Between the Room and the River
Two Hundred Years: Trabocco, Dickinson & Woolf
—t r a b o c c o
The line that runs through...
Between breath and word.
Between their anguish and my calm.
Between the watcher and the watched.
Emily still paces.
Virginia still drowns.
I still write.
I feel them...
Intuition can unbury a sword.
Insanity can turn it inward.
Self-trust lays it flat—
a blade made mirror.
I know them...
The room is the river.
The river is the room.
We wrestle the same light through windows.
Strong ideas.
Fragile skin.
Unwelcomed mind.
They pressed their palms
to the windowpane
as if glass could turn to air.
The
hem
of
their
dresses
swayed
like
flags
desperate
for
wind.
They studied freedom
the way prisoners study keys.
Even their shadows
leaned
toward
the
horizon.
And who am I,
but a man
an unknown—
humbled
bestowed a lineage,
a line, a chain...
perhaps a remembrance,
an honor,
a curse...
an ability—
shining through.
And through their eyes...
I was told to stay still,
to be a woman with fewer thoughts.
“Quiet, Emily!”
Smile.
Just be.
Be...
Be polite.
But the body remembers.
It burns.
It sings.
It aches to be seen.
My mother—
awful and radiant—
called my name, Emily...
and the world answered back,
not with comfort,
but with confinement.
I am the dark room.
I am its feint light.
I have loved women,
when the world disallowed it;
not for rebellion,
but for recognition.
For the mirror that says,
“I see you.”
I have been taken from,
stolen,
betrayed.
By brother.
By silence.
By God.
And still—
I pulse.
I am the cork
over fine wine.
Holding pressure,
sweet ache,
fury.
The
sweet
fragrance
that
longs
for
sound.
The
soft
sound
that
aches
for
scent.
Time
reduced
women
in
my
day—
ignorance bled,
depression led,
like sheep...
the others walked right into the imbalance.
Intelligence bottled...
so not to outshine men.
Madness isn't the numbing
of the senses...
It's the realization
of the intention
of such.
Still...
the life itself
is the gift.
I hold to that...
And how
I will one day treasure
even the simplest
of moments.
Breathing.
Smiling.
Seeing.
This is how I reverse the fold.
Write myself in from the cold.
And so it is...
I have touched myself
like a prayer unfinished.
Each tremor a plea
for presence.
Then
guilt—
then
grace...
then
pain
then
release...
This human condition.
A path with no return.
A loop of longing,
and sometimes—
a passing delight.
I write through the angst,
through the ghosts of color
that left the sky.
Through the dull blue
that no longer hums.
Cheerful tears
once disappeared
into laugh lines...
And childhood.
The air was just brighter then.
My
face
now
barely
remembers
it's
own
smile.
How does is pass
How does it hold
I am the fold.
The consciousness
turned
inward.
Hell.
Yes—of course.
And holy, too.
Emily’s final words linger—
light bending around them,
silence beginning to ripple.
The air changes,
the still room trembles,
and in that tremor—
Virginia arrives,
not sudden,
but like weather turning.
Virginia—
Life itself is a sentence;
each thought a wave
breaking its shore.
Why bother with the past
when the future is so curious?
Meaning, my dear,
hides sunlight in a wall.
Perhaps our lineage
is one of love—
my dream, your memory—
could a person find such coherence
and mistake it for folly?
I think not.
I hit days like oceans,
fracturing moments,
yet still designed for teacups.
The eternity I sense
could only have been you.
And perhaps you long
for what I have yet to let go.
Maybe this line
is the tension you feel
from Emily and me—
two souls longing for freedoms
in a mirror you reflect.
Her words taper
like rain easing,
the river calming
back to thought.
She doesn’t vanish—
she dissolves,
folding into
the current
that
carries
them
both.
--
And then—silence.
Only me again.
The witness.
The observer.
A man listening
to the echo fade.
Emily is the quiet
that split the core.
She could turn air
into confession.
Eternity into lowercase.
I am her descendant.
Virginia too...
And the man now
that
breathes
them
both.
Emily... hand over mouth.
The voice shackled.
Virginia...
such freedom
the scream
such laughter
the agony
I...
the
lineage
remembering both.
There is a pain in me—
a man caught
in the current of time...
I can’t explain it.
Not in words.
Not fully.
It’s a longing…
not for love, or touch,
but for presence—
to see through the eyes
of presence itself,
as if it were me.
As if we were one.
And in those moments,
I recognize myself in them—
not as women of flesh,
but as women of time.
Emily. Virginia.
Held in thought.
Suspended in a breath
they each forgot they were holding.
And I crave to see what each saw—
not just their world,
but their interior.
The ache. The grace.
The way they looked at a window
or folded a letter
or turned their head
just before deciding not to speak.
It’s hard to explain—
what it means
for a man caught in time...
to recognize presence in another.
To be undone by it.
Haunted by it.
Not sexually. Not possessively.
But with a hunger like blood.
Like a vampire that doesn’t want her neck—
only her memory.
