense, no order. And maybe if I was a sound or a color I wouldn’t be a sound or a color, I would be a wildebeest. Of course you’d say, “That’s not true, you are not a wildebeest.” “We all have darkness,” you’d say. But I know mine is darker and that it hides a herd of rabid wildebeests.

3.— interlude (percussion)

4. 

Eventually it was night and I walked and I ended up in a pub, and the room was crowded with people who all seemed to know and love each other and they also knew that they did not know or love me. I looked at my feet and I knew the disrepair of my shoes gave something away about me— but I was always doing this, wearing shoes until they had been burned down to barely anything.

5. 

In the morning, there were birds. There were birds here just like there are birds anywhere.

6. 

Cars went, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed much less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone … and I wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been and I stood, again, alone, listening to the ocean falling over itself, hitting rocks, and I thought about going to the beach, but all the romance of travel had shriveled and now the ocean wasn’t such a thing to me.

7. — interlude (instrumental)

8. 

In this situation, any rational person would be hurt, would feel lost. A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset. Her feelings would show up in her body as if she had no choice in the matter and this would cause her to realize she needed to find a way back to her home, to her real life that was somehow going on without her. She would immediately go to an airport and buy a plane ticket. She would start practicing her apologies on the flight and when she got back home she would start seeing a therapist to prove to herself and everyone else how sorry she was, how wrong she was, how much she needed help. And if she was lucky, her husband would work hard to forgive her. And when this rational person was in therapy she would talk about things like her dead sister and her monster mother and through all this she would make progress in her therapy and when someone asked how she was she would say, I am okay; I’m in therapy; we’re sorting things out; we’re making progress. But first this rational person would need to get to an airport and buy a plane ticket and before she could do that she would need to have the courage to do that and before she could have the courage she would need to want to have the courage, to need to want to try to have the courage to say: I give up, I was wrong, take me home.

9.

Weeks vanished. I did not feel guilt; I did not feel guilty; I forgot all the things that could have caused any warm ounce of that feeling.

10. – interlude (percussion)

11. 

There is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t eat a sandwich off a plate, can’t read the newspaper, can’t put on clothes and go outside, can’t be married, can’t keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never meet this man who is looking at you and loving you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened.

12. – intermezzo (piano)

13.

Husband, if I was actually speaking to you I'd tell you, husband, I want to watch that video you showed me once of the twin babies saying the same syllable to each other over and over and over. Husband, I'd tell you we're all twins and clones and remakes of each other; we're all pairs unpaired; we're all speaking the same repeated syllable at each other and why is it that I have to go running off into a twinless solitude? What is inside this solitude but me, saying the same syllable to myself over and over and over, trying to make sense of it.

14.

I don't know what I'm talking about or thinking about or whether I am talking or thinking. I am not like you, there's no light in my darkness … my darkness is a midnight savanna on a moonless, starless night and all my wildebeests are running at a full, dumb speed.

15.

Even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was, it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that.

16. – interlude (instrumental)

17.

I walked to a hostel and tried to pay for a room with a card and the girl behind the counter seemed embarrassed when it wouldn't go through … While everyone slept I walked—down a pebbled path and through the field where the cows all swayed in their standing sleep. I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a feeling—a feeling like, this is sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

© Copyright Catherine Lacey. 

Recede from internet
into notebooks and writing.
Grow catnip in random
and habituated patterns.

Confused and upset, I'm
not Zen. Put good memories
into my notes.

I'm crying.

Myna birds are
making loud complex noises
in an o' hia tree.

I'm fasting from the global internet
in somewhat random patterns.
I'm not confused today-

Cichlids are a kind of fish.
Geckos eat honey and flies.

Geckos and cats undulate their tails
Cat-gecko-cockroach complexes
oscillated against the floor and walls.

Pairs of myna birds deflected light
into my mind as they flew away
from the ground together.

I got chills on the second viewing
of the color-changing water, 
when I was no longer upset. 

Grief is a sudden 
and gradual rearranging 
of reality through one’s views 
on death. Change is time.
Wild animals are amazing. 
They know how to live. 

© Copyright Tao Lin (2023/2024).

Triplum:
This sickness I desired in my youth 

that I might have it when I was thirty years old…
a wilfull desire… myself believing I should die…
for I would have no comfort of earthly life.

And by Adam's falling we are so broken, in our feeling…
by sins and by sundry pains, in which we are made dark… 
And our every-daily sins:
for we hold not our Covenants, 

But fall oftentimes into wretchedness 
And the beholding of this maketh us so sorry 
and so heavy, 
And this dread we take for meekness,
it is a foul blindness

I desired to have all manner of pains 
And this I meant for that I would be purged, 
and afterward live more to the worship of God 
because of that sickness.

Motetus: 
pain it purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves
and to ask mercy. 
Our true Mother Jesus showed in these words of love,
'If I might suffer more I would suffer more'.

I saw the love that made him to suffer…
the pain was a noble worshipful deed…
For which love he said full sweetly…
these words,

'If I might suffer more, I would suffer more'.

Tenor:
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well 

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

© Copyright John Berryman.