We go out to the back yard. I like watching the sun sink low in the west, noticing the sky turn interesting colors. She prefers to flip her belly towards the sky and roll in the grass.
This week I am at least partially responsible for tending to seven dogs that aren’t mine. Also an indoor cat and a couple of strays. Three different families are off traveling across the ocean, so they hired a caretaker with spare time, experience, access to transportation, and opposable tumbs.
I make my rounds and help keep everyone from going hungry or creating an unholy mess. I give them time to run around outside and play in the sunlight.
I worry a little that something bad will happen to them on my watch. I am careful.
So often, in the summer, it becomes almost impossible to get out of bed. In the stillness of the morning, it’s difficult to think of a reason not to give in to the persistent waves of sweet unconsciousness.
Being responsible for taking care of other creatures gives me a reason.
Heard it first from a friend. Needed to do something. Anything. Better than sitting at home feeling small and powerless. Called my little sister. She hadn’t heard, and she took it hard.
My thoughts are racing in circles, saying I don’t know what to do. I am frightened.
And a voice answers back, and says you have had some of the finest mentors that anyone could dare to hope for. You did not spend all of that time learning from them only to get lost in feeling hopeless now. If anyone could find a way, it would be someone who’d been lucky enough to be taught by them.
You have friends. You don’t have to do this alone.We will continue to fight.We will go on finding ways to take care of one another.
Got in the car and took an impromptu road trip to the birthplace of women’s rights in the US. I couldn’t think of a better place to be, on this day of all days. I needed the catharsis of being part of history, of standing in a crowd and yelling and crying and marching and peacefully breaking the rules. Somebody was banging a wooden spoon on a cake pan. There were drums. People cheered out their car windows and hooked their horns as they drove by, and each time this happened it was met with a deafening wave of sound.
It felt good to be surrounded by strangers who needed to be together and know they weren’t alone. It felt good to look over my shoulder and see a big parade of people in the streets.
I didn’t carry a sign but I have never in my life been able to hold back tears for the sake of politeness and maybe tears said something that words couldn’t.
When I remember this day, I can look back and know that I was there for the woman walking beside me, the one with the tattoos she covered with bandaids and a long sleeve shirt, the woman with a nose ring and brown eyes and faded pink hair shaved close on the sides, the woman who will not have a voice tomorrow because she needed to scream at the top of her lungs with all the shaken grief and bitter rage and bone-tired disappointment that a woman who hasn’t yet seen her twentieth year should never have to feel.
In the quietness after the crowds dispersed, I sat in the grass and watched as she slowly read the words carved into the rock wall of the fountain. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women are created equal.”
And I remembered teaching her to read when she was small.
We split open the center of the maple in the front yard, so we could pick her up and carry her away. In doing so, we found something unexpected.
The trunk of the tree was hollow, which we knew. But the entire hollowed out center – a space at least as tall as me but not as big around – was filled with honey comb.
We didn’t know.
The bees are still reeling from the crashing of the tree. They swarm around what’s left of her. If I didn’t know any better, I would say the swarm is moving with an attitude of agitated concern. But I must be anthropomorphizing.
We’re going to try to help them, carefully relocate them to a different home. I hope it works. I’m not terribly worried about getting stung.
When someone in the family dies, there’s an old tradition of sending someone to tell the bees what’s happened.
And I know that she wasn’t exactly family. She might have been something like a beekeeper. In this instance, it seems like a close enough thing. They ought to know.
The wind picked up, and the sky darkened. I straightened up from the weeds in the dirt and looked southwards over the horizon. Clouds in dusky blue and grey and black swooped low between the fields and the sun. The branches on the trees rustled, and then bent and creaked, and then started to break.
For as long as I have been alive, there’s been an ancient maple tree standing gaurd by the road at the end of the driveway of my parents’ house. It stands comfortably in the shade of the Austrian Pine, and must be almost as old. It is covered in mushrooms and moss and green flakes of lichen. The soft bark is rough, with a texture like crumpled paper, deep creases full of shadows where bugs burrow and the spiders make their webs. The middle of the trunk is hollow, which provided shelter for several generations of honey bee hives and bird’s nests.
Once in a while we used to drill a small hole in the side of the tree in the spring, to collect the sap we boiled down into syrup. The smell of sap bubbling in a big pot beside the porch is the essence of nostalgia. If I could bottle that and take it with me, I could get back to my childhood any time I liked. There were small round scars in the bark, healed over.
When I was maybe four or five years old, my dad carved my first initial into a walking stick made from one of its branches. The walking stick, made for a child, is too small for me now.
When I was six or seven, I waited alone with my backpack for the schoolbus in a windstorm and leaned against the tree so that my tiny body wouldn’t blow away.
When I was nine, ten, eleven, I would sit on the swing of the next tree down and marvel at the strength of this new internal monologue which was beginning to chatter inside my head. It was powerfully distracting. I could sit in the shade of the maples in the grass, feel the wind in the warmth of the summer, but a part of me was carried off somewhere else and has never quite managed to find its way back.
When I was fourteen, fifteen, I leaned against the tree waiting for the same schoolbus in the mornings. My hair was longer then, and I used to wash it in the morning, so it would freeze into ropes in the cold in the winter. Depending on the season, I would watch the sunrise. After school I used to sit on the front porch and play guitar and try to write songs that felt grown up and profound, and if I couldn’t think of the next lyric I’d look up at the blue hills and the sky. The comforting, familiar shape of that tree would be there in the foreground, like an afterthought in a Bob Ross painting.
When I was sixteen, seventeen, I would wait for the bus and lean against the tree and drink hot coffee from a travel mug. I was probably thinking about whichever boy happened to seem interesting at the time, or whichever girl I couldn’t stop thinking about because I thought I was jealous of her perfect eyes and hands and smile and sense of humor and her brilliance and her charm. Sometimes I am slow on the uptake. The leaves on the maple tree rustled in the breeze, laughing.
When I was eighteen, and then nineteen, I learned how to drive in a busted jeep and every time I backed out of the driveway I would carefully look over my shoulder to make sure not to hit that tree on my way out.
For my whole life, each time I got back to the house and pulled into the driveway, that tree would be there to greet me, and that’s how I’d know I was home.
I was gardening when the storm hit, and I was a mile away from home working for a neighbor. The wind picked up. I stood and watched the storm roll in across the fields, a wall of wind and thundering clouds and rain rushing towards us at great speed, and I felt my own smallness and fragility in the face of the raw power of the weather. Part of me wondered if this is what it’s going to feel like at the end of the world.
A text from dad: “don’t drive until this is over.”
We ducked into the house and waited it out. Anything that was not tied down was thrown about everywhere. The father told stories of other storms, and his son moved around the kitchen and listened to music because he is far too old (and much too young) to listen to his father’s stories.
And so I wasn’t at home when the maple tree went down.
She split across the middle at her weakest point. It was a clean break. All the branches still bearing leaves have been severed from the roots they have nourished for decades. It’s over and done.
When I got back I leaned against what’s left of her and cried.
I am catsitting in an undisclosed location. Aside from a cat who is still being shy, I have a whole house to myself. The guest bedroom is nice. There’s a queen sized bed, windows on two adjacent walls for a cross breeze, and a lamp with soft yellow light on the bedside table.
It’s dark out now, and a summer thunder storm is slowly making its way towards us. The air is thick and heavy and still and altogether much too warm for comfort. Thunder isn’t so much booming as tumbling across the sky.
Sat down to do some writing for the death directed study this evening. Something about being away from home in a quiet space with nobody else around is soothing. Helps me focus. I opened my laptop, created a document, typed “Annotated Bibliography” at the top of the first page, and proceeded to write for a couple of hours.
It’s like any self-respecting conspiracy theorist’s basement wall, covered in old newspaper clippings and thumbtacks and red string. This is a fine place to begin, to start chasing paper trails, to go looking for connections between the sources, to find the motifs, to let my brain’s natural inclination to see patterns in the stars and in the rugs and in the ceiling tiles run wild.
Narrow the topic, carve out a thesis, defend. Pick out the hill you will die on.
There’s the rain. And a breeze, too. That feels lovely.
Two days ago I took the dog to the back yard and we both stretched out on the grass in the sun and the breeze. Listened to a recording of Practical Ethics by Peter Singer and watched the sky.
Yesterday I drove to the lake alone, with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand out the window catching wind. Waded in the water, black jeans soaked through up to the knees, swinging my shoes by the laces. Sat on the pebbled shore with my feet beneath tiny waves crashing where the water meets the land. The coolness on my skin was soothing.
Today I made it out to the hiking trails that crisscross between the ponds in the park a little to the north of us. Between the clouds and the breeze and the shade, it’s lovely and quiet here. Feels like it might be about to rain.
I’m experiencing a heavy kind of sadness. It feels like there’s something sitting on my chest, constricting my breath – something big, expansive, vast, dense, solid. Usually depression feels like discouragement, or apathy – a bleak fog hanging low between me and the rest of everything. This is different. I just feel sad, properly sad, and I don’t know why.
Spending time outside is soothing and difficult at the same time. The quietness out here gives me the space to feel the sadness more keenly. I can’t compulsively reach for anything to keep me distracted, numb. I have to let it be there, taking up space, humming, throbbing, aching. I’m sitting here in the moss under a tree, and in my head I’m glancing sidelong over at the big sad, wondering where the hell it’s coming from.
“This too shall pass,” as they say, I suppose. I’ll have to wait it out.
Laying in the grass, eyes closed, earth beneath my back, music in my ears, breeze playing across my skin.
Sitting in the shade, listening to a podcast, pulling weeds out from between the stones around a swimming pool. The gloves I’ve borrowed are comfortably soft. I uproot thistles that burn, fat plantain leaves with tap roots that grow deep and don’t let go, something with a square stem and yellow flowers and shallow roots growing tall and prpud, altogether too much stubborn quack grass. The sun blazes on my back. Sweat is dripping, trapped between my skin and my clothes. The gardener’s profession is an old one. I am pleased to have something to share with our Samwise Gamgee and the rest. Still not sure why we spend so much time trying to create patches of land free from overgrowth – so that we can notice it for a few moments when we walk by? There must be a reason.
If I must do arbitrary tasks in the service of people who are willing to exchange work for the funds I need to get by, then it might as well happen out of doors in the summer.
Two days ago, I drove down to the lake and hiked along the trail through the woods to the point that juts out into the middle and I skipped a couple of flat stones. The water was smooth and clear and still, and the shoreline was nothing but trees. I listened to music with the windows down on the way home.
Yesterday, I build a campfire in the circle of stones I made during quarantine a couple of years ago. The flames crackled and glowed in the twilight, and the smoke drifted away on the wind. Tiny bugs swarmed for our eyes and ears and noses as the sun went down. The dog stretched out on the bluegrass at my feet, tucked her gray-flecked nose between her paws. I flopped down on my back beside her and looked up at the trees, tracing the gaps between branches, picking out the outlines of individual leaves. Behind them, the sky faded to purple, and then to dusky indigo, and then to black.
This evening I stripped down and jumped into the swimming pool after sunset and looked up at a dense canopy of stars. The water was cold at first, but swimming around in a couple of familiar circles helped my body adjust.
I can’t see very well without my glasses, but my brain still made triangles. We haven’t seen a sky this clear out here in a long time. It’s lovely.
thanks for going on a road trip down route 20 with me @shameless_and_crazy. Had a lovely time driving, listening to Dolly Parton, absolutely destroying you at yellow car, munching through a bag of dill pickle potato chips & a family sized packet of double stuffed oreos, driving, following the GPS into a very sketchy forest, charging our phones outside of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, seeing turtles eat lettuce and getting to pet a sting ray, driving, not dying in rush hour traffic in Boston, driving, finding a teenage mutant ninja turtles statue on the 23rd floor of the library in Amherst, driving, eating chinese food and finding rocks on the beach, getting rick rolled by a middle school band at quincy market, cooking on a camp stove in the rain, learning how to play blackjack in a tent in a rain storm, driving, drinking ridiculous quantities of coffee, yelling about women’s rights in Seneca Falls, looking at jewelery at craft vendors at a random fair, driving, jamming out to New Moonshine, and watching you manage not to die falling off a picnic bench. I’m so proud of you for becoming a teacher and landing your first gig, my dude. I cannot think of a better way to celebrate than doing the Thing we’ve been talking about doing for five years. It was worth it.
Road trip to Boston with Jenna, because she’s just become a teacher, and everyone’s very proud. We took Route 20 to the East Coast. Eventually, we will go the other direction, so we can say that we did. Just not right now.
Have been living on antidepressants, oreos, potato chips and coffee. Listening to Dolly Parton and Queen and Sam Smith and James Taylor and We The Kings the entire category of music which we affectionately refer to as “dad rock.”
And the driving. So much driving. We take shifts resting every hour but it’s still intense. The cities are the worst, but the back roads twisting through the New York/Massachusetts border are something else altogether.
Got lost without cell service looking for a place to camp in a state forest. Successfully became unlost.
We took a detour over to Amherst to visit the philosophy department where one of the Feldman brothers worked for a long time. Fred wrote Confrontations With The Reaper, which is one of the books I’ve been reading for my directed study on the philosophy of death. He’s gone now, but we found the department where he used to work, and we stopped to say hi. Jenna puts up with this and is rewarded for her patience when we stumble across a library that is 26 floors high. There was a teenage mutant ninja turtles sculpture on the second highest floor accessible to the public. I thought I could feel the building swaying under my feet.
Survived rush hour traffic in Boston. I never want to do that again.
Made it to the beach and took a walk along the sand. The sun was setting. I found some interesting rocks. Actually, I think what happened was that I took off my shoes and stood with my feet in the water and looked across the harbor and eventually I looked down and went “ROCKS!!” and started picking up pebbles in ruddy orange and soft green and mottled purple until my pockets physically could not hold any more.
And then we went back.
I don’t like endings.