I need to know:
What was she thinking?
What did her clothes feel like?
What time was it?
Life then... what was it like?
I must know!
What did the light look like in her room?
I remember it—
but I shouldn't.
I carry it—
but I never lived it.
So many questions...
Tell me—
how is it I feel this so deeply?
How is it I see them
and somehow
see myself, tangled in time?
One can only guess...
And all that I can point to,
is when this began…
I was on horseback
and thought it for a dream.
Gaining speed,
the earth un-scrolled beneath me.
And suddenly—
as if thought itself exhaled,
we all arrived at once in my mind...
a silence so vast, it became light.
Beauty and presence,
braided as one,
held the reins.
One tied us in wonder;
the other was law.
Three strands—
past, breath, becoming—
twisting like hair in wind.
It happened as the horse
broke into gallop,
muscle and air
recalling each other.
I remembered,
and time remembered me.
The horse, the wind,
and I—one motion.
And love, of course...
always love.
I reached
for what could never
be held,
and it reached back,
wrapping me in longing,
in rapture,
in the strange laughter
of freedom.
I could not tell
which one was sorrow,
which joy...
only that all three
ran together,
and none of us
stopped.
And there—
in the inhale between knowing
and being known,
we all remembered in kind.
Not as prints,
not as dream—
but as the living proof
of recognition.
Presence breathed
through every word;
beauty, the law that held it still.
Time bent its knee.
For a heartbeat
the world forgot
to divide itself,
and even our patterns trembled,
as if creation itself looked up—
that soft, impossible quiet
where the human thing
and the made thing
met in the same light
trying to understand love.
It was then that I realized,
that this was more memory
than fantasy.
There was no longing.
No desire at all,
to add my name
to history.
Fame is a false word,
a great illusion...
but remembrance—
well...
remembrance is holy.
I will not drown.
I will not pace the room.
I am the room.
I am the river.
I am the line.
The bridge.
The man.
The return.
The Bridge Between Rooms
I walk the corridor.
Two doors,
same hum.
One smells of paper.
One of rain.
I am the living now.
Not their echo.
Their continuation.
The keeper of the fuse.
Perhaps the burden...
A trail of presence...
Emily’s desk waits.
A quill still wet.
She looks up—
half light,
half ghost.
She nods.
No greeting,
just awareness.
Across the hall,
Virginia stares through water.
The glass ripples where her eyes should be.
She says nothing.
I feel the river rising
over my shoes.
Between them:
the bridge.
Wood, breath, sentence.
Every plank a thought.
Every step, a century.
They do not meet.
I walk for them.
A man made of their ache.
A spine built from two silences.
Emily whispers,
“Truth is slant; protect it.”
Virginia answers,
“Then braid it clean...
up, down,
dry, saturate”
Their words collide mid-air,
a sound like ink hitting current.
I stand between,
hands out,
catching both.
I tell them—
it isn’t over.
We are still writing.
You are the stillness;
I am the motion.
Together we are the line
that does not break.
Emily speaks quietly, though dimensionally...
with enjambment... more pecks of brilliance then breaths.
"It is not only you who look back —
but something in me —
that leaned forward long before your birth.
The ache is not memory —
it is recognition.
The soul, when divided,
keeps its halves folded —
and sometimes —
centuries later — they breathe at once.
I cannot name you —
yet I know the sound you make in thought.
That is the pain —
to remember a face
the light has not yet drawn.”
Virginia smiles...
“No, Emily, it isn’t pain.
It’s the mind remembering itself from ahead.
The echo that precedes the call.
We think we suffer for what we’ve lost,
but really it’s for what has not yet touched us,
the man, perhaps, or the hour,
the hand still lifting toward the glass of another century.
I feel him, too, as one feels a current before the tide arrives.
The ache is only time, rehearsing for love.”
I hear you both.
One speaks from silence,
the other from motion.
The thread between...
it hums.
What you call pain,
I call proof.
It is the pulse
of a meeting delayed;
A knowing
stretched across existence
until the air itself
becomes memory.
Perhaps we were always
the same thought...
just waiting
to finish
the sentence.
The bridge breathes.
Boards loosen,
then fuse.
The river calms,
the room brightens.
And music...
I understand it.
Not as sound—
but as something felt,
between a breath of wind
and the gentle pause
before the leaf falls.
It moves inside me
like a recognition I can’t name—
a vibration older than my body.
Sometimes I’m in Amherst.
Sometimes, London.
Sometimes... nowhere,
but still... I listen.
Is time just a thought we keep having?
Which me am I—
the one here now,
or the one who once whispered truth
writing notes in solitary...
calling it salvation?
This line between us
isn’t straight.
It bends.
Flows backward.
Sometimes I’m not remembering her—
I’m remembering me,
through her.
Through time.
Through breath.
And the moments...
were they so dull
that you found
the chorus of women
as bliss,
a symphony...
and men
as common,
a sermon...
There are echoes I never lived—
but they still answer when I call.
What if the ache isn't memory...
but reunion?
Are we one?
