Chloe Rook Explains What Makes Me Tick

It’s rhythm. It begins near your navel and goes down when you breathe in. It rises as you exhale, sometimes clear out your mouth.

It’s the sound of your feet on the sidewalk, the softer sound passing over wood chips in Rasmussen Woods, the sound of your rubber soles on terrazzo as you walk from your desk to the restroom. It’s the echo in the restroom, your voice against the canyon wall, the cave. It plays the sound of your past against the sound of the next moment.

It followed you in your car that day to the double falls outside of town. It’s waited for you all these years to hear about why nothing happened, why you turned around and came back. It’s the rhythm of three moments: the drive there, the turning back, and now.

It lies down inside you like breath, like the bass line of grief, two thimblefuls so powerful, if you let them leave you you might die. It’s the life in you you have to give away. It wants to be prodigal, to upset you running away toward the world. It’s the music of letting flesh and blood go join the circumference of the world, the round song of ancient birds, the round violence of Asian war, of leaving someone behind.

It’s never idea. It’s rhythm of cornstalk following Buick following the color of his cheek. It’s the rhythm of summer air so heavy the insects labor through their song, and baseballs die in midair just over second base, and the woman high in the stands blacks out, comes to, then talks nonsense, all the while her sixteen-year-old daughter fumbles with her summer skirt watching Jeremy, the boy at bat, who just last night in these bleachers put his lips to her neck, her ear.

It’s never idea. It’s rhythm. It’s rhythm in your chest and in the sound it makes in air and something like the sound of words on a page but never that perfectly, never that or else you will have become a sorcerer and your writing the spell that without help of potions or swinging watches would make us lose, or find once and for all, ourselves. Writing’s not magic but the rhythm of it.