Bugs of all sorts have been finding their ways into my house lately, which isn’t really a hard thing to do (she came in through the open window), but I’ve been surprised by the variety. Earlier this afternoon, a beautiful grasshopper perched on the windowsill, close to the exit but facing the wrong way. He was small with a lovely, smooth red underneath him and elegant antennae. I used one of those plastic containers from Your Dekalb Farmers Market (size medium) to catch him, then let him outside on my porch railing. The container wasn’t clean; I’d taken some kind of rice and chili crisp weird lunch to work in it a day or two ago. The little grasshopper sat still on the ledge where I’d let him out and one-by-one cleaned his little feet. His little mouth pincers tickled around on the pads of his little paws, and the motion was so measured and thoughtfully done. I regretted getting him a little spicy and a little oily, but I loved watching him clean up. After caring for each of his feet, the grasshopper pulled his left antenna into his mouth, starting at the end attached to his head. Slowly, he worked his way down the antenna, like how you’d suck pool water out of the drawstring of a bag or bathing suit, working your way down the line, or how you’d munch on a Nerds rope if it were a long and skinny corn cob. When he reached the end of the antenna, it sprung out of his mouth, back into position. Next, he cleaned the other.

The documentary about Mary Oliver (called Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World) is wonderful. I’ve been calling it “the Mary Oliver documentary,” which is just because I’ve been anxious for its release all year. I love the way Oliver looks, I love how she pays attention. And in ways even more deliberate and practiced and devoted than I’d ever imagined.

Lately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmingly like life is happening to me, that time is just washing over me. The news is all bad, and the pavement is so hot, and I counted only a few fireflies in my backyard last night. Very little feels joyful, or untinged with this knowingness that everything is dying, for more than a moment. The feeling is familiar. When I find myself in this emotional valley, I wonder if I’ll ever fall in love. I’ve been reminding myself daily that I am already, almost unbearably sometimes — that everything is bonus. I know this!! Still! I feel desperately afraid of dying, of running out of time (for what?), and (at the same time) dread the day after day after day after day after day after

If I knew, for sure, that I would die tomorrow, I would spend the whole day watching grasshoppers cleaning up; bees doing their little paws like a cat; everybody on the mountain mint and beebalm all together; chickadees taking one seed at a time; the little frog in my pond resting … I would like to be still, I would like to watch and listen. Okay, then, start there.

I also liked noticing the nearly imperceptible changes along my route, namely in the flowers and plants and things growing. The yard I loved in particular was near the corner, at the top of a hill heading away from the lake. This is the first yard I really noticed for its design, and I was totally smitten. The house was painted tastefully and subtly, greens and greys that complemented the dark wood of the trim. I’m sure I wouldn’t find the garden nearly as breathtaking now, largely because of the plant selection (hardly any native plants), but the layered structure of it would land for me, I think. I loved to walk past this house slowly, really looking to see what changed each day. This is where I first saw Japanese anemones, still a very favorite flower for its delicacy.

I stopped taking these obsessive, daily walks once I got a job that required more than 20 hours of my time each week. Now, I take walks because I like looking, and I like the possibilities and close encounters that walking affords. When I’m working in my garden or sitting on my steps and someone passes by, I wave and say hello. When I pass someone working in their garden or sitting on their steps, I wave and say hello, and if they have a nice garden, I fawn. I would like for every person who is alive in a vibrant sense to take me around their garden or their living room or another special place, and to describe to me in detail each object or plant or collectible or whatever it is — where it came from, why they love it, what is special. I want to know about the particularity of each thing.

I’ve been having strikingly vivid and stressful anxiety dreams for a good while, which means I resist falling asleep, which means I am tired and short-tempered and feeling in a daze. The other night, though, I had the loveliest dream. In it, I was in New York, on the block in Bed-Stuy where I spent the summer subletting from Louisa’s and Ron’s apartment mate. In my dream, Bed-Stuy was a beachtown, like the Rockaways. Katie, MJ, Brian, Floy, and Kelly were all there. I was elated to see Kelly. I checked my watch to confirm that it was September, her birthday. She had to go somewhere, to some antique store to check on the popcorn machines, and she ran off. Usually when I dream about her, I wake up aching and mournful, but this time she really felt so alive, and I like to think of her running around New York in some parallel reality.