This was my first in-person year of college classes since 2018-2019, and now it is done.
I met strangers and got to know them, a little. I grew to like the people I saw every day. Some of them are leaving. It won’t be the same, after this.
I’ll still be here, for a little while yet. And also
“it’s not like you’ll never see each other again,” my sister reminds me. “You have phones. You know how to use them.”
I am reminded of the words of another acquaintance, fading into memory, who once said: “nope, after my friend leaves it will be like he never existed. I’m just really bad at object permanence.”
I’m going to look back on this year with fondness. It’s my worst trouble, getting fond, and then having to let go. It keeps happening. You’d think I’d learn to stop getting attached, but I never do.
Maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being completely in love with life, just the way it is, and not wanting things to change.
There will be other times.
Oh, damn. I’m crying again.
I’ve decided to keep falling in love, over and over again, because things are going to keep changing, and the people I love are going to keep drifting away just as soon as I realize how much they matter to me. But it won’t do to stop loving just to save myself from the horrible ache of parting ways.
I have to keep falling in love, as hard as possible, because I can’t help it, and trying to hold it all back and keep it inside is like trying to hold up the sky.
Stayed up all night so as to complete the written take home exam for Theater History. Wrote five short essays in record time, one for each of five plays:
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Importance of Being Earnest
Trifles
Angels in America
M. Butterfly
*we also read A Rasin in the Sun, which I think is worth mentioning.
Worked all night in the table in the kitchen. Eyelids were impossibly heavy at around midnight. Almost gave up and went to bed at two, but persisted. Made tea at like four-thirty or five, and then watched the sun come up through the kitchen windows.
Submitted a thick pdf at ten fifteen in the morning, while the sun was streaming in from the east. Proceeded to close my laptop with a thump and collapse in a heap in the chair.
That was, uh – that was a twelve hour sprint. I am so tired.
Tomorrow marks another revolution around the sun. To celebrate, I’m going to take the rest of this day that’s happening now to just stop, and rest, and maybe recharge a little. I’ll curl up in bed under a big comforter and re-watch old episodes of the Umbrella Academy, and serve up however much ice cream can reasonably be expected to stay balanced on the spoon without crumbling into the sea, and then there’s that book I’ve been meaning to finish…
Tomorrow is for writing that last paper, and then I am through. It’ll come together in the end.
Today I went into a grocery store for a snack, and I did not die in the process.
Successfully avoided murder at the bakery & deli. No sign of premeditated homicide in the refrigerator section. Dodged any racially motivated hate crimes happening in the produce department. Managed to walk down the entire cereal aisle without encountering a single bullet.
Made it home safe.
Seems like an absurd thing to have to think about, right guys?
Of all the money that e’er I had I spent it in good company And all the harm I’ve ever done Alas, it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit To memory now I can’t recall So fill to me the parting glass Good night and joy be to you all
Of all the comrades that e’er I had They’re sorry for my going away And all the sweethearts that e’er I had They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it fell into my lot That I should rise and you should not I’ll gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be to you all
So fill to me the parting glass And drink a health whate’er befalls Then gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be to you all Good night and joy be to you all
Climbed into the passenger seat of my sister’s car to drive into town and pick up a cheese pizza and some onion rings with country sweet sauce. After picking up the pizza, we get out of the car for a minute to go and look over the top of the waterfall near the center of town.
There’s a mallard duck floating on the creek. She’s caught in the current, and she looks like she might be about to be swept away and down over the edge. We watch in anguish as she hurtles towards the precipice, nervously paddling her feet to no avail. We breathe out a sigh of relief when she manages to get her footing on a solid patch of rock. She rests for a few moments, nibbling on something under the surface. Then she spreads her wings and half dives, half soars down over the side with surprising grace, landing smoothly on rough water far below us.
I’d forgotten for a moment that most creatures with wings are capable of flying.
We are born knowing that a call for help is harder to ignore when it is loud and shrill and persistent.
In a world like this one, one voice on its own doesn’t seem like it can make much of a difference.
So many people don’t like to speak up for themselves or ask for what they need because they feel scared or ashamed. Their voices are missing from the cacophony, and so the cacophony isn’t as loud.
The folks who carry on in silence might be less ashamed and scared if they knew they weren’t alone. And there are few things that can stave off the loneliness like seeing yourself in somebody elses’ story. There are few things as comforting as hearing somebody say, “I’ve been there too. I’ve needed this kind of help too.”
Knowing that there’s even one other person who needs the same kind of help that I do makes it so much easier to ask.
As more of us speak up, it will get harder for the folks who’ve been entrusted with our care to ignore us. They could go on ignoringing us for a long time, if they’d like to. They could ignore us for hundreds of years – they know how. But that only ever makes them look like bad caretakers.
Before there are protests, before there is any solid promise to vote for, before there is legislation, before there is change, there is storytelling. That’s where it begins.
So tell your stories whenever you can, complete with all their human complicated messiness. Whenever it’s safe.
Laugh. Break down crying. Sing. Cook some food. Spin a yarn. For fuck’s sake, write.
Take all the regrets, all the relief, all of the awful halting indecision, all of the cold detached decision making, all of the love and the mistakes and the discomfort and the longing, and put it into a story.
Go out and build a safe place for that storytelling to happen. Build it slowly, and carefully, with your own hands. Maybe it’s a friendship, or a comfy room, or a book in the library, or a song.
Never underestimate the importance of making another person feel seen and understood. That feeling changes everything.
In the meantime, we’ll go on getting by as best we can.
–
I heard this argument first from a friend whose name is Emma. I think it’s a beautiful take.
It’s a Thursday. I borrow a modified vintage Jimi Hendrix t-shirt from a friend and try it on. Everyone in the room tells me it looks good on me.
Feeling like I look nice doesn’t happen very often, so I ask the owner of the shirt if I can steal it. He says no. I think about absconding with it anyway, but I decide not to. Instead I get away with a cup of coffee and five minutes to spare before class.
Later on I get home and immediately start rooting around in my dresser drawers for the black t-shirts I used to have to wear to work back of house in a fancy restaurant. They still smell faintly of frier oil, occasionally, so I don’t particularly care for them as they are.
After like ten minutes of YouTube and another ten minutes with a pair of scissors and a couple of knots, the shirt has been transformed into something completely different.
It looks like a cross between the all-black hippie/stoner vibes my sister was fond of in the 00’s and a costume from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Lads, I am completely obsessed. I physically cannot take this thing off.
I ask my mom to take a photo. She fusses until she is happy.
I send a photo to the Jimi Hendrix fan and he asks if I can make one for him if he donates old t-shirts. The answer is yes. I post another photo to IG, and a friend comments, “Damn, you made that shirt impressively queer.”
This gets a smile.
I haven’t felt like I looked okay in a long time and it’s a nice feeling.
“If you’re ever having trouble sleeping, try reading some Immanuel Kant. That ought to do the trick.”
~ a professor of modern philosophy, who shall remain nameless
Maybe this is for you and maybe it isn’t. No worries one way or the other, but
if you have a moment, look away from the train wreck for awhile. I won’t get mad at you for taking a break.
Have some tea, or at least a sip of water. Wrap yourself in a blanket if you’re cold. Go to a window, and breathe in the air that smells like rain. You would miss the smell of rain, if it wasn’t there. Listen to the wind. Look at the gaps between the tree branches. There will only be so many stolen moments for looking at trees. Stars too.
Rinse off. Have something to eat. Brush your teeth. Rest well, even if all you can do is lay down and close your eyes. Don’t forget the meds.
If you need to escape into a book or a show or a video game for a bit, I wish you a comfortably immersive experience.
If you need to be buried in work, for a while – then be buried. But also remember to breathe.
“For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.”
The term paper was a critical comparison of Locke and Descartes on the nature and existence of external bodies. Submitted at 11:54.
I think the debate comes down to whether or not we try to make sense of things with or without relying on our senses. I argued that even though cold water feels hot when my hands are frozen and food tastes odd when I’m sick, I’m still going to have to trust my senses, because the alternative is troubling.
I think that paper might have been one of the neatest things I’ve ever thrown together in a hurry.
I also think it was a mediocre piece of work from an undergraduate who couldn’t keep up with the reading and barely understood the assignment.
It might have been both at the same time.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that pretty soon I’ll be looking back over my shoulder and I’ll be thirty-three and I won’t remember hardly anything about this assignment or this class or this semester or this year or all of these years of my life. But somehow, I’ll have managed to plow through some more time.
Maybe there will be things that I’ve figured out by then that are still beyond me, right now. I don’t know what it’s going to cost me. I expect that it’s going to be painfully embarrassing and uncomfortable most of the time, and that trying keep myself together is going to feel like trying to hold up the sky.
This is not the first time that it’s been almost the end of a spring semester and I’ve felt scorched and overwhelmed and a little bit lonely and sad. This is not the first time I’ve walked down a sidewalk past the daffodils with earbuds in my ears, found a spot to park the Jeep by a lake, stocked up on snacks from a gas station convenience store, and written a goddamn paper in a hurry.
This is not the first time. I have gone through this before.
18 months later, I am once again listening to Hozier and writing a philosophy paper for the first professor who ever gave me a C.
I’ve learned enough about writing philosophy papers in the intervening time to understand why I got a C. I might even have learned enough to do a little better.
There is just enough space between now and the deadline to for me to slip through the rapidly closing gap without losing any of the buttons off my coat. Hopefully. 🤞
Oh, and Hozier’s music hasn’t changed. He’s still singing about death and decay and bugs and dirt and sleep and bones and cherry wine and trees and sex in the woods, so that’s something.
Must get back to paper-writing.
You know what I think is beautiful?
Watching somebody else experience a thing that they think is beautiful. Watching them get really excited about the beautiful thing and wanting to share and tell everybody they know all about how beautiful the thing is. At great length. Or else, watching them decide that they don’t want to share with anyone, actually, because if other people knew it would take away some of the magic.
That is prime loveliness. I am happy to die on this hill.
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potatoe. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
If I’ve recently made a mistake, no I haven’t. What even is a mistake.
Depend on me to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people. Depend on me to laugh too loudly and too soon, and to make myself look like a child. I’d rather be like a child. I miss running barefoot through the grass.
I wasn’t trying to flirt, I was just matching your energy. If I was trying to flirt, you wouldn’t know.
I am devastatingly transparent and sincere, and I want to help. Why are you cringing? Don’t you have anything better to do? The planet is on fire, Karen.
I move through this world in my own way, and it my own time. Y’all will just have forgive me, and go on loving me anyway.
I am, all at once, not loud enough and too intense. The gaps between my words are a half beat too long. Sometimes my speech is jumbled when I talk about the things that matter to me, or when I don’t understand.
I am objectively wrong all the time, and it’s just as frustrating for me as it is for you. One more irritated sigh out of any of you, one more impatient glance at the clock on the wall, and I swear to God I’m going to explode.
I am so tired of translating. It’s exhausting. Finding people I don’t have to translate for doesn’t happen often, and the people I don’t have to translate for are usually the ones who are also perpetually tired.
I no longer want to be responsible for the ways I am misunderstood.
If I have legitimately said or done something that made you feel upset, fucking – tell me what happened, so that I can understand. Once I know, I will do my best to stop. The last thing that I ever want to do is hurt anyone.
But I can’t read your mind. I can’t know if I’ve done something wrong and exactly what to do about it without ever having been told.
My shoulders are not wide enough. Please go easy on me.
My face is sliced open, healing from a hundred tiny open wounds that never soothe me. My body trips over itself constantly, and never could manage the monkey bars on the playground at school.
This is the bag of bones I was born into, and this is the bag of bones that will rest in my grave.
Prickly and sore and fragile and out of sorts, because the weather is awful and I am so tired and overwhelmed.
Every time I open my mouth and start grumbling, my dad names the fallacy.
Black and white thinking, catastrophizing, only noticing the worst in everything.
He’s right, I think.
I am very much in need of hot tea and better sleep and a happy medium.
That’s it. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Forget that you don’t know what most of this stuff means. Don’t pay attention to the novelty of the problem that you’re working with. Don’t look down – you’ve gotten way up high above the world. If you realize how far up you are, you’ll remember that you can’t do this, because you’ve never done it before. You’ll panic and freeze up and fall all the way back down again. Just settle yourself down, and forget what you’re doing, and allow your mind to reach out for what it can’t quite reach, but can almost reach, and will soon be able to reach and hold onto and swing from with plenty of grace in just a minute. If you’ll only give it the room it needs to breathe.
It’s April and there are daffodils, but also it’s snowing.
All my pants are too long for me, because I am vertically challenged. This evening I gave up and took a pair of scissors and chopped the last six inches off the cuffs of a pair of baggy leggings that I got second hand from my older sister. They no longer get caught under my heels when I wear them around the house and they don’t bunch up around my ankles. This is a nice thing.
(Is it a look? Nobody else will think so. Will I ever get around to hemming them? No. Does it matter? I don’t really think so.)
This evening I’ve been hiding in my room, awkwardly dancing to the Tedeschi Trucks Band and painting my nails rather badly and binge watching Downton Abbey because Maggie Smith is a gem.
Also, Susan Tedeschi may sing me to sleep any time she likes. That’s all.
I’ve been stubbornly avoiding the work that needs doing for the analytical paper for modern philosophy that’s due around this time next week.
But that’s actually not true. I’ve finally gotten myself set up with meds and chocolate and a comfy chair and warm blankets and music and a knit cap and a tea candle and a purple pen and a lot of old notebooks and I’m *studying,* so help me.
I have almost everything that I need. Except anywhere near enough serotonin and/or dopamine.
I’ll take it.
I’ve been copying the notes that I took during the lectures. This class is Way Too Early In The Morning, so I don’t remember what was said during the lectures, and I don’t remember writing hardly any of this down. But the notes themselves are actually pretty good. They’re even occasionally legible. I’m impressed by this.
I’ve been taking a break but I’m about to try to write again, for a while.
