https://substack.com/@melaniejwhite
I keep coming back to subordinating words and phrases, or maybe they are just conditional. Either way, these seemingly insignificant words carry emotional weight and intention. Carol Shields affected me deeply with her novel, Unless, the title of each chapter is a subordinating or conditional word — “Hence, Yet, Notwithstanding, Whatever”, etc. That book hovered around the edges of my consciousness long after reading, a meditation on what it means to parent, to love, to hang in the hopeful “unless”. It is a book about the fragility of connections, and what it means to acknowledge the utterly uncontrollable nature of the life we have to face.
“Until”, as a word, sits in that space between the hopeful and the dire. It suggests some future reality, or some long enduring span of time. “Until death do us part.” It speaks of work not yet done, experience not yet lived, when the tilling of the ground we travel will become complete. I am still tilling the soil of experience, still existing until.
“Until” is a chameleon, shifting meaning with a crowd of words that follow, separating the listener from the speaker — “Until you clean your room…” or encircling them in a loving embrace — “until the end of time…”.
I’m living in that space called “until”: this strange palce between parent and grandchild, several generations of life in one family, one life about to take leave, another life about to begin. “Until” is the warning, like Shields’ book, that we must face that inevitability “unless” something changes, and then we face it now.
And this book that I am trying to write will never be written, until I move beyond the word, beyond the phrase that fascinates me, so here it ends, and here I leave to do more writing. Or, at least until next time.
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