Anyway, the rest of us waited in line to enter the apartment where I was staying, which had been converted into a movie theatre for a special one-time showing of something we all wanted to see. We followed each other single-file up a curling staircase. The whole top floor of the building had been converted into the theatre, with a walkway cut across the middle of a large room, like a skinny boardwalk, like the ones at the Bird Trails. On either side, the floors were entirely memory foam mattress material, and numbers were painted directly on the mattresses to indicate seat numbers. The cushions were supremely comfortable and like marshmallows. The film was projected on all four walls of the dark room, so you could lie down however you’d like, however felt most comfortable, and see a screen. (I think this is a really good idea for a way to watch a movie, and much of the reason for writing it out here is so’s not to forget.)

Partway through the movie, I had to use the bathroom. I wrapped myself in a blanket, went downstairs, and left the apartment for the bodega on the corner. I passed by Jenny’s house, where she and her extended family were admiring the blueberry plants in the front yard. Her brother planted shrubs with fruits I’d never heard of, big, maroon, gelatinous fruits that looked like Japanese persimmons. I realized, once I reached the bodega, that I could just use the bathroom in the apartment where I’d just been because I lived there, but I forgot to bring my keys and so banged on the front door until the ticket guy let me in. He said I couldn’t go back into the theatre room because it’d disrupt the movie, so instead we sat on the stoop to kill time. I told him I wasn’t from there, that I was from Atlanta, and what I loved most about Atlanta is that no one locks their doors. I told him I could never live in New York because everyone in New York needs so many keys. Then, I woke up.

Earlier this evening, I walked through the neighborhood where I grew up, which is just a mile or so from where I live now. Sometimes, it feels excruciatingly painful to live here, in my hometown, to be confronted almost daily with a physical nostalgia that can be totally overwhelming. The terror of time passing feels unrelenting already.

I feel a crushing ache.

In the produce area, a balding man wearing a large tank top, shorts, and flip flops paws through the kale. He’s been recently in the sun. Our skin is similar shades of reddish-brown, toasty sunburn that will fade in the next day or two into a more settled tone. Later, I see him running without a cart (he had a cart before) down the cereal aisle, toward the back of the store. When he placed each item on the self check-out conveyor belt, he realized he’d forgotten a crucial ingredient for his recipe, and now the items are piling up at the end of the belt, crashing into each other and toppling over, and the sensor isn’t triggered so the belt keeps running and running and running and he is, too, past the sugary cereals and buy-two-get-one organic boxes that are especially slender to grab whatever it is he’s missing. Later still, we cross paths in the parking lot. Now, he has on a hat.

I needed a cupful of pistachios for this salad, which I made for Mother’s Day lunch and have made a few other times for other occasions. I’ll be making it again next week for a party. It is really fantastic. I got the recipe from a friend at the second Vegetarian Dinner I attended with my grandma at her church. Vegetarian Dinner is a quarterly (or so) event on a Wednesday evening, during which a speaker gives a casual talk on some topic related to the environment, and churchmembers bring vegetarian dishes for a potluck. I love the simplicity and straightforwardness of the name, Vegetarian Dinner. It sounds like some kind of code, or a club, or a short story I’d like to read.

I bought a bag of pistachios in the shell because I figured I wouldn’t use them all, and I like the activity of a pistachio. I bought pre-shelled once, and I won’t do it again. I sat down on my porch to start shelling and was feeling impatient, like it was going to take too long and I wish I’d just gone for pre-shelled, because who has the time. But a few minutes in, I loved this activity, of course! I know this! It’s about attention, and the time it takes is the point. I filled my cup and kept shelling. I thought about calling someone to see if they wanted to string beans or shell peas or do something that takes time with our hands sitting on a porch.

Unrelatedly, earlier this week, Darah described something as “hard” when you don’t want to do it, but you have to keep on - like a job that sucks or feels pointless, or a task that isn’t really moving you closer to any solution or goal or whatever the desire may be. Things that you want to do, even if they are grueling or difficult or painful or exhausting, aren’t “hard” in this way. And this want, its source and motivation, can be all sorts of things. We were talking about having a baby and the postpartum first few months, and Eli and I (unknowing - neither of us has kids) described this time as “hard,” which is when Darah made the distinction. I’ve been rolling this around in my mouth like a marble. I like the shape of it, it resonates and echoes and rattles me.

