The dead speak, she writes. We have forgotten how to listen.

I grabbed Patti Smith’s M Train on the way out the door, holding the tattered, familiar cover like the hand of an old friend.

I haven’t read it all the way through since high school, back when New York was still a distant dream. Inscribed in the cover is the year 2019 and all throughout the pages are underlines tattooing what meant something to me. I opened it on the train yesterday, flipping through favorite passages and for the first time, recognizing the street names, neighborhoods, and train stops that held no meaning for me then.

This was perhaps the first book that truly got me into reading. I usually credit the English teacher I had my senior year and the stack of books he prescribed me during that depressive year, but I’m remembering now that it was actually Patti. I remember staying up late in my bed one night, reading half of it in one sitting, wondering what the hell I had just tumbled into. If there was ever a shred of hope that I wouldn’t become a writer, it escaped me on that night and never came back.

Up until that point, I had never read anything that pushed the boundaries of standard prose. Not like this. I fell in love with her sentence fragments and meandering thoughts. With the way she could trip me and send me falling into a metaphor that altered my perception of reality, one I would have never otherwise thought to question. But mostly, I loved that the book documented her going through New York City alone, sitting in her favorite coffee shop in Greenwich, writing in her journal, taking photos. Her deep connection to books and to the world under her feet resonated with me. Her poetic vocabulary lit a fire that I was only just beginning to nurture, one I casually live engulfed by the flames of these days.

M TRAIN QUOTES FROM PATTI SMITH

I trace my fingers over the lines I etched into the pages, touching the sentences that I wanted to remember.

A few of them read:

“We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.”

“I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards. I have watched the snow falal onto the sea and traced the steps of a traveler long gone. I have relived moments that were perfect in their certainty. Fred Buttoning the khaki shirt he wore for his flying lessons. Doves returning to nest on our balcony. OUr daughter, Jesse, standing before me stretching out her arms. — Oh, Mama, sometimes I feel like a new tree.”

“Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”

I was still a teenager, barely opening my eyes to the real world and to my place within it.

Coming of age was like being born again, everything deafeningly loud and painfully bright. You’re disoriented, lost, flung from the warmth of the world as you knew it, the world that has dissolved into a hazy memory.

These passages found me there and made sense of what I felt. They showed me that writing, and my addiction to is, was a way of reliving life. Tracing your own steps. Examining moments that never stay long enough for you to get everything out of the first time around. Losing things became an art instead of a tragedy. Distant people and places became ghosts and graveyards, voices I could close my eyes and listen to as I pressed pen to paper, transporting myself back into worlds with portals that would otherwise have been sealed shut.

Smith gave me all that. She taught me how to write, evidenced by my English teacher that year telling me just because Patti uses sentence fragments doesn’t mean the AP board is going to let you. I could have cared less about the AP board. I preferred prose to syntax. Sentences that danced over ones that sat still. Words I had to look up over ones that I knew. Writing became art, no less abstract or creative than paint on a canvas.

But she also taught me how to live. She showed me that every dimension of life, whether filled with love or loss, has something so vital to offer if you are willing to just stay with it for a moment longer. To really look and listen. She taught me that writing is a way of cheating time, of preserving moments. Of coming to understand and really see what was right there, but escaped us.

The dead speak, she writes.

She taught me how to listen.

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