Before We Weren't Anywhere

“I wanted to see how far I could go before I wasn’t anywhere at all.”

Wade says it on their first night, in a Seattle flat in 1995, with the vinyl spinning low and rain tapping at the window. Selene asked him to tell her something he’s never told anyone, and this is what he gives her.

Before We Weren’t Anywhere is a poetic novella in fifteen chapters, subtitled A Reverie in Fugue, and it moves like one. Lines come back like voices: Feel where I go before I go there. Maybe I’ll take you there.

Her feet are always cold, so she tucks them between his legs. When he talks, she runs her fingers along the inside of his wrist, measuring the truth in his pulse. During the blackout she holds her fingertips to his throat to guess the song he’s humming, and guesses wrong every time, because he made it up. The love scenes take their time: on lavender sheets in a bed and breakfast on the coast, and in a makeshift bed by the radiator while the ice storm keeps the city dark.

She burns the toast every morning and curses at the stove. On the drive down 101 she keeps one hand on the wheel and the other on his thigh. Come spring, she starts standing at the bay window, tracking planes out of an airport she can’t even see from the flat.

Some nights he watches her from the bed and thinks, This is a thing I could keep. But Wade has never kept anything in his life.

It’s a love story told from the inside of losing it, frank about sex and honest about cowardice.

For anyone who wore out Disintegration and Mazzy Star in the same winter, and for readers of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.

From the book

“Not like that,” she laughed.
“You don’t fight it. You let it carry you.”

She lifted his hands,
placed them lightly on her shoulders.

The edition

White type on black pages, with black-painted edges. The hardcover adds a maroon silk ribbon and red-and-black head and tail bands. Every copy includes Pulling at the Threads: A Companion Guide. First printing: 25 signed, hand-numbered hardcovers and 50 hand-numbered paperbacks.

The poetry of Eric Williamson

This Is Our Secret, What Of Us Remains, Where Silence Keeps You, And In Our Absence, and Before We Weren’t Anywhere. Read the titles in order and they follow one love, from the secret, to the empty room, to before any of it began.