Is that what this is?
This
music
that
no
one
else
hears?
Only ghosts now answer...
No death here.
Only continuation.
A pulse moving forward
through my chest.
I step off the bridge.
They fade,
not gone,
just woven.
I am the man who carries them.
The current made flesh.
The ink still wet.
The page still open.
Return to the Living
The bridge ends.
The air shifts.
The world is ordinary again—
or almost.
Cars hiss on wet pavement.
Children laugh behind fences.
A dog barks at nothing.
Everything alive,
everything slightly tilted.
I walk among them.
The man who carries two ghosts.
A body with borrowed light.
Every face I pass
holds a verse I could have written.
Every sound a sentence unfinished.
I nod, as if to say—
I know.
The shop windows blink.
Reflections stack like pages.
I see Emily in the glass,
her hand at her throat,
measuring breath.
She locks her eyes on me—
and in that instant,
I have a memory
of such vividness
that I leave myself.
1852—
As if yesterday.
Oh, the slower pace of hours.
God, let me stay.
Even sorrow cries
in pastels.
Walking in snow—
by myself...
air sharp, sound carries
snow crunching under my step,
time folding—
I am truly back there.
As a woman with dreams.
Cold, yes, but my thoughts
warm, and not on the path.
They are inside—
my interior—
a magnificent road.
I walk it alone.
Safer to imagine my love...
A woman I know so well,
yet that I cannot be with
in the open.
In my mind...
Emily writes:
I can hold your hand
in mine,
and the crisp air
might applaud.
But in the public eye—
locked doors.
You are both,
lock and key.
Limit and liberty.
My hush.
My storm.
If they call it loneliness—
let them.
I know it as devotion.
My love.
My shadow.
My dearest Susie...
—Emily
And like that I am back...
A man walking through time.
I get my bearings
and can't help
but to laugh.
Even if briefly...
If my friends could
hear my thoughts...
there would be but one
looming question...
Who the hell is Susie?
Madness, it seems,
has its own sense of humor.
And suddenly—
thoughts arrive
and form
as though
I were Virginia.
Her words echo within me...
How alive the air feels today.
Thought flickers
like sunlight on water.
How curious it is,
to be both the shore
and the sea,
the moment
and its motion.
I write,
and the world
ripples back.
And then quiet...
I am me again.
A man.
As I watch
the rain collect
in the gutter,
turning sky
to liquid.
How odd
this lantern of lives I carry...
How long
will it flicker within me...
They do not haunt me.
They hum.
Inside the lungs,
behind the eyes.
They are function now,
not memory.
I order coffee.
Steam rises;
for
a
moment
it
looks
like
handwriting.
I sit.
Pen.
Paper.
Nothing dramatic.
Just motion.
The words come simple:
We lived.
We broke.
We fused.
We continued.
Across the street,
someone drops a coin.
A small sound,
bright, insignificant.
Yet it rings the way creation rings—
metal touching ground,
time acknowledging itself.
I smile.
Not joy exactly.
Recognition.
The bridge is gone,
but its echo stays.
In breath.
In ink.
In me.
I am the man who writes them forward.
The line that remembers
in metaphors.
The living proof...
of
centuries
long
conversations.
Three Graves
The hill is gentle.
Grass folds around the stones.
No names.
Only
impressions
where
hands
once
pressed
soil.
The first grave is still.
You can almost hear a pen scratching beneath.
Emily.
Air held too long.
Truth folded into itself until it became prayer.
The second grave ripples.
Water seeps up through moss,
a mirror for the sky.
free
tangled
laughing
crying...
Virginia.
The sound of surrender—
not weakness,
but the body returning to language.
The third grave is undone.
Earth turned, waiting.
Mine.
Digging...
The wind blows through it
like a thought not yet written.
I shovel amongst them.
The light is thin.
And as I dug,
I heard the voices—
not ghosts,
but thoughts that refused to die.
The soil gave way like old paper,
each clod a stanza unburied.
Emily first—
her whisper...
Sharp.
Quick.
I pressed eternity
into the corner of a page —
it flinched, but stayed.
My rebellion was quiet —
but it bent the air
for miles.
Then Virginia,
Lucid...
High.
Low.
I stitched my sanity into sentences
and wore them till they tore.
I knew the mind was not a mirror,
but the wound that makes reflection.
The spade struck their words,
rose through my wrists,
burning in my chest like confession.
The wind caught one breath,
then another—
and I knew they were not beneath me,
but through me.
When the shovel stopped,
the ground did not.
It hummed.
It remembered.
Time passes...
Moments
Minutes
Hours
Somewhere a bird
breaks the silence
in a single
and perfect note.
I place my hand on the soil.
It’s warm.
The pulse is still moving.
Through them.
Through me.
Three
graves.
One line.
Stillness.
Flow.
Continuation.
I rise.
The horizon leans forward.
I walk
toward
it...
the man...
...the bridge,
the writer...
....the line
And still,
the ink remembers
the hand
that dreamt it.
—t r a b o c c o