This semester I’m working as a teaching assistant, for a logic class. A couple of weeks ago, I tried to lead part of a review session. I stayed up half the night trying to make a presentation that was good enough. But when the time came to get up and speak in front of an auditorium full of students, all of them looking down on me from above – I froze up and I couldn’t do it, and I asked one of the other TAs to take over before running away out of the room.
I found a corner somewhere to try to remember how to breathe, until somebody came and found me and picked me up and took me to somewhere comfortable to be. I was so mad at myself.
“It used to happen to me, too,” our prof tells me, kindly. “It gets better with time.”
“Maybe it’s good for the students to know that their teachers are humans with feelings who make mistakes,” a friend tells me, later.
Before I froze up and lost my voice, I managed to ask if anyone in the class was feeling confident with the material. About a third of the class raised their hands, which was a good thing. Then I asked if anyone was struggling and feeling super lost, and I promised not to judge them – I just wanted to know so that I could pick out the faces of the people who needed help.
Only one student raised a hand. Shyly, close in front of his chest, so that nobody else could see. I knew that he wasn’t the only one, but he was the only one who was brave enough to tell me. I shut down pretty soon after that. But afterwards, when I made it back into the room to find my things, he made eye contact and smiled at me.
The next week, he found me and asked me when my office hours were. And it took a little time, but he dropped by today. We got out the whiteboard and some markers.
He’d fallen behind in the class, but he’s also sharp as hell and doesn’t know it. He got every single practice problem right with almost no help at all – just somebody to sit there and smile when he asked if he was going about things the right way.
“I want to try some of these problems without help,” he tells me, so I leave the room for a minute to fill up a water bottle. When I got back, he’d gotten a problem wrong, and was frowning.
“Just as long as you’re here, I can do this,” he told me.
That isn’t the point, but it was still good to hear that again. It’s been a long time.
I have missed working with students. So much. The thing about students who need help is that they almost never ask.
But whenever they do, I will be there.
“She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
“Why are you constantly trying to seem like you’re better than everyone else?”
“Because I – well. Because I’m not used to feeling like I belong in the same room as someone like you. Because I think you’re completely amazing, and I don’t think I’m anything special. I think you’re way too amazing to even talk to someone like me. So I’m not trying to seem like I’m better than you. I’m trying to seem like I’m even remotely good enough to be your friend.”
Skipped school again yesterday and stayed home. I went walking past the postage signs, through the wetlands and the woods. Somehow it’s been almost two years since I’ve been back there. The place doesn’t seem to have changed. I walked, and I listened to stuff I’m meant to read for homework.
I found an app that will read (stolen) epub or pdf copies of the assigned readings out loud for me. Even though the computer’s voice is choppy and strange, it’s somehow not unsettling. I chose the lower tenor voice with the british accent and set the playback speed to a little faster than a regular speaking pace. My brain can – miraculously – attend to and process and understand what I’m hearing for long & mostly continuous stretches of time.
Between the meds and this useful bit of tech that I’ve just found, I might actually be able to keep up with the readings for my classes. This is game changing.
I have managed to BS my way through about three and a half semesters of philosophy without being able to keep up with the readings. I’ve had to get quite good at BSing, because I can’t make my brain concentrate on the task at hand when I sit down and try to read.
To the best of my knowledge, I am mostly getting away with this. The only prof who has called me out on my bullshit understands exactly what I’m doing because he spent most of the six years it took him to get his undergraduate degree skipping class and playing table tennis with his friends and I guess that it takes one to know one.
I’ve done my best. I can read enough to sort of know what’s going on some of the time, and most of what I’ve actually learned has come from lectures and seminars.
This is funny because I can sit down and read any halfway decent fantasy fiction book in a couple of days, any time, if I want to. I don’t know why. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just is what it is, and I’m learning to take it in stride.
This is also funny because it’s opposite of the way I got through a math degree. I zoned out every thirty seconds for four semesters of calculus and linear algebra and differential equations. My hands took notes, but I couldn’t pay attention well enough to listen. I had to be, like – knitting, sitting with my feet up on the seat of another desk or with my legs folded into a pretzel, drinking black coffee, probably drumming my fingers on the desk without realizing I was doing it, etc.. in order to be able to be present in that room at all.
It was all of the time spent working through the notes outside of class that helped me make sense of mathematics. But I suppose philosophy is easier in the form of the spoken word.
I’m not sure if I have a disability, or if the whole entire system is just less than user friendly for people whose brains are wired like mine. But since the system it’s going to change any time soon, I’m the one who needs to get creative about finding ways to learn within a system that isn’t designed for me.
Which sucks, because it takes me such a long time to find the things that help. But it’s good to find them wherever I can.
There’s a thick layer of cloud cover between me and the stars. It is almost stiflingly dark. Any light that escapes a streetlamp or stoplight doesn’t make it far from the source before getting lost in the gloom.
Black fog inside my head rises to meet the blackness pressing in against the windsheild. I feel incomprehensibly small and unimportant, and everything that matters seems flat and mechanical and cold.
I pull into the driveway and turn off the headlights.
There are peepers singing in the hallow. I can hear them.
There are is a string of Christmas lights around the roof of the front porch. There’s an austrian pine that’s much too wide for me to reach my arms around, still reaching for the sky.
I know that I’m going to come back and read this, later on. And so I will leave this here, in case there is ever a time when I need to read it:
I love you. I love you, and I’m going to try to take care of you. No matter what happens, whether you like it or not, you will always have me. I will be here when the rest of the world has moved on. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want to be anyone else. I would not trade this life for anything. I love you.
I hope it’s a good night.
This time last year, almost all of my classes were online. I was tuning into seminars over zoom from the back of my car, or from my chilly little attic bedroom. I would wrap myself in an old green vest with too many pockets, several blankets, and a shawl, and I would sit in front of my laptop and take part in conversations.
I learned about theories of knowledge at the knee of an old man with sharp edges and white hair and a white beard and spectacles and dark circles under his eyes.
We got along, at least for a little while, in spite of jarringly different worldviews.
“Always leave room for the possibility that you might be wrong,” he told us, over and over again. The message was not at all unkind, but it was persistent.
He was right, of course. But I used to want to argue with him about this.
“What if there’s such a thing as too much doubt?” I used to ask him.
He never gave me a satisfying answer.
Intricate and careful logic doesn’t always jive with the graceless intuitions of a very tired twentysomething who would much rather be trecking through the woods among the peepers.
There are so many questions that we don’t have answers for. There is so much that may never be certain. And that’s okay.
There are people who find joy in the process of trying to understand, and that’s good enough for right now.
I’ve often had dreams in which I felt sure that I was awake. How can I be sure that I’m not dreaming?
Say I have a dream that I am a butterfly. What if I actually am a butterfly, dreaming that I’m a human being?
How can I be sure that I’m not some kind of brain in a vat, hooked up to an incredibly powerful machine which simulates my sensory experience of the material world?
How can I be sure that an evil demon hasn’t bewitched me, tricked me, deceived me into experiencing the world in the ways that I do?
How do I know I’m not a character in a story?
How do I know that you’re real?
How do I know if I’m real?
–
This was the sort of puzzle that kept the lads up in the university busy, and sometimes even gainfully employed. 🧡
–
Meanwhile, the nurses made their rounds and tended to the sick and the dying.
The mother balanced babies on her hip, patched jeans when they’d gotten ripped, washed dishes with brittle soap, milked the goats, kneaded rosemary into the bread dough and let it rise under a towel in the warmth of a patch of sun.
The witches went to the woods to find a quiet moment alone.
The farmer watched the flooding and the insects in the fields. The sailor adjusted course to the prevailing wind. The plumber worked expensive magic over the pipes. The children played hop-scotch past the cigarette butts on the sidewalk, drawing faint and wobbley lines of yellow chalk.
Recall the taste of raspberries, exploding in your mouth. The breeze on your skin. A cat’s rough kisses. Raindrops, tangled in eye lashes.
Bodies on the streets of the city on the other side of the world.
–
Once in a while, dear one, get your nose out of that book and go outside.
I’ve wound up back among the friendships and the card games and the music and the fine conversations and the research papers and the due dates and the 8PM spaghetti and the coffee shop adventures and the liquor and the walks across the quad to class.
Between that world and me, there is a wall made out of glass.
I can see through it.
I can see them. Smile at them. Laugh with them, walk beside them, even hold them. I can imagine pleasant nonsense about lovely future times.
But I can’t be with them. I can’t be one of them. I don’t know how.
It makes me feel alone in the middle of a crowd.
Sometimes, when I sit down to write a paper for school, it’s as if I can see the entire cosmos on the inside of my head.
I only get snatches of clarity, and then it slips away – and then I have to work for it properly.
Writing down your thoughts is tricky business. You never know quite what you want to say till it’s already said.
The kettle on the stove sings an increasingly persistent song, and I can’t hear it – I have sunk too deep into a state of concentration, and my fingers keep on tapping away at the keys. The dog flops down and my feet. The wind howls over the roof and down across the valley. I am so grateful for these sturdy walls.
When I come back into the real world, out of the reverie, my limbs are numb from sitting still too long. I take a shower, bring a hot pack with me up to bed in the attic and cuddle up under the comforter with the cat for company.
I set about the chore of carefully disentangling myself from the constant cacophony of less than welcome thoughts, put them in a box under the bed and let them rattle away until the morning, as they do. They will sure as hell be there for me at any time.
Philosophy club hosted a meeting to debate whether or not there are more doors or wheels in this world.
It’s not like this is important, but also, this is the kind of shit we’ll remember later on down the road. The silliness. The willingness to get together and just be, for the hell of it, for the good time.
If every door has hinges, and if hinges might be considered wheels, then there will always be at least as many wheels as there are doors. If a door doesn’t necessarily need to have hinges, or if a hinge shouldn’t be considered a wheel, then we need to go back to the beginning.
We are almost unanimously team wheels. But we also took the time to think about why that might be the case. We got out a whiteboard and some markers and started defining terms and arguing over the minutia and trying to come up with counterexamples.
In the end, so much in any debate comes down to what we mean by the use of certain words. It’s sometimes helpful to slow down enough to clarify.
I think I have learned more about communication in my philosophy program than I have learned about philosophy.
I hope it’s a good night.
Took a mental health day. Skipped school and went to the woods.
Later in the evening, I drove through the dark to the store for some ice cream.
There was nobody at the store except for the high school student who was minding the cash register and dancing to the Justin Timberlake song on the radio when she thought nobody was looking. I almost stopped for long enough to tell her that I tremendously appreciated the dancing at work vibe. Almost.
I have a little time to myself. Something more than stolen moments around the edges, but not so much time that I can get lost in it and drift away.
I stayed up all of last night reading a book, because I couldn’t put it down.
This morning I had too much energy and needed to move, so I walked across the top of the hill and down into the hallow and I listened to the music I grew up with.
I’m sitting cross legged at the kitchen table and trying to put my life in order, properly. I have put this process off for a long time, and I’ve been dreading the state of affairs I would find myself in once I slowed down enough to take stock.
Once I got everything written out on paper, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed inside my head. That does seem to be the way of things.
Asking for help is the most difficult.
Friends tell me that there’s nothing wrong with reaching out for support. I grit my teeth and close my eyes and call my ego to heel and I trust them.
It would be so easy to let all my flaws and quirks and mistakes keep me from trying.
The tricky thing is to show up, and to show up imperfect and real.
I hope it’s a good night.
and they said “baby there ain’t no shortcuts on your way,
oh, baby there ain’t no highways in these parts.
you know baby gonna have to drive yourself down every little winding road
A long time ago, on the other side of the pond, I met a traveling man from Amsterdam. He snuck into our backpacker’s hostel after hours and tried to sleep in the loft above the common space so that he could get away with not paying for a place to sleep. The staff scolded him black and blue.
He forgot to remember that all the supermarkets in Germany are closed on Sundays, and so when Sunday rolled around, all he had to eat was bread and water. He joked that it was worse than prison food.
He had an odd charm, and I liked him.
This week, he is vacationing in Poland.
He shared photographs of train stations filled with people who are fleeing Ukraine. He stopped to talk to as many of them as possible, trying to understand how they are doing. He said he was trying to make them feel welcome.
His was not a reputable character and I would not take his stories at face value. But I think there’s room for a little truth. Enough.
I started this blog at 4am in the common space of a shady, dirt cheap youth hostel in Krakow. That was almost as far away from home as I’d ever been. East of here.
Much has happened since then, but if that place is still in operation, I wonder it’s filled with refugees.
I wonder if there are road weary people leaning their foreheads on the cool glass of the window in the bar downstairs, feeling haunted and small and scared.
The bus stations, the hostels, the markets, the streets – I have walked in some of those places. And that gives me goosebumps.
I snagged coffee with a person I would be honored to get to know better
I’ve been knitting in class. It helps me.
I have a warm coat my folks got me for Christmas
My family is safe and whole
I still have a vehicle that works when I ask nicely
My classes are lovely
I have friends…
We dropped by the candlelight service for peace in Ukraine. After a handful of opening remarks, folks were invited to speak.
An old woman sitting in the back stood up with something to say:
“There’s an old song that begins,
‘what the world needs now is love, sweet love.’
and it might not be enough on its own, but it sure would help.”
and she sat down again.
And then there was war, on the other side of the pond. I listen to interviews with families, fleeing, through my car radio.
Tomorrow in the evening there’s a candlelight vigil at the interfaith center at school. Some friends and I are going.
At school, there was cable knitting in the back row of the lecture hall beside a friend. There was sharing notes with an acquaintance in class. There was a lesson on the Shakespeare riots.
At home, there is the smell of baking chocolate chip cookies and burning beeswax candles and tomato sauce on the stove. Incense escapes below the crack of my sister’s bedroom door. The cat is purring. My fingers are absently picking away at guitar strings. Most of my family is close enough to reach out and hold, but some of them are much farther away.
I’m frightened.
