Divya Victor: ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Mar 27, 2023

"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain." — Virginia Woolf

That I haven't written, will not write can't mean I am not writing about having written, about standing still in the hereafter. I have, of course, outlined the arguments, tried on the opening gambit like a silk blouse. Can't mean I didn't gather a bouquet from my wild— a sliver of wit, a peck of curiosity, a crisp riposte, the curve of a dimple— to offer you. "To have offered," as in: "to have had it be offered to (someone)." I did try to be prepositional, to stray near you.

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I rehearsed the syntax—should I first: apologize? confess? joke? —a fern here, a lily there, the subject here, the object there. Run on I creased the sentences into flightless origami; drafted monographs on silence—its juicy neurosis, its daft meter, my poor scansion. The predictable comparisons.Alphabetized my 12 memories; abridged the rest. Check and check.

By the next edit: I would have drawn the curtains against the fret of your neck. I could have shaded my eyes from your laughter, I will have pruned the light branching on my skin where you might have taken root; I should have folded up the map to my heres. Conditional as they all were, anyway.

Yet I keep walking into these stanzas—where you stay baffling the rafters, a rasp of feathers. I nest into the floss of those four hours, story myself to sleep.

So, hi. As promised, I have moved the furniture and flooded the room with shade. My hands are now free to file night further, further into day. Sorry, sorry, on my way to write you, the words left me at a stoop. The one where, for e.g.: "jasmine grows," "is growing," "will grow." In being so out of time, tenses "have mattered," "are mattering," "will."