robyn reads books

A man was one story.

The architecture was the lesson.

Integrity became the house.

Last night, in the middle of a text message, I wrote something that surprised me.

I wasn’t trying to be profound. I was irritated.

Actually, irritated is too polite a word.

I was somewhere between exasperated and “Jesus fuck dude, read the room.”

Then, almost accidentally, I wrote:

I’m not a woman who waits for a man in a closed room.

And immediately after that:

I’ve got my own reading room.

For a couple months I’ve been building shelves. Writing essays. Collecting encounters. Putting Homer beside Clarice beside Harpman beside Nabokov beside Dazai.

I thought the reading room I was building was a way to record my encounters with books.

Lately, not so sure. I think I’m building something larger than a room full of books. Maybe it’s a house.

With a massive fucking library.

And so this question came to me:

What actually belongs in a reading room?

Shelves, obviously.

Books overflowing.

A comfortable chair with a quilt I sewed.

Windows (lots of them).

Daylight (lots of it).

Honesty.

And then this one totally got me:

Does a reading room even need doors?

I love this question because it feels both ridiculous and strange, and I genuinely don’t know the answer.

Doors separate things.

They divide spaces.

They create compartments.

They permit entry.

They deny entry.

They lock.

They hide.

And that’s when I realized something.

I don’t think I want that kind of architecture anymore.

Yesterday I wrote, half laughing and half furious:

It doesn’t have any fucking doors.

I meant the reading room.

Except… I didn’t.

I meant my life.

This isn’t about everyone who crosses the threshold getting unlimited access (though I feel there is a future entry on that idea) because I’ve actually become much better at boundaries. Hmm.. there’s too much ego in that. I’m learning my boundaries.

But I’m done with secrecy. Full stop. I’m done with side entrances. Hidden wings. Compartmentalized versions of me to fit the compartmentalized version of someone else.

I’ve spent a long time thinking about consciousness this year. I didn’t realize until recently that consciousness has or could have architecture.

Some people organize their lives into rooms:

Professional self.

Romantic self (some have multiple rooms here).

Literary self.

Family self (again, multiple rooms).

While there are moments in life where that matters, I’ve realized that very little inside me stays in its own room.

Living in an open-concept house means joy wanders into grief before I’ve finished making coffee…

Language ends up in love.

Books insist on becoming extended family.

Loneliness sits beside beauty.

Kids interrupt existential thought.

Anger encourages consciousness to keep writing.

Visitors spontaneously combust into metaphors.

Integrity opens a window and soaks up the sunshine. 

Nothing seems interested in staying where I left it.

Maybe that’s why I never understood how to keep separate versions of myself.

The reader.

The writer.

The mother.

The runner.

The woman who falls in love.

The woman who chases sunsets.

The woman who rambles about an idea.

The woman who underlines every sentence on every page of a Lispector book.

Nothing within me feels like separate rooms. There are corners, obviously. A kitchen, a closet, probably a skeleton stashed somewhere I haven’t looked in awhile. But it’s still one house. Perhaps even a home.

Books and experiences have revealed to me that everything seems to connect to everything else, exist in one open space.

I can’t read Homer without thinking about my dad.

I can’t read Harpman without thinking about what it means to be registered.

I can’t photograph a sunset without somehow ending up in a conversation about travel, choices, longing and language with a stranger on a dock.

So nothing stays on its assigned shelf for very long.

Looking back now, I can actually see the sequence:

My Dark Vanessa asked: Who is holding the pen?

Clarice asked: Who told you the room needed walls?

Harpman asked: What does it mean to be encountered?

The Odyssey asked: When do stories finally give way to the person standing in front of you?

And somewhere between Penelope needing evidence, Eumaeus opening his door to a stranger, and Odysseus trying to become a husband again after twenty years of survival, I texted someone:

I’m not a woman who waits for a man in a closed room.

I love staring at this sentence.

It’s not dramatic and it’s absolutely true.

It doesn’t say, never love again.

It says, never wait in a closed room again in a house on a street named, “No one knows what’s coming.”

That feels like wisdom rather than anger.

A man was one story.

The architecture was the lesson.

Integrity became the house.

Maybe that’s why certain kinds of relationships hurt as much as they do. Why the structural differences end up hurting both people.

A hidden room.

A locked wing.

A side entrance.

I’ve discovered that kind of structure doesn’t allow me to flourish, especially if I’m waiting inside one of these. Especially if it is in Dorothy’s house, free falling out of the sky. Especially if it’s labelled ‘uncertainty’. And especially if the ventilation system has been turned off by ambiguity.

For me, the rent is paid by my nervous system, and by parts of myself I abandon to remain there. Because clarity and honesty and reality are like oxygen for me.

So all I really want is for someone to say, come see this room too.

And now I’ve come back to the word: threshold. And to that massive fucking library. All the old libraries.

Many of them didn’t have doors.

They had thresholds.

You simply walked in.

I like that.

A threshold acknowledges you’re entering a different kind of space.

One that doesn’t require secrecy.

One house.

One consciousness.

One reading room.

I’m still building it.

And it doesn’t have any fucking doors.