Love you.
to all of my trans and nonbinary/genderqueer folks, and to their families, if you need to hear this today
because I did
I love you. If you need anything – anything at all – don’t for one second hesitate to reach out to me for help. If I can’t be there in that moment, I will help you find somebody who can. Your presence in this world, and in my life, is a beautiful thing. I hope you feel safe to be comfortably yourself wherever you are and whoever you’re with.
At home, I wear black pants, black socks, black boots, a purple beanie, a green jacket, and sometimes a black shirt with a picture of a spaceship hovering over the red rocks amphitheater and tractor, beaming the crowds into the sky.
I drive to school and back again. I listen to FM radio stations. I’ve been knitting in class.
I go to class and wish I’d done the assigned reading. Actually, I wish that *any of us* had done the reading.
I’m closer to broke than I’ve ever been, so I don’t buy food from the convenience store on the corner – I go to a friend’s apartment over an art gallery on main street and snag a bowl of something cooked with lentils and white pepper. We talk about ideas we don’t understand (but would understand better if we’d done the reading.) We discuss ways to make money under the table. I tell him that he smokes too much.
I have excellent dinner at home and that’s what tides me over until the next time there’s food.
There’s an acidic tang in the air today. As I walk from one class to another, I break into a run, backpack full of books and all.
Gas prices are skyrocketing.
I think the best gift I can give to a world that feels shaken right now is to stay solid and strong and unfuckwithable and genuinely kind.
I wish the cashier at the grocery store who said, “how’s it going, champ!” when I walked in the door could hear a lower soprano/higher alto voice come out from behind the mask on a body with a messy crew cut and a flat chest and small limbs covered in baggy clothes and not make that small moment of connection with a stranger into either a worried apology or subtle but distancing nonverbal cues of contempt.
I know it’s a small thing to wish for but also it totally isn’t.
Fucking – fortify. Gift yourself all the little things that you need in order to feel safe and comfortable with experiences that are new.
I’m not sorry for being unexpected in a way that makes you uncomfortable but I am sorry that any of us have to feel anything less than safe and okay when we stand side by side.
No matter who you are or where you’ve been or what you look like on the outside, no matter what the cadence of your voice is like when you’re feeling at home and comfy, I hope you get home safe tonight.
If there are walls between you and the dark and the cold and the bitterness outside, I hope they’re trustworthy, solid, strong walls that protect the well-being of you and yours. I hope the door stands firm in its frame, I hope the locks don’t break.
I hope that anyone, even the reaper, could come knocking and you could know that you don’t have to let him in unless you want to.
I hope you sleep safe and sound until the morning. I hope that you dream sweet dreams.
I hope that the unspoken expectation that tomorrow will go on being much like all the days before will be left peacefully intact,
And I hope that you go on living, sometimes without even stopping to notice that you’re alive, because you are so caught up in all the things that make that life important.
Once upon a time, I suspect that somebody decided to strap a couple of flat planks to her feet, the better to walk outside in the winter without sinking knee-deep into snow. As you do.
Later on, somebody else got bored and wondered what it would be like to strap a slightly fancier plank to his feet, the better to rocket down the side of a vertical snow-covered hill. For fun.
And then a whole bunch of other people saw him doing this and thought it looked like a fine idea, so they found their own planks, and it became a sort of game – a competition over who could make hurtling down impossible slopes with a plank strapped to their feet look the coolest.
I hadn’t suspected that humans could fly until tuning into the Olympic snowboarding qualifiers yesterday. Watching the folks who have mastered the art of launching themselves off high places at great speed, twisting themselves 900 degrees in the air before touching down as gracefully as birds do.
It’s enough to make me wonder. It is beautiful.
The opening ceremony in Beijing was beautiful, too, in a way. And it was sad, because they played the song Imagine and I wanted so badly for those words to come true, even a little.
But then the torch bearer was of Uyghur descent and the folks standing behind the man who spoke of peace and harmony stood perfectly still and smiled the whole time without moving an inch.
And I wish I understood, even though I suspect that I don’t want to.
I don’t want to believe that it isn’t going to be alright.
I don’t want to let myself believe that it will be, either, because I don’t want to be wrong.
I need a fine arts credit to fulfill all of the gen ed requirements for a bachelor’s degree from this tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere.
By the time I get around to registering for classes, the only fine arts class with an open seat is Theatre History II.
This was the second day of classes.
My professor is openly making fun of the Catholic church for banning cross dressing in theatre troops in the Spanish golden age. The church also tried to ban women in theater troops, because – of course they did. This effectively created an evolutionary pressure and we just – ended up with a whole bunch of particularly definant theatre troops in the spanish golden age. Which is excellent.
I am cracking up in the back of the classroom. I make eye contact with the professor and it becomes clear that they’re laughing too.
We split off into groups to work on a project and make introductions.
I asked everyone in my group if they went by any pronouns in particular, because I need this to be a normal conversation.
There were three different people who asked for different words, all in one small corner of a room. Three.
The church found it necessary to ban cross dressing in theatre troops in the 1600s. I suspect this has been a thing for a long time. But even a handful of years ago, I suspect that a safe conversation about a small collection of words would not have been a thing. Not in this part of the world.
That moment felt – basically safe and okay. I don’t think that it always has been. I think that in many places it still isn’t.
Bless all the people who went first. All the way back through the years, across generations. Bless all the ghosts of the people who couldn’t.
In the many months of hiding in my room, during this insufferable pandemic, I’d almost forgotten about the messiness of romance that inevitably happens when a bunch of twenty something children and assorted accomplices are thrown together in some of the newest and strangest chapters of their lives.
Christ, I am so tired.
Three years ago, I recognized that trying to be somebody’s partner hurts too much. For me.
Trying to be with somebody I actually like is much, much worse, because I’m too smart to believe that I’m not going to make an enormous mess of things and lose the companionships that matter most to me in this world.
At least, back then, that’s how I was feeling. That feeling has never quite gone away.
It has been well over three years since I promised myself not to try for a partner again until after I’d finished knitting a sweater.
I’d never made a sweater, before I made this promise. I didn’t know how. So before I put myself through another companionship, I needed time to learn.
If I couldn’t teach myself how to make something halfway decent from scratch with my own hands, then I also probably shouldn’t be trying to navigate the tricky strangeness of that sort of promise with an entirely seperate human being.
I haven’t done much knitting, since.
It’s not that I haven’t had time.
I did successfully crochet a sweater, at one point. I wanted to know if I could. It was messy and terrible and far too big for me, but it vaguely resembled an article of clothing. I loved it so much.
But crocheting and knitting, as everyone knows, are two entirely different passtimes, and so I was safe from the obligation of pursuing a partnership.
There have been friends. There have been quiet, ridiculous hopes. There have been butterflies, in unexpected but not at all unhappy moments.
There have been exhausted retreats from the world back to the safety of my attic room with the weighted blanket and the soft comforter and this sweetheart of a cat because closeness sometimes hurts too much.
In all of that time, I am sure there were many hands that would have been lovely to hold.
In all of that time, there were all of two people who made me pause for long enough to think seriously about getting the knitting needles out of the trunk that is tucked against the far wall of the attic. You don’t meet that sort of person every day, I suppose.
Don’t ever settle, a friend told me, once. But that’s not it. That is so far away from being the point.
There are some people who will probably never stop being frustratingly beautiful. Closeness hurts. Feelings are complicated. Navigation is extraordinarily difficult. I have such a hard time talking to anyone about this.
You will go through this life in your own way, and in your own time. And that’s okay.
There’s more than one way to love and be loved.
Ane so, for right now, I’m still not knitting a sweater.
I’m keeping my eye out for some yarn that is soft and acrylic and dark green. I’ve never knitted socks in my whole life and I would be so disappointed with myself if I didn’t learn how in this lifetime. Also, there’s a baby blanket that is long overdue, and a scarf I’ve been meaning to work on.
This morning, I went to the mall with friends. We went ice skating.
I learned how to skate when I was eight or nine years old. It was so much fun, and it was also a long time ago.
My body still knew how, but it took me a minute to remember. If there were pathways – or connections between neurons that knew how to skate, somewhere in my brain – they were buried deeply.
It has to do with balance, which has to do with how you carry yourself. Hold yourself together. Arrange the various limbs until you don’t feel like you’re falling, and keep adjusting them in little ways throughout. Shift your weight from one side to the other, in order to move forward.
Be wobbley. Be willing to fall on your ass and look like an idiot, over and over again, and feel awful in the morning. If you’re willing to fall, you might find it easier to try things that require more balance than usual.
I wasn’t exactly flying. Something closer to hobbling quickly over the ice.
When I’m spooked, it is much harder to move. My brain is powerful. If I’ve gotten it into my head that I can’t do well at something, then I probably won’t.
I can’t afford to be spooked or frozen. The things I’m trying to do are too important.
It’s not about believing in myself so much as telling the part of me that does not and never will believe to quiet down, no matter how loudly it’s screaming that I won’t last two seconds if it isn’t there.
We went ice skating.
There were pop songs playing in the background. I got sweaty. I learned how to move in a different way. I was with beloved people. It was good.
I felt happy. I worked harder than I have in a long time. I am exhausted.
I think it’s important to learn how to say, “I don’t know.”
Alternatively, you could lie.
Act. Pretend. Put on a performance.
Take pride in being a talented con artist
Carefully master the art of bullshitting,
Wear different personalities and attitudes like masks
Whatever you need to be, whenever you need to be it
Blend into your surroundings like a chameleon
Reflect the people around you back at themselves
Split yourself in at least two pieces –
The mask you show to the world,
And the face underneath it that few people ever get to see
At least two pieces.
Each piece is just as much a part of you as the next
Even as you pretend to be something you’re not.
Knowing how to do this is powerful.
Strategically useful, for one thing.
And it’s a gift – because people who have to lie in hundreds of little ways all the time might better appreciate what it means to be genuine, and know how much it means to be trusted when somebody else is comfortable enough to be himself in their presence
I’ve always suspected that everyone is just pretending
Pretending as hard as they can, all the time
Pretending they believe or comprehend
About everything. Morality, attraction, body language, the spoken word, the taste of wine.
How we’re supposed to feel, and what we are
And some people are just… so much better at pretending than others
They’ve gotten so good [at pretending] that they don’t even know that they’re doing it
Or maybe they do know, but they’re afraid to admit it
Because everyone is so good at pretending
That everyone else feels impossibly alone.
And then there are the people – hello – who are frequently awful at pretending
[except for the odd moment when everything clicks]
These are the ones who like strange things, think strange things
People who’ve been looked at sidelong with impatience all their lives
By other people, people who work so hard at pretending that they no longer know how to stop
and it bothers them to stumble across people who don’t always know how
I’m not sure if I fully comprehend the difference between my own subjective experience and the experience of somebody else.
I don’t know what it feels like for them.
Probably a lot like what it feels like to be me, except… less cinnamon and more nutmeg and a total absence of ginger and a little too much salt. Different ratios.
I can try to understand. I can probably learn to do this well, over time.
It took two years of feeling cut off from everyone I know to even begin to understand
How many different ways there are to be a person
How many different ways there are to pretend
And that it’s possible to be connected to people who are different from me
Without needing to change who I am
Or panic and freeze up, from trying
To manage the things that I think that they think
And I think it’s important to work out how to say, “I don’t know.”
Once a year, sometime in November, the WARM 101.3 radio station in changes from top 40 pop music and soft rock to what is essentially just Mariah Carey’s ~ All I Want For Chrismas ~ repeating on a never-ending loop. This year, I have been turning the radio dial past that station every time I’m driving and listening and looking for a song.
We watched White Christmas. My sister is listening to an audio recording of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I haven’t taken the time to listen to John Denver & the Muppets CD.
I cut down a tree, for the house. It’s covered in colorful lights and familiar ornaments. I think I owe the universe about 22 trees, so far. None of this stuff about paying someone else to plant a tree halfway across the world. I need to plant them myself, somewhere I can go back and visit.
The sun’s hanging low in the south for what seems like just a handful of hours at a time. The nights start out early and drag themselves out for as long as possible. I know that there are still and quiet places, hidden under the shelter of the pine trees. There are impossibly dark, cold corners behind dumpsters in the back allys of the villiage where it’s possible to look up and see Orion’s belt.
I could sit here and write about the feeling of not feeling the way I’m supposed to feel around Christmas. But I’m sort of rejecting the notion that there is a way that I ought to be feeling at this time of year, I think. I’ve decided to let that one go.
From 10,000 feet up, I would rather enjoy the time that I’m living through now than feel sad because I’m not feeling the childhood magic that there used to be.
It comes down to perspective.
“Every so often, I look down at the blue veins on the inside of my wrist and remember they’re blue because of a molecule called hemoglobin which is responsible for carrying oxygen to my cells, and that hemoglobin contains trace amounts of iron, and iron can only be forged in the heart of a star that is dying. And so those blue lines on my wrist are literally full of stardust, which became part of the earth when it formed 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago, and traveling at the speed of light, which is as fast as it is possible to travel, it would take 81,000 years to get to the nearest star aside from the sun, and that is only the beginning. This makes all of the problems on the surface of this exceptional little planet seem smaller, somehow, and perhaps more important for all of their smallness – because of all the possible lives I could have lived, I ended up living this one. Might as well make the most of it while I’m here.”
[This is an excerpt from a paper that I just wrote for a class about Ethics, which I am going to miss.
*For the sake of acememic integrity, I feel like I need to point out that the stardust-in-our-veins concept was shamelessly stolen from a post that I found on tumblr a couple of years ago. I have a friend who gets cranky about misattributed quotes and I can’t stop hearing his voice in my head telling me to get out of bed and go downstairs and fix this, so – here. Have a paper trail. Love you.
If we fall out of touch, our connection will slowly fade away to nothing. That connection is made of an exchange of attention and togetherness, and… nothing else. That’s all.
