You’ve likely noticed that some time has gone since I last published.
In that time I’ve done nothing remarkable: I took recommendations for both shows and books. I went on fewer walks. I made amends, playlists, coffee, sandwiches, calls in the middle of sleepless night, and feverish plans for escape. I started to see movies a few times a week. I moved myself and friends out of old apartments. I traveled. I took pictures. I started and ended therapy. I slept in. I scheduled nail appointments. I voted. I cleaned the shower. I got sick with covid and later with vertigo. I went to the museum. I swam. I drew at the park. I bought jeans. I called Congressmen. I wore perfume. I obsessed over money. I went on dates, most of which went nowhere.
In a “honkey tonk” bar I spoke with one date about the kit of inapt tools that dogged my incurable case of aimlessness. The ambitions that rewarded me as a student of some school or a daughter of some family were no longer relevant. My relatives were two-thousand miles out of touch and my institutions forgot everything about me apart from my debts.
I was twenty-three. For the first time I’d watch my cock-eyed sense of integrity begin to dissolve into a blank dreariness. The date compared my dilemma to childhood sweaters. Though the fit is not as relaxed as before, they said, we wear them until we decide we will not.
So that my sweater no longer fit (that I did not like my life) was the singular issue that my pastimes tried to address at an indirect. Let me chalk them up in a phrase: I hung around crowds and convictions past their expiration while I waited for my problem to fix itself. It did not.
The solution arrived in late August.
That week the temperature rocked between ninety to one hundred degrees so when my inertia lined up with my one day off, I stayed in bed with the blinds drawn and the ceiling fan on high. The blades spun and spun and spun into a single furious disk. For a while I watched them like that. But when I squinted, the optical trick fell into exposure. The solitary blades came into view, hard to distinguish, but impossible to miss.
Impermeable things tend to fall apart under scrutiny: Despair, self-pity, rumination. They are more fixed to the highest setting than they are fixed, immovably.
There may be some unalterable things in this world, but in that bed, underneath that overworked fan, I decided that going on with life as a room to wait in would not be one of them. I got up to my desk and wrote on mauve construction paper: “I WANT TO ENJOY MY LIFE”
Your potential offense to this remedy is not incomprehensible. Its brevity is offensive. It is offensive even to me.
But on the days I lose all reason and plunge into my neurotic remakes of arguments to end up in the “right”; Miasmatic daydreams about people whose attention could ostensibly convert me into someone happier or more fulfilled; Moral teeter-totters back towards those old crowds and convictions, all I have to remember is that to do something else is entirely possible, and I am set straight again.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post as I truly, truly, enjoyed writing it. My creative process needed a Listerine brain rinse, and I think I found just what I need to do this work from a space of footloose fancy free-ness.
(“As she should” they said, nodding in unison.)
Whatever lives between an Irish goodbye and a Midwest goodbye is what I now wish to extend to you. Let’s meet again. Maybe tomorrow. Next week? Well, alright then. Have fun. Stay safe. See you soon. Bye-bye.
💜💜💜
your voice is soar soothinggggujhdhh