Like making footprints in the sand when the tide is low. After the water rises and falls away again, it’ll all be gone.
A hopefully less terrible take:
The mark that you left on my life changed my everything, and it made me into the person that I am. No matter what happens, nothing can change that.
You scratched your initials in the cement of the sidewalk outside of my door before it had time to dry. I see them every day when I leave and every day when I come home, and they remind me of you often. When the pavement crumbles to dust and my eyes are dim, that connection will go on existing, because my friendship isn’t something you can lose.
A long time ago, I made a blog post about taking responsibility for my own conscience, instead of adhering to somebody else’s value system in order to belong.
The premise was that it’s better to carry a moral compass in my own hands, because nobody else ought to be doing that for me.
I still think that’s true, but also I think there is more to the story. There usually is.
A personal sense of right & wrong is deeply intertwined with our connections to other people, other lives.
The conscience that is built alone, from scratch, is always going to be missing something.
I have found that letting a stranger’s story tug at my heartstrings hard enough to change my mind is a potent kind of magic. It almost feels too powerful for one person to hold.
Holding my moral compass in my own hands is sensible, but it won’t help me get where I’m going unless I’ve got a map of the world to navigate by.
If I tried to draw that map based only on where I’ve been and what I’ve been through, it would be a terrible map. Even with the best compass in the world, that map would still get me ridiculously lost all the time.
I think that map ought to be woven from a thousand voices and perspectives and stories that aren’t mine.
Listen as hard as you can, all the time, and let the things you hear and understand inform your perspective. Seek out the masters of storytelling and poetry. Ask the librarians. Talk to the children, the elders, the stranger sitting across from you, the people you’ve known for a long time without ever knowing them well.
It’s alright, you are still allowed to have a mind that is full of questions. Nobody can ever take that away from you.
Dear one, you’ve got two ears, and you’ve only got one mind.
For the last few days, I’ve felt shaken and tired. I’ve been haunting the comfy chairs in the loft of the public library, drifting up the hill to sit at the base of a tree in the cemetary, walking along the tops of high brick walls on the hill at the college like balance beams. I have been thinking too much.
Two days ago, when I got home, I locked myself in the attic. Cried a little, snacked on dark chocolate, drank Irish whiskey (plenty) straight out of the bottle, listened to old albums full of melancholy songs, wrote out a poem with a similar vibe. I cleaned my room all the way to the corners, and then I read a practical guide on using unexpected stratagies to take down entire dictatorships with as little collateral damage as possible. As one does.
(I really should go back and read the Watch books, again, some of these days.)
By the time I let myself out of the attic, I was feeling much steadier.
This evening, I drove through the snow and the far-too-early darkness to pick up some dumplings from the restaurant in the little town at the edge of the lake. The car was almost out of gasoline, and it was cold enough to need gloves between my fingers and the steering wheel. I got lost twice, even though I knew how to get where I was going. A radio program called Acoustic Café was playing, as I navigated twisted back roads in the dark. It helped me.
And, just like that, it is winter.
My family sat down together at the table, with the dog laying down under our feet, and we talked. That doesn’t happen as often as it used to. It was nice to have their company.
I haven’t been answering my phone. It hasn’t been ringing. That’s okay with me, right now.
I know I have friends. I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not, to belong and be loved. I have loved ones who have seen me at my worst and still somehow bring out the best in me, without even knowing they’re doing it, without knowing how much it matters to me. There are people in this world who are worth staying alive for; not just staying alive, but really living…
I still don’t know how this happened. I am just glad that it did.
I’m so glad I have a sense of humor. I’ve graduated from “I hope nothing bad happens” to “I hope whatever happens is at least funny” and it is fucking keeping me sane.
I am also appreciating whatever it is that allows me to look at the darkest and most upsetting things in the universe and see them for what they are without falling apart.
This past new moon, I managed to get myself outside to look at the stars. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
It was cold out there, but I found long underwear and warm socks and boots and a comfortable sweater. Stayed plenty warm enough.
I turned off the porch light & walked out into the back yard, as far away from the lights in the windows of the house as possible. The dew on the grass was frosting over. I found a plastic lawn chair and carried it out with me, so that I could rest.
Orange light from the city tinges the sky, to the north. The light from house windows are a bit south of me. There was still plenty to see.
Watching the arms of the galaxy, letting my eyes connect the dots in interesting patterns.
It’s funny – this used to make me feel small.
I still feel small, but it’s a different kind of smallness.
In all of the vastness of the universe, of all of the possible ways to exist and experience this place, of all possible lives, I ended up living this one.
This is the life I have. This is the only life I’m ever going to have. I really ought to make the best of it.
All my friends are feeling low, this week – scattered and worried and tired. Three of them told me about feeling like they didn’t want to be here anymore.
I know how that feels.
and it just – I’ve been noticing recently that for the first time in what feels like a long time, I don’t want to die.
look up, little one… look up and live.
And that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s how I’ve been.
I saw a couple of shooting stars. I saw the brightness of the planet hanging low in the southwest. I looked out at the sprinkling of lights across the hills, to the east of here, and thought about how each one of those little points of light is a home.
Down the road, a neighbor set off a single firework. I turned around just in time to see it.
And then I heard coyotes crying, and I didn’t feel scared. There’s a warm house with study walls right next to me, so I know that I’ll be okay.
it was time to go, and I went inside and made some tea
This evening I drove out to the college through the rain, through the wet darkness that seemed to suck away at the headlights until it’s almost impossible to see.
I found a parking place in the lot behind the auditorium, and I walked down the hill to a door in the side of one of a handful of old brick buildings. There were wet leaves all over the sidewalk.
Inside the building, there is a room.
I drove all that way because I have a key to this room. Once a week, in the evenings, I unlock the door and prop the door open, and I turn on the lights, and sometimes I open the windows.
And when people start to show up, I greet them. Say hello to the familiar faces, welcome the new ones. I have to wear a certain personality in order to do this well, which isn’t easy, but I suppose it’s good practice.
We get a scraggly bunch of students, one or two faculty members. Some of them have started to show up more regularly. It’s encouraging to see.
This week, we talk about the history of the electric chair, state sanctioned executions, depictions of death in the media, the attack on the world trade center, eugenics, prisons, the Holocaust, the medicalization of the death penalty, the Milgram experiments, a book called The Agent of Death, and the fact that veterinarians have the highest rate of suicide among the medical professions.
Considering the darkness of the subject matter, the tone of the conversation is remarkably open, curious, considerate, kind, and solid. When we talk about death, we remember that one day we are all going to be gone. Sometimes, in the right context, that can bring out a certain goodness in people.
But there’s also a creepy feeling, left over, after the conversation is over. It’s enough to make me scan the empty room an extra time before turning out the lights and locking the door behind me. It’s enough to make me look back over my shoulder, once, as I walk across rainy darkness and wet leaves on the pavement.
I’m not one for looking over my shoulder in the dark. I’m probably the scariest thing out there.
Every day, I make sure to laugh. I have conversations with interesting people, and we talk about strange and wonderful ideas. I am always trying to look at people and really see them. I am thinking of the friends that I’m so lucky to have met, always.
Every day, I walk from one place to another and notice my footsteps. I flop down on the grass and look up through the tree branches, or stretch out on the floor and rest. I look up at the sky in the evening.
I notice the universe, and I am awestruck.
I look at art that makes my brain happy. I listen to music that makes my heart sing. I mostly read books that make me want to throw them across the room. I think messy and intricate and terrible thoughts all the time.
At home, I catch a hug from my mom or dad, in passing. I listen to my kid sister when she talks about her day.
I scratch the dog behind her ears, scritch the calico cat under her chin, and cuddle with my tabby for a while before I fall asleep.
I am burning beeswax candles, and the air in my room is cleaner. Easier to breathe.
My brain has latched onto some horrible thoughts, which are seeping through the rest of me in the shape of a horrible feeling. This feels like… like the shock of accidentally drinking tea that’s gone bad a couple of days ago. My nervous system is stubbornly determined not to let this shit go, and it’s getting to be decidedly uncomfortable.
There are times when I have a clear sense of direction, and the ground under my feet is comfortably solid. This is becoming more common.
But sometimes there are moments when I’m navigating blind, without a compass… and the world, when I can feel it there at all, keeps sliding away from me.
It depends on the weather.
The tough thing, I think, is to keep going. Even when I feel shaken and lost.
Other people have gods to turn to. In the absence of certainty, at least there is some kind of faith.
The faith that I do have mostly belongs to the trees and the stars and all the things about the universe that won’t be discovered until after I’m gone, if they’re ever discovered at all. This world is so beautiful. It helps keep me wanting to stay.
I have this notion that even if I don’t know what I’m doing, even if I make a terrible mess of everything, I will somehow be able to figure things out, and learn, and grow, and repair things if they get broken, and grieve properly when things are lost.
Even if I’m wrong, it’s nice to think that I might not be.
A much harder thing to believe is that the same kind of resilience can exist between and among people who care for each other.
I have seen broken understanding and awkwardness and resentment and exhaustion tear companionships to pieces. I have lived through this. I think most people have.
I was just a kid, and it bruised me a little.
It does me so much good to stumble across old companionships that are still beautiful.
Not because they’ve lasted a long time, exactly. Time isn’t the thing that matters. The things that’ve happened in all of that time… those mean everything, I think.
Some of the things that happen over time are going to be difficult. That’s how it goes.
And so, when I find things that are lovely that have also existed for a while… I think about all of the things that they must have been through. Made it through. Scratched up and dented and held together with tape and string in some places, but more or less whole, and still laughing.
This gives me more hope that I can put into words.
When I feel completely frozen, I can always prove myself wrong. The smallest motion is enough to prove that I’m not frozen.
Even if I don’t get everything done… a little at a time is better than nothing. It is so much easier to get things done after I’ve started working on them.
I can do just about anything for two minutes.
Sometimes it is necessary to stand outside in the cold for a moment, to take a hot shower, to listen to music and dance and sing along, to take a turn around the room.
Grounding myself in my body might not actually be as helpful as using my brain for something that is comforting. A book is a wonderful escape.
It is okay to rest.
One day, I’ll get to tell the stories about these moments, and it’s up to me to decide how those stories are going to go.
So if I’m going to work on a thing, I might as well do the best that I can to make it into something amazing. Purely for the sake of collecting quality storytelling material.
It sounds like work, but in the words of an excellent storyteller – it is my life’s work.
A friend said that I have something to add to this world that nobody else does, and the world would miss that something it if wasn’t there. I don’t know what that is yet.
There is only one way to find out.
…I think it begins with the first two minutes of this godforsaken pile of homework.
if I open the upper half of my attic window, I can lean out and look upwards. lots of moonlight and cloud cover at the moment, and I don’t have a clue where my glasses have got to. but the stars in the eastern sky are still there. I’d be worried if they weren’t.
for the first time in a while, the air smells like winter is coming. cold and sharp. it feels too soon, but then again it’s not unheard of for late October. I keep hearing rumors that this coming winter will be one for the history books and I am a little bit too excited about this.
a swirl of memories – colors and smells. hot cocoa. itchy wool scarves and hats and boots a size too big, for growing into. dragging a sled through the pine trees. laying in the snow, looking up at the sky. climbing over the drifts. footprints.
there are at least four (4) people that I would dearly love to challenge to a snowball fight, at the moment. you’re one of them. this is partly because I am sure I could win; I’m a decent shot with quickly handmade, sadistically cold projectiles.
but also, I’ve decided against growing up, because it is boring and stupidly difficult. If you need me I’ll be playing outside.
I might spend less time hurting if I had a thicker skin.
I could leave cuts and bruises to fester, let scar tissue creep over the wounds…
I could build the walls higher,
Lock myself in a tower
And sleep for a hundred years.
I could wrap harshness around me, like a coat, against the wind
Carefully presenting an image of indifference
Could I be safe, after all this time
*
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but only words can hurt me.
*
Hard, brittle things crack under pressure.
Softness doesn’t break.
Strength, toughness, resilience…
These things are not won by the people who lock their hearts away for safekeeping, who have numbed the pain until they can’t feel anything at all.
Even if they seem unbreakable on the outside, it comes at a price.
Close your eyes and tilt your face towards the sun.
Unlock the doors, push down the walls like dominoes
Go to the healers, care for the wounds.
Cry, if you need to, if words have ever hurt you, if you buried the pain long ago. Let it out, let it unravel, let it dissolve, and then breathe in the relief.
It’s okay, here, and you can come back any time you need.
I am starting to think that the strongest people in the world are probably also the most unexpected.
I am using up an average of one and a half composition notebooks per week. When I sit in class and listen in on the discussions, my right hand is constantly taking notes – practically flying over the pages. When I have a thought that seems important and doesn’t align with the direction the conversation should be going, I write it down. For later.
If you asked me, I probably couldn’t even tell you what I’d just written down, because I am carefully listening. When I flip back through the notes that I took a couple of days ago, I find interesting thoughts that I have no recollection of thinking. It’s like reading something that someone else wrote, but I recognize my voice.
There is a rough, round bump on the first knuckle of the third finger of my right hand, because that’s where the pen rests most of the time. It’s a writer’s callus. It gets red and raw when I hold on too tightly, but it doesn’t hurt.
I’m a little bit proud of that. It’s like… the work that I love to do most in the world left a mark on me. A real mark, something I can touch.
When I need to reach for the confidence of knowing that even if I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, in this moment, I will somehow be able to figure it out…
Late last night, I crawled out of the attic window and onto the slanted edge of the roof. The wind was persistent, stong gusts tugging at my center of gravity, pushing my hair out of my face.
It was cold up there, but I couldn’t feel it. I could only feel the wind.
From there, lying down on the roof, looking up – I can watch the sky. Not just the stars, but the clouds that drift across them, the moonlight, and the swirling of the shadows.
The roof, beneath me, is comfortably solid. And the wind in my hair is a magic that’s hard to describe.
Those two sensations, in tandem – the freedom and the safety, the comfort and the thrill… it’s a rare thing, to strike that balance. And it’s beautiful, when it happens.
I have no idea how long I was out there, letting myself be rocked in the cradle of the sky.
The timelessness was broken when my cat poked her nose out of the window, anxiously, wondering what I was doing, wondering if everything was alright. I noticed that I’d gotten stiff, got up, and ducked inside.
I’m not afraid to be alone; not anymore. But I’m so glad that she is with me.
I know how another person is going to respond to the things I do and say, before I do or say anything.
I know what other people are thinking and feeling, even if they never tell me… in body language or in stories or in words.
It feels so real, inside my head…
It seems so real that unless I am careful, I don’t even wonder if I might be wrong about things.
I am so sure of myself that I don’t even bother to ask you how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. I don’t give you a chance to speak for yourself, and so I never have a chance to hear what you would say.
And this would be fine if I actually knew what you were thinking, but I don’t.
Not everybody thinks in the same way that I do, and so unless I listen to the way that you think, I am always going to be missing something.
Since I already know what’s going to happen, and I know it isn’t going to end well, I’ll just… bend space and time and matter around me to make damn sure that a sad future never comes true.
And this would be fine, too, if I could actually see into the future. That would be fucking useful.
Except that I can’t. I can’t know what is going to happen before it does.
I am usually wrong about things, even and especially when they make perfect sense inside my head. The inside of my head is hilariously devoid of context. My perceptions are distorted, and they’re always going to be.
I can’t know what is going to happen before it does.
I know this. Because even when I put everything I have into the abortion of sad endings, they usually happen anyway… even if they don’t happen in the way I expect. Sometimes one sad ending happens precisely because I was trying to stop a different one from coming true.
And so… I cannot read your mind, I cannot predict the future and I cannot predict how you are going to respond to the things I do and say.
And so I missing something, I am always missing something, unless I am able to bring myself to talk to other people. And that’s hard for me to do.
I am learning that I’m not a telepathic precog, but I am learning that the hard way.
For fuck’s sake, stay true to yourself and don’t pretend to be somebody else, because otherwise what is the point.
For fuck’s sake, don’t lie and pretend like you don’t care for somebody when you do. If you lie well enough, there’s a chance they might actually believe you.
And for fuck’s sake, kid, give the people around you a little credit. Let them surprise you with their kindness, especially when you don’t see it coming.
Listen to that feeling, the one that isn’t sure that you’re right to be worried. Listen well. And then go looking for those answers, when you’re ready.
There is so much potential for joy, and laughter, and understanding, and love. And it’s worth the risk of a sad ending to imagine that they might be there, even when you can’t see them.
It’s a Tuesday in September and I hope it’s a good stretch of time.
Go outside. Practice getting too hot, too cold, covered in sweat and bugbites and mud and rain and dust.
Lay down on floor *as much as possible.*
Look up at the stars. Connect the tiny points of light with imaginary lines.
Cook with rice, corn, black beans, avacado, cheeeese. Hot sauce is especially important.
Every night, read a book until you fall asleep and drop it on your face.
As you read the things you have to read for school, write questions all over the pages.
The answers you find on the internet will probably not be as interesting as the insights that are already there in your head. Go looking for those when you can.
Notice when things are objectively absurd, and find the humor that exists there.
Write because you have something to say.
The things you have to say might become more interesting if you spend more of your time listening.
Put your blankets outside in the sun, when it isn’t raining. They will smell nicer.
Give yourself a break from whatever hurts the most. Set it down, even for just a moment. It’ll still be there when you come back.
Classes are starting in a couple few weeks and it just landed on me the other day I am now in my senior year of college. It took me longer to get here than I expected, but here we are.
I have a persistent feeling that there was a right way to do this thing, the college thing, and that I didn’t do things that way.
It wasn’t what I expected.
It was living at home with my mom and dad, commuting instead of living on campus, driving in every kind of weather, listening to my car radio.
Making friends.
Buying textbooks so well-used they were falling apart, with notes from previous readers in the margins. Using the printers at school because there wasn’t one at home, using a tablet instead of a laptop for three solid years. Never, ever taking out loans, even if it meant bending over backwards and turning my life inside out to pull it off.
Obsessing over keeping my GPA in the 3.9’s, but never asking for help with a single writing assignment even when I really needed that help. Spending all the free time that I had giving that kind of help to other people, and hoping that it counted for something.
Working on campus, living in learning centers, working a total of seven different jobs over the course of five years.
Zoning out every thirty seconds in class, all the time. Objectively admirable procrastination abilities. Debilitating anxiety over deadlines and exams. An actual existential crisis when I got a 75 on a term paper, that one time.
Doing the best that I could.
Listening, and asking questions, and speaking up when I had something to say.
Earning scholarships from every department of every program that I was ever enrolled in. And then some.
Knitting in class. Countless $1.07 mugs of black coffee from the cafeteria. Walking with friends by the lake.
Favorite grey jacket, a green lanyard with my car keys, old flip phone, wallet from a dollar store, and a chipped coffee mug. So many composition notebooks, a thousand different favorite pens.
Earning a two year degree in mathematics with honors and crying at graduation because I didn’t want to leave that place.
Somehow believing, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that I wasn’t bright or resilient enough to carry on down the path I’d been walking. Walking away.
Accidentally taking a gap year, because I didn’t know what to do next. Somehow, traveling the world, a little
Staring in abject horror at the state of the world and not being able to look away, and not being able to process any of it with any kind of grace.
Stubborn determination to go back and finish the school that I’d started, no matter how much time or work it took, no matter how hard it was to remember why it mattered, no matter how strange it turned out to be.
Transferring schools during a pandemic, zoom meetings and online classes with professors I will never meet.
Studying in the back of my car.
Laying in the grass, under a tree, barefoot, eating a salad I packed at home and reading a book for class.
It wasn’t what I expected. I don’t think I was ever sure what to expect.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “if I could go back and do it all again, I wouldn’t change anything.”
But that isn’t true, because I would. Hypothetical mechanics of time travel aside, I think that’s just an interesting way of telling people that you haven’t learned anything.
If I could go back…
But I can’t. So that isn’t useful.
I am a senior in college and I don’t know how to put into words how good it feels to finally be able to say that.
It’s been a long time.
I am almost through. At least for a while.
I don’t think that knowing what I want to do is as important as I used to think it was. I like the idea that it’s okay to make things up as I go along, and keep finding interesting things to do until I die.
I don’t know where I want to end up, or how to get there, but I do know what I want to do next.
This fall I’m taking five 300/400 level classes. They will focus on the subjects of nonviolence, medicine, environmental issues, and genocide. The fifth class is statistics, because I am one class away from a math minor and it would be silly not to just go for it.
~~~ I am a terrible hippie and should be banished to the 1960’s as soon as possible ~~~
It is going to take lots of showers, naps, snacks, chats, cats, meds and water to get me through the heaviness of the things I’ve just signed up to think and talk and read and write about for four months.
But I think I’m going to be okay.
One day at a time, until Christmas, and then… one day at a time, until June.
I’m stretched out on the ground outside my parents house. The sun isn’t setting yet, but it’s about to be.
Right now, in this moment, everything makes so much sense. I feel at peace.
I’m laying here thinking there’s no way I’m going to be able to remember this later
I am thinking in words, which is normal for me. But if I try to hold onto those words for long enough to say them out loud, or write them down… something will get lost in translation, and it won’t be the same.
This morning there was news about a report on the state of things, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Conversations about this are happening in the newspapers and on the radio.
It seems like things are heating up in here.
*
Life on Earth is stubbornly resilient.
It also exists within this delicate balance of environmental conditions that it needs to have, in order to survive.
The best science we’ve got is telling us to stop fucking messing with that balance, because we’re already losing it, teetering, swaying dangerously, and now we have built up enough momentum that there might not be a way to slow it down.
People tell me that the planet is actively dying
the bird was flying too fast when it hit the window and the only thing to do is give it somewhere comfortable to be and
The planet under my feet is made of rocks and dust, and she will go on spinning through outer space for a good long time, no matter what happens to the life that exists on her back. Astronomers think there is probably going to be a moment sometime in the distant future when the Earth falls into the sun, and maybe that’s another kind of dying.
But I think that death, in some ways, belongs to the living
Death belongs to the sparrows and the crickets, and the dandelions, the terriers, tabby cats, whales, trout, chipmunks, swans, herons, bees, monkeys, oysters, kelp, bears, snakes, spiders, bats, mushrooms, moss, and human beings
Queen anne’s lace, and goldenrod and yarrow, plantain and clover and black eyed susan and burdock and sunflowers and ferns
The oak trees and the pumpkins, and the blue corn and the beans
All these things that came into being because once, in the very beginning, carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen held hands and danced in interesting ways
It would a be such a shame to see those things go, because they are beautiful. Every single one of those endings is a sad ending, a tough goodbye, and a great loss.
But everything is temporary. In order for a word to be spoken out loud, there has to be silence before, and silence afterwards.
I am thinking about the weeds growing up through the cracks of a pavement, in the most polluted city in the world.
Life is resilient.
*
There will be other moments to talk about what we can do, about how to take care of each other when the weather is bad, when the fires are burning and the rain won’t come, or when the flood just washed away somebody’s home.
There will be other moments for sitting down and learning more about what the science is telling us right now, and what it all means
There will be other times to talk about how to stop fucking with this delicate balance.
*
For right now… late last night, or early this morning, there was news about a report on the state of things
And I just needed to let that land on me, and let it move through.
I hope it’s a good night.
“Baseline perception of reality is a playground for the devil and the sicked
We, just as Jesus, perservere in the face of the wicked
Some are, or have become, as crazy as all hell
A life of endless wanting is a life of never well.
Before it’s too late we much fix what is not right
Do unto others what you would like
What you would like done unto you
And act in full contemplation of what true love would, or would not do
Whether you are a corporation, government, or a person.”
I live in a galaxy, one that’s flat and round and spirals outward
I live in a solar system where many rocks and several planets orbit a single star.
On one of those planets, which happens to be the third one out from the star in the middle, there is a strange thing that we call life. Basically, some interestingly shaped molecules on the surface of the rock sat up and started to breathe, and eat, and eventually move around by themselves
And some of the things that are alive have evolved to the point at which they’ve become aware that they are living.
(Hello! That’s me. I’m one of those.)
The thing about life is that it is temporary. It comes into being, and then it exists for a finite amount of time, and then it doesn’t.
I’m only going to exist for a little while. There is going to be a time when I don’t exist, anymore. There’s going to be a moment that is the last moment that I am aware of my own existence, just like there was a moment that was the beginning.
Between those two moments…
There is the living of the life, and the life of the living.
I get to look up, and look around, and become aware of things happening outside of me.
I’m aware of the shape of the rock that’s under my feet, and the universe that is everywhere. This is mostly because I am a living thing that moves around, and if I wasn’t aware of the shape of the universe, I would be constantly bumping into things all of the time.
Inefficient, if nothing else.
I am also aware of the existence of other living things, and I am aware of the way that being around them makes me feel.
There is this thing that happens when two or more living things are together in the same space. Sometimes, there is an agreement to help each other keep on living, in one way or another, or at least to have a better time while we’re here.
The connection that is forged in the wake of that agreement is a powerful thing.
It might not be a thing that matters very much, compared to the stars and the galaxies and the universe
but from the perspective of a tiny speck of consciousness in a universe where I keep fucking bumping into things all the time, and from the perspective of a consciousness that knows that one day it will cease to exist and I don’t get to know when that’s going to happen, yet
it is something that matters, to me, and it’s something that matters very much.
When you think about it, it is so amazing that any of this ever existed at all.
I am so glad that the stuff of the universe eventually formed itself into the shape of a friend.
I hope that you’re having a good time, while you’re here.
I turned on the radio this morning, and these words and phrases were repeating:
Delta varient, case numbers, ventilators and ICU beds, vaccinations, arms, mask mandate, virus transmission, social distancing, CDC guidelines, vulnerable demographic, children under twelve…
Felt eerily like turning on the radio in March of 2020. I was even driving the same direction down the same stretch of road.
We are not through this thing, yet. And that reality kind of smacked me in the face today.
Folks in the part of the world where I am sort of collectively started trying to move forward into a way of life that felt like the way things used to be. It felt too soon, in the beginning, and it still does. But there was this moment… after the vaccinations. There was this moment when the restrictions started lifting, when we started to be able to see each other again, when I almost began to feel safe. I started to relax into life again without thinking about the virus at all.
And I, just… I don’t think that’s a thing I can let myself do yet. Not completely.
So many of the things I’m used to doing don’t really need to be done. And sometimes, when I have to, I can let things go for a while and still keep living. I know this because I already have.
It’s simple, but not always easy to do.
I have missed dancing. I’ve missed laying on the floor and talking with friends. I’ve missed school, and I’ve missed working. I’ve missed the library, and the coffee shops. I’ve missed holding people, and being amoung people, and sharing a space.
Being away from those things is hard, and when you have to let go of them for a while you realize how important they are in your life. And I think when you get to come back, even when it’s only for a finite amount of time… you remember what it was like when they weren’t there, and the love that you have for them is somehow more profound.
In March of 2020, I felt like the world was ending. I didn’t know for sure that there would be a time when things felt alright again, even just for a while.
Things aren’t completely okay again, right now, because they probably aren’t ever going to be for as long as people keep being people. But for just a moment, in the summer, it felt more okay than it was before. And that isn’t going to last forever, because everything is changing all the time.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the last time I felt like the world was ending, there was hope, and I wasn’t able to see that it was there, and I wish that I had been.
Leaving room for hope is not, like – the equivalent of trying to reassure a child by telling them that everything is going to be okay, because that isn’t true. It just isn’t.
An unfathomable number of people didn’t make it through this thing. I looked it up, but I’m not even going to write that number down, here, because I can’t wrap my head around how many faces and names and personalities and connections and stories we lost and I can’t comprehend the numbers of loved ones who are grieving, who are still grieving, because it hasn’t been that long.
I have been so lucky.
Leaving room for hope is not a promise that everything’s going to be okay. It’s just that there’s an off chance that it might be, and you can’t let yourself lose sight of that.
Take care of the people around you, even if that means letting go for a while, again. Cherish the people you love while they’re here.
I read once that if you’re not at least a little bit embarrassed by the person you were about a year ago, you’re probably not growing enough.
The concept that you’re not going to be the same person in a few years’ time is beautiful and scary and bewildering and also, quite possibly, a big releif.
What does it mean if you’re embarrassed by the person you were a month ago, or last week, or yesterday? How fast am I growing, then?
I don’t know.
There’s something about using shame as a metric for measuring growth that doesn’t feel right, to me.
The business of growing and shifting and changing is fuuucking uncomfortable because… in order to grow, you have to be making mistakes all the time. You’ve got to mess up, in order to learn things. Messing up is painful, but it’s nothing compared to the embarrassment of looking back at the asshole that you used to be and not liking them very much… and then slowly realizing that sometime in the future you’re probably going to look back at the person you are right now and think the same things about them.
The people you used to be stack up, over time, like beads on a necklace. And you’re stuck with them. You can’t go back and change things that’ve already happened. You can’t go back and make them different, you can’t force them to be anything other than what they are.
And I just think… hating the person you used to be doesn’t do anything to change the things that you wish you could change. It’s just an elaborate way of punishing the person you are in this moment.
You weren’t literally a lot of different people, over time. You’ve always been you, and you are constantly becoming.
The problem with having a self that has been lots of different shapes over time is that you’re going to have to be nice them. The whole lot of them, and that includes the ones you can’t stand. Even when you can’t find it in yourself to be nice, always find a way to be kind.
I wish I knew how.
If I could choose a metric for measuring growth, it wouldn’t be shame or embarrassment or loathing for the person that I used to be.
It just takes up so much time and energy and space that I wish I could be spending in other places.
Spinning around in circles with your arms outstretched until you fall down onto the grass. Climbing over fences. Cooking food. Skinny dipping at three o’clock in the morning. Reading a book, or gaming, or writing, or watching videos that make you laugh, or making music again. Playing with friends, or maybe just laying on the floor and talking about anything for centuries.
Things that are actually important.
So measure growth in something else. Anything else.
Cut me in half and count the rings, perhaps. Put my heart on a scale across from a feather. Throw me off of a tall building and, assuming that there is no air resistance, calculate how many units of laughter there are in one human soul.
Count the number of beads on the necklace, and be kind.
Hope it’s a good night.
It is four in the morning, and my whole entire self hurts.
My thoughts have been racing nonstop for three hours, now. They got so loud that the distractions I’ve been leaning on recently weren’t keeping me safe anymore.
Body is trying to process signals that best translate to English as intense anxiety, sadness, and shame. All three at once is confusing and overwhelming.
Emotions are meant to tell us something important, I think. That is why they exist in the first place. They’re meant to move through you, communicate what they’re trying to say, and then… pass away. But mine get stuck, sometimes. Jammed. They don’t fade after the message is delivered. They stick around until it hurts.
I am trying to sort out where this is happening in my body so that I have something to work with.
Right now, this feeling is showing up as a lump in my throat. My shoulders and neck are tensed up, and my jaw is clenching. My chest is tight and my breathing is shallow. I can also feel it in the hallow space behind my eyes, the tops of my legs, in the back of my head and neck, all across my back, in my upper arms, and in my wrists and hands.
This is worse than usual. It doesn’t usually spread through my entire body like this, which means that there are fewer corners of me that feel kind of okay right now.
The safest feeling places right now are the ones in contact with blankets. Lots of heavy blankets, even though it’s summertime. I am also holding a stuffed animal, which is comforting.
My brain is sifting through memories to find all of the times that I’ve made mistakes and all the things that I don’t like about me, just to fuel all this shame that is burning. The shame, in turn, is fueling the anxiety like nothing else can. And when I dwell in anxious places I often end up feeling so impossibly sad.
And I don’t understand why
And also, shame tends to set off a sharp twinge of, just – not wanting to exist. Followed immediately afterwards by a few moments of kicking myself for having that feeling.
Throughout all of this, there is a healthy portion of existential dread, along with a fair bit of helplessness. This is hard.
Over and over again, rushing, thrumming, burning, aching, shaking, crying, hurting. For hours, and days, and weeks, and sometimes on and off for years.
Fighting against this is really hard. Waiting it out is terrible but sometimes that is the best option that’s available to me.
It’s – not unbearable, but close.
There are going to be nights like this, nights much worse than this, for as long as I am alive. I am going to have to be so strong.
There is a small part of my consciousness that stays calm and quiet, throughout all of these things. There is a presence there that almost doesn’t feel like me.
It’s nurturing, and gentle, and calm, and sure, and kind, and solid. It reminds me to do things like roll over on my side because it’s easier to breathe, and tells me to get up and blow my nose when I need to. It reminds me about coping mechanisms. It doesn’t fight with the spiral of thoughts, it just – doesn’t listen, because it is predominantly focused on making sure that I’m okay, and everything else can wait until the morning.
It isn’t loud, but it’s there, and right now it’s telling me to try to sleep again, a little.
Being young and stupid and not knowing what the hell you’re doing is a necessary step on your journey to becoming a slightly older person, who still doesn’t know what they’re doing and also has a lot of regrets.
Life is short. Our cells start to die faster than they can be replaced at the age of 25. Ask literally any 25 year old, they will confirm.
The experience of fucking unbearable pain in response to real or perceived rejection is not pathetic. It is human and normal to be scared and sad at the prospect of having to live disconnected from people who matter to you.
…if they’re clearly online and they haven’t texted you back yet, they are probably watching a stupid sixty minute YouTube video of some dipshit trying to start a lawnmower at the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes, nothing else will do.
Negative feedback loops are not written in stone. The trick, obviously, is to stop the negative feedback from looping.
The fact of your existence on this planet in this universe is a beautiful scientific coincidence. Also, having a consciousness living amoung other seperate consciousnesses is such a fucking trip. The way that one person can compose words out of thin air to describe an emotion and then somebody else can come along years later and be moved to tears, but also, I can’t figure out how to sucessfully communicate basic concepts. This is so weird.
If you say “I love you” to a person who thinks they are impossible to love, they will naturally be highly suspicious. And it’s tough to tell someone you love that you love them, when you know they don’t know that it’s true. Tell them anyway. You might need to kind of thwack them over the head with it for a while until the message gets through.
Life isn’t fair, and there is so little that I can do about it. So little. But at least there a few small things that I can keep doing for the rest of my life. When I think about how much time I might have, if I make it safely to whenever I’m going to die… I feel like all the little things might count for something.
Heard recently that mixing a pound of sugar into a ton of concrete will prevent the concrete from setting properly. I want to see if this is true.
Also recently heard about a man who decided to kill himself. But before he went through with it, he figured he might as well do all of the things that he’s always wished he could do but had been too afraid, since it didn’t matter now because he was going to die anyway. He made a list of things. And by the time he got to the end of the list, he no longer wanted to die.
The world doesn’t stop for anyone, and there is never going to be a time when you’re completely ready to do the thing that you’re afraid to do. Return the fucking library book that has been sitting on your nightstand for eleven months, you dumbass
professional mental health support network that is covered by insurance
all of my time with my Jeep, whose name is Helen
ridiculously inapplicable horoscope predictions
disordered eating management resources that are helpful
the one guy at work who understands about needing to rest.
“i’m ready,” a neat track by Sam Smith and Demi Lovato which has been stuck in my head for this entire week but could absolutely stop at any time and I would be fine with that
I am a friend, and I have friends, and I am still surprised about this. Anyway it’s real and it is stupidly important
It has been such an objectively ridiculous year to live through. Somewhere along the way… something inside of me got broken, I think. The piece that had always helped me with steadiness was gone.
I felt so alone, and lost, and terrified, and I am still in recovery.
But now… something is different. Shifting. I don’t know how, or when, or why. I think this same stretch of time that left me shaken in so many ways was also a catalyst for another kind of change.
It keeps showing up in unexpected places
It’s hard to put into words.
It’s the way that I walk, the way that I take up space in a room.
It’s the sound of my voice. Louder, clearer. The harmony that is always there. It’s the “I love you” that I can say out loud.
It’s not caring what people think. It’s taking a chance and speaking up for myself, especially when I’m afraid to. It’s not taking shit from anyone.
It’s a touch of defiance. It is knowing that I have a choice.
It’s deciding to let go, and leave.
And it’s also deciding to stay. To keep trying, even when it’s daunting. It’s the decision not to give up, not now, because there is still hope.
It’s daring to think that there might still be love and it’s trying so hard not to cry when I realize that it’s still here, and it never left, and it’s going to be okay.
It is the admission that I have been wrong and probably looked very stupid, that I’ve messed up over and over again and I am most likely going to keep doing this, and that all of those things are so fucking human and that it’s okay and I really do know this
It’s in the moments that I needed to live through in order to even begin to understand, and it’s in all the things that I don’t know yet.
It’s the relief of setting down the weight of a world that I will never be able to heal by myself, even though I want to. And it’s the sensation of lightness I feel after having carried something heavy for too long.
When you set down all of the things that were never yours to carry, you’re better able to carry the things that were always meant to be yours. May you carry them well.
It is perspective. And embarrassment, and confusion, and awkwardness, and lots of swearing as much as possible all the time. It is hilarious coincidence, serendipitous connection, dawning comprehension, and regret.
It’s letting things be what they are, and not trying to force them to be anything else.
It’s… taking myself less seriously. It is relief that this world revolves around the sun, instead of me.
It is hard work, and careful attention to the little things, and wanting to do a good job.
It’s a kiss on the mouth that hasn’t come true yet. It’s the smile I was wearing all day.
It is the laughing. So much laughing. Laughing until my face hurts and my heart aches and there are tears coming out of my eyes. Laughing at myself, and laughing with you, and with him, and it’s awestruck listening and it’s looking up at the stars.
It’s this calm that is there on the outside that helps me stay centered.
It is a very quiet strength, from a grounded place. And it snuck up on me.
For these last two days I have been staying at the house of a friend who is traveling and needed someone to be with her dog, because she didn’t want him to have to be alone with the sounds of the fireworks.
– this next bit is a sad story –
Once, a long time ago, this friend left a dog alone at home during the fourth of July weekend. The dog was so afraid of the noise that she jumped out of a second story window, and her injuries were so bad that there was nothing they could do.
So I totally understand wanting someone to stay here with this absolute sweetheart of an Australian Shepard. We have hung out before on multiple occasions and are totally excellent friends.
He is pretty low maintenance. He just really, really doesn’t like the sound of the fireworks.
Mostly he just needs someone to sit near him when the sound of distant explosions become too intense. His whole body trembles, and he whines quietly.
Mostly we are just sitting together and listening. He seems comforted by all the hugs.
Once he got up and did a lap around the room, investigating, and asked to go outside into the twilight. When I opened the door, he just stood there and listened. Carefully
Also, this arrangement works beautifully for me because it means that I have entire house to myself for a weekend. The solitude is so peaceful, and the getting away feels like something that I’ve needed for a while.
It’s a good house. Comfy and homelike. The aesthetic here is… a kind of prettiness that only happens when somebody who pays attention to the little things has lived in once place for a long time.
There is a pool in the backyard, here, and the water is pleasantly cool. I snuck out after the fireworks had quieted down and swam around in circles in the dark. There were so many fireflies. I just barely made it inside before the rain came.
I am trying to figure out whether or not I have anything to say about the holiday that is happening around me. I am looking for the words.
For right now, I am watching over a friend who needs comforting. I am swimming in the dark. I am sitting in the quiet, and I’m thinking all the time.
It happened quietly. I was washing dishes, with my back to the rest of the room so nobody could see.
I was operating on maybe four and a half hours of sleep. I had just worked as hard as I could for three consecutive days and I still had the fourth day, ahead of me. And I was just so tired.
The chaos and the noise happening around me suddenly collided with the anxiety and turmoil going on inside my head. I can usually cope with either one of those things separately, but it’s tricky to manage both at the same time.
And it was all too much, and the tears bubbled up and out and then I was swallowing sobs and standing up straight and tall and strong to keep my shoulders from shaking.
In the back of my mind, there is a calm place. It’s a bit like the eye of a storm. Inside of that space, I was able to think – okay, okay. So I’m crying at work. I’m surrounded by people I don’t know and I’m having an honest to goodness meltdown and I am crying at work.
And honestly, I don’t really care.
I felt surprise and also tangible relief when I realized that I was crying at work and it actually didn’t fucking matter.
I have been washing dishes for half an hour and I am already soaked to the bone with dirty water and I haven’t slept or eaten enough in days and the pile of dishes to wash is stacked high and is growing and nobody is saying thank you or even looking at me, so if there was ever going to be a time when it made sense to cry, it would sure as hell be right now.
And I needed to cry, and nobody was about to fucking take that away from me.
Once, I might have worried about people thinking less of me for crying and it would have sent me further into that state of distress. But in that moment, I just felt indignant and angry that anybody could think less of another human being for needing to cry. That indignation at the ridiculousness of the state of things kept me in a place where I was able to breathe.
I can work as fast as I physically can soaking wet for seven hours. I can fly across slick floors balancing heavy dishes on one hip, lifting them higher than I can reach over my head to the top shelf. I can plunge both hands into scalding water over and over again. I can send every dish from this entire restaurant through this battered old machine, on a busy Saturday afternoon, in an unfamiliar kitchen, with nobody else on the schedule to help me. And this is fine.
Just please don’t tell me I can’t cry.
My grumpy old kitchen lady friend looked at me and shook her head and told me that a grown man twice my size would have had a hard time with that shift.
By the end of the day, the line cooks had started shouting at me across the kitchen to take a break. “Go get a popsicle out of the freezer, and if you find them right away, pretend like you didn’t for a while.” Appearently, I looked like I was going to pass out, but I was still going because there was more to do…
I drove home feeling a strange sensation of lightness. Maybe it was joy. I can’t for the life of me understand why, and currently my money is on the endorphins flooding my body after walking five miles worth of steps in that crowded little space.
I don’t feel like many people work a dishwashing shift and then come home and write about their days like this.
I’ve landed a summer job working part time for a restaurant and brewery, just across the street from the mall. I made like 100 lbs of guacamole on my first day.
It’s been a little over a week.
My whole entire body aches from standing all day in the wrong shoes. My acne is flaring up. My throat is sore from breathing the air in the place where I am currently working – a mix of water vapor, fryer oil, cigarette smoke, onions and jalapeño peppers.
On my first day, somebody asked me if I smoked cigarettes. I said “no,” without thinking, and I should have said “yes” because people who smoke have an excuse to step out of the chaos and the noise for like two minutes and into the relative calm of the pavement just outside of the back door.
I’ve been quietly thrumming with anxt for the entirety of every shift this week, because what if I’m not doing a good job and what if somebody is going to pull me aside at any moment and tell me that I am not useful and I don’t deserve to be here
Sometimes I escape into the walk in cooler for a minute, just to breathe. I have done this in every kitchen I’ve ever worked in. This is easy, because all kitchens are secretly exactly the same.
In every kitchen I have ever worked in, there has always been at least one person that I could go to if I needed to ask questions.
This is the person who knows exactly what they’re doing and where everything belongs, but also doesn’t get paid enough to worry too much about whether or not everything is running smoothly. There’s a kind of balance there that leaves room for patience when talking to new people, especially the ones who are trying to do a good job.
They are generally grumpy old ladies with crooked teeth, sad eyes, a solid sense of humor, and their own copy of the recipe book which nobody else is allowed to touch.
There is one of those, here. She’s probably old enough to be my grandmother. She has a red tattoo of a dragon with butterfly wings on her ankle, which she told me she got in Australia.
When I talk to this kind of person, I don’t feel like a burden, and so I can actually think. It calms me down, a little. Enough.
I am focusing on keeping up with the whirlwind pace of what is going on around me, and learning how to do as many of the various tasks as possible.
Ask questions. Take nothing personally. Notice small details. Follow instructions. Work together. Pay attention to your surroundings. Clean up as you go along.
I am pushing so hard.
I’m going to try to rest now, because I am so tired. I hope it’s a good night.
A friend turns twenty-two, and celebrates with a small gathering of old friends.
We burn a large pile of dry brush, inside of a circle of stones. The heat sends all of us a few steps backwards, for a moment. The flames are taller than we are.
We carefully throw an old Christmas tree onto the pile and watch the flames double in highth and width, for a few moments. It is breathtaking and beautiful and we are all extremely pleased.
When the flames die down, we roast marshmallows over the coals. I roast two of them on the end of a twisted piece of grapevine that is longer than I am tall, because the heat is still intense.
Someone is playing music through a bluetooth speaker. Also, there is a bubble gun or two, because this is a party for Adults.
For some of us, this is the first time we’ve had a chance to actually talk, since… it’s been a fucking long time. So as the sun goes down behind the trees, we talk. About what we’re doing with our lives, about the world, about history and science and religion. We also gossip to no end.
We’re different now that we were in high school. We’ve grown – up, and out, and over the edge, and across the water.
We’ve all learned an unexpected thing or two about ourselves. We’ve seen horrible things, and tried to come to grips with how awful the world can be. We’ve experienced things so beautiful it hurts. We’ve gone on adventures. We have fucking tried new things. We’ve worked and rested, laughed and cried, gotten lost, and figured things out in time.
We’ve all loved and lost, and it shows. It really does.
And now we’re here around the campfire, eating chips and talking about All Of The Gay Things. And it’s fucking lovely.
I drove home smelling like a campfire, and I couldn’t stop smiling inside.
Last night, the rain came down hard on the attic roof. I looked out the window and saw flashes of lighting tumbling through the sky to the north east. The clouds seemed to flicker, tossing the light back and forth amongst themselves. I haven’t seen the sky put on a show like this since I was very small.
I pulled on a pair of cargo shorts and a sweater and navigated through the big empty house, down the stairs. I made my way to the porch.
I settled into a hammock chair, and rested. The rain came down all around me, but in the shelter of the porch it was cool and dry. I watched the lighting make silhouettes of the cherry tree branches. And I listened to the thunder, which seemed very far away.
It was peaceful.
I forgot about everything, until the storm faded into the darkness behind the trees.
Today, I went to therapy. I filled my tank with gasoline. I purchased a large cheese pizza with mushrooms and some sweet iced tea. I read a book about serial killers, stopped at the pharmacy, and made some phonecalls I’d been putting off too long.
I am in my mother’s garden, and I am not wearing any shoes. We are picking strawberries.
The ground under my feet is dry and crumbling, parched in the sun. This space is overgrown with weeds, and cluttered with old fence posts and curling wooden boards.
We didn’t plant strawberries this year, but somehow they are here anyway. The patch is thick, and wide, and it rambles.
I balance on my heals, close to the earth, and reach out my hands for the berries… bright red, all the way down.
I talk and she listens. I try to tell her what is wrong, and I think she almost understands.
Two opposing things are true at the exact same time. I am more grounded that I’ve ever been, and I am also impossibly lost and shaken and I am so frightened.
I am filled to the brim with a sensation that something is horribly wrong in the world, that something bad is going to happen.
I feel as though the entire universe is hovering on the brink of something I can’t name.
I am back for about two seconds from a brief and accidental hiatus from writing for this blog. I got to the end of last semester and realized that I needed to sleep for a thousand years, and then life caught up with me for a while.
This has been an interesting time.
Since the beginning of this summer, I feel like I’ve jumped feet first back into the world. I have so many stories that need telling, but this isn’t the right place nor the right moment.
There have been campfires.
I’ve fallen in love, a little bit, for like a grand total of seven minutes. There were caterpillers. And then I picked myself up, again. I’m walking with a bit of a limp. My knees are still a little dusty, but the scrapes are healing. No hydrogen peroxide was applied to open wounds.
I’ve fallen asleep in the back of the car, on the way home from trivia night at a gay bar in the city. Our table was the best table. We won a shot of strawberry lemonade vodka, from which everyone took a sip.
I have sat cross legged on the floor of a living room with two amazing humans. We played slap jack until our knuckles were sore.
I’ve unearthed dusty boxes of seashells and fabric and glassware and cassette tapes that used to be my grandmother’s, in the attic over the kitchen. It is tough emotional work.
I’ve worked out that I am roughly a size 30 in men’s cargo shorts, which is tremendously useful information to have.
I have accumulated what feels like an unnecessary amount of knowledge about serial killers. This predominantly happens as I’m drifting off to sleep.
I’ve taught myself how to paint, a little bit. I tried to paint lots and lots of naked women, but the boobs are unexpectedly tricky and I still can’t get the shading right.
Aaand I’ve learned how to take a hit like I know what I’m doing.
It has been wild.
I want to sit with you and tell you these stories. Maybe, someday. Maybe I will write them down.
These last few days I’ve been struggling under the weight of a long, drawn out, and extraordinarily shitty depressive episode. Today was really bad. I woke up feeling like like I’d been run over by a truck, but in the emotions? I hope that makes sense.
I tried watching Bob Ross videos. I have just discovered that I can watch those on YouTube, because of course I can. They make my heart sing and calm down my brain.
But then I tried to make a painting, and the painting was predictably imperfect, and I felt frustrated and sad. I wish I could write him and ask what to do about feeling sad when you’re not able to make something perfect. I think he would’ve written back.
I tried walking, aaaaand it was really hot and muggy. I stopped and got a cold ice tea with lemonade from the convenience store at the intersection in the middle of town. Driving in the sun with the windows down, drinking iced tea with lemonade, felt sooo nice. It broke through the awfulness of the aching, overwhelming feeling, even just for a moment.
I drove to the pharmacy to pick up the next thing that my doctor says I should try. The woman behind the counter has known me since I was small. I wonder what she thinks of all the different kinds of medicines I’ve tried, of how many times I’ve had to change them in the last couple of months. I don’t know why, but I actually told her about it today. “I’ve been looking for something that helps my brain, but it’s so hard to find something that doesn’t throw everything else out of balance,” I said, very quietly. Even though we were both still wearing masks, I could tell from her body language that she understood. She was very kind about it.
I wonder if all of the things that I go through in this life will make me into someone who is kind. I really hope so.
I’m currently trying to focus on the textures of the surfaces around me, and hold onto those sensation with everything I’ve got. Crocheted blanket, solid teddy bear, linen pillow case, heavy phone under my thumbs.
My biggest fear about all of this is the knowledge that I might wake up tomorrow and not feel able to get up and move around, and maybe I won’t even want to. I’m so frightened of not being able to move through the haze, but I know that it might happen, because it’s happened to me before. And sometimes the only thing to do is give it time, and wait it out.
It’s hard to maintain equilibrium because it takes energy to balance.
This is really hard.
I hope you’re holding up well, but if you’re not, I’m with you.
The other afternoon I was walking through the streets of the town just adjacent to campus. There are lots of little shops, on those streets – books, music, pizza, Chinese food, sub sandwiches, little handmade curiosities and whatnot. As I walked past one of them, I heard a familiar sound. It was blasting through the speakers in the doorway, pouring out into the street. And it was zydeco music – not the cheap kind that sounds like it’s gotten trapped in a tin can, but the good stuff. The genuine Louisiana article. And then I started to cry.
I can go for months at a stretch without hearing that sound, and then I’ll stumble across it by accident. And every time it’s like remembering who and what I am.
I remember dancing barefoot with my little sister in the muddy field in front of a stage, letting the music move up into our bodies from the ground. And eventually the music from the speakers is so loud that it cracks the sky open, and the rain comes down. So we run and hide, in the safety of the wooden dance floor under an enormous white canvas tent. The rain fucks up our carefully painted faces, and we laugh about it. But the music is happening here, too, and so we go on dancing. Swing apart, swing together, awkward two step to the left and then back again, and I spin her around like I know what I’m doing, and she laughs.
And we are the zydeco music, the accordian and the fiddle and the bassline thrumming in the wooden dancefloor.
And this is who I am, just in case I ever forget, just in case I ever lose sight of the fact that there’s something in me that exists to be held and shared and understood. And maybe not everyone is going to be able to understand, but maybe that’s okay, because this self that I have doesn’t need anyone else to understand in order to matter, to just be.
I am the zydeco music.
I’m the trees and the grassroots, the dirt flying up underfoot in front of the stage. I’m the hula hoop, spinning around. I’m the drumbeat holding everything together. I’m the smell of smoke. I’m the one handing you your first cup of coffee in the morning, and I’m the one giving you six quarters in change for that dollar fifty you paid for it. I’m the smell of food cooking. I’m painting a butterfly in bright colors on the face of a four year old girl. I’m reading a book on a blanket under a tree, in the afternoon. I’m the shade. I’m the paint on the drop cloth. I’m the harmony between the banjo and the fiddle and the upright bass, in the middle of a song in the evening.
That’s me. That’s part of me.
And it all came back to me, on the street outside the little shop, beside the campus. It all came flooding back, all at once. I guess I’d forgotten. Sometimes I do.
Sometimes I forget who I am. But in that moment, I knew.
The CDC just recommended allowing fully vaccinated people to go without masks in most places.
I’m remembering the first time that I heard about the NYS mask mandate, in the spring of 2020. I think I was sitting in the living room of my parents’ house, one evening, after work… or maybe we were at the dinner table, talking.
Remember back then? We kept checking the case numbers, every day, watching the increase, watching the spread.
I remember feeling as though this was all very real and strange and terrifying and new. Going out into a world full of people wearing masks felt like stepping into a science fiction story, or a nightmare. Now it’s the opposite. Now when I think about going out into the world without half of my face covered, it seems odd.
In the last year I’ve gotten to know people – teachers and classmates – without ever knowing what their noses were shaped like.
I also had a new way to tell whether or not a stranger in a crowded room cared about other people, or liked being told what to do. I’ll miss that simple test of a person’s character.
When one half their faces were covered, I was forced to look into people’s eyes in order to read their expressions. I also had to speak up a little more loudly so that I could be heard through the fabric covering my mouth. Never used to speak up, much, before. Never used to look people in the face unless I knew them. I wonder if I will gaze more calmly into people’s faces, if I’ll continue to speak like I want to be heard.
I’ve been waiting so long for this small piece of news. I’d recently started to look forward to it, to wonder when it was going to come.
But now that it’s here… what if it’s too soon? I’m having a hard time believing that things will ever go back to normal, at all.
This pandemic took so much away from me. It could have been so much worse, and I know this. But I still feel like so much is missing that should have been here.
In his parting video lecture for the semester, my astronomy professor told us that he hated teaching like this, from behind a screen, without ever meeting one of us. Because he missed the people that he’ll never get to meet, the classroom full of students, the banter, the questions, the “how was your day” and the “have a good weekend.” It’s the little things, but the little things matter. He didn’t cry, as he was speaking, but I could tell that he would after the camera was switched off. So, I feel like – if I’d ever gotten a chance to meet him, we probably would have been friends.
And maybe after all of this is over I will find his office, somewhere on this campus. And I’ll peek around the door, with my face without a mask, and I’ll say “hi. You never met me, but I was your student. You taught me so much about the galaxies and the stars and the universe, and it was very beautiful. And I just wanted to say thanks.”
I don’t know how many friends I didn’t meet because things turned out this way.
Fuck, it’s been a difficult year.
I hope you’re alright. I love you. We’re going to get through this.
I’m stretched out on the ground outside my parents house. The sun isn’t setting yet, but it’s about to be.