I had to return the book to the library already, but in King’s Writers & Lovers the main character’s language for describing how feelings and experiences move through her body is totally electric. It is vibrant and vivid and a little childish, only in the sense that it’s so full of feeling and expressed without self-consciousness or overthinking or whatever it is that tends to dampen or dim the thing. I wish I could remember the exact phrasing I liked. I thought I had a copy of the book already — I swear Katie sent it to me for a birthday or some other occasion? — but maybe I lent it away and now it’s moving through the world and I’m glad for it. I’ll read it again from the library and I’ll remember.

Along the road in Adrian, a few hours southeast of Atlanta, the fields were full of nodding sunflowers, all of their broad faces tipped toward the ground facing the same direction, performing a choreography or in prayer. I wish I’d taken a picture. I’d planned to, on the way back the next day, but I guess the curve of the road tricked me into thinking there’d be more opportunities to see these candy caned flowers in rows and rows forever, then all of a sudden I was back on the highway and I wasn’t feeling like turning around. Later, I drove behind a semi trailer carrying three enormous bales of cotton, like bales that you could live in, they were so large. We were driving on a two-lane road, only going so fast, but tufts of cotton drifted off the bales and littered the side of the road. Again, I should’ve pulled over to collect a handful, but I didn’t. I was running late. When I first saw the cotton piled along the shoulder, I clocked it as trash, like stuffing out of a couch or something. How incredible it is that cotton grows.

I don’t know, really, how to tell about this next thing, so here it is. I am wondering where the impulse comes from to tell about it at all. I guess writing it down feels grounding in some ways, like tending to the un-reality of it all. Anyway — a month ago last Saturday, a MARTA bus blew through a red light and smashed into my car, into the driver’s side, and the force pushed me hundreds of feet down the road, where the car slid to a stop next to the curb where the driveway runs up to the McDonald’s there, the one that is always out of frozen Coke.

I am shocked, like the electricity is vibrating in my body and the glass is so tiny, like glitter. How does it shatter so tiny and so perfect? I wonder if it’s somewhere in piles, or where it evaporates to. The radio and the little knobs that control the air and the seeking and the volume are pushed into the frame of the car, but the lights are still on. The rearview mirror is torn from its little perch, and maybe it’s on the floor, but I don’t see it. I don’t know if I’m hurt, but my leg feels like it is apart from my body and there is no blood. After a little while (time bends) I climb over the center console and out of the car, and Richard is there. He is on his way to pick up dinner from Checkers, but he stays with me for the better part of an hour. He takes pictures and collects my things spilled across the road. He is so kind.

On the phone, my voice wobbled. My dad answered immediately, which surprised me, because it was after 11 and I assumed he’d be upstairs or watching TV and either way phones would be silenced. My phone died after “hello” and Richard let me borrow his. I couldn’t for the life of me remember my dad’s number to call back. I wonder if I couldn’t because of the shock or if I just don’t know it as well as my mom’s. I feel bad about this. I dialed hers.

It is surreal to be unhurt after this impact, and the fact of this makes the whole thing feel like a scene in a play or a move in a game and I don’t know that it actually happened, except that I still have the traces of a nasty bruise on my leg and when I walked down the sidewalk at night for a week after I couldn’t help crying. I try to shake the feeling out of me. I am the luckiest girl in the world, I know this in my heart to be true. Again and again and again.

Finally, I know what it is: I’ve been feeling so out of my body, like I’m floating around and feeling like a grey puddle of glue. Like a piece of skin. Really what it looks like, when I visualize what I’ve been feeling like, is it’s skin that’s been dried and pulled so tight that you can see through it, but it’s cloudy and skin-y and the palor is sickly. That is what I have been feeling like, like a little piece of that but also glue and also sour.

A couple weeks ago, in therapy, I wondered aloud where to put the feeling, what to do with the non-feeling of it. How to move it. Here I am, wondering and turning over and over in my mind the meaning of this thing that happened, WHY and WHAT NOW and WHAT DO I DO WITH IT … and feeling very little, and feeling like glue, when actually the whole point is — accidents happen and I am okay!!!!

This is miraculous and wonderful and I can’t believe I forgot, even for a moment, how absolutely besotten I am with the world and everything around me — how much there is to behold, how much goodness, how much luck and grace and wonder and joy and delight and sorrow and grief and pain and feeling and all of it is special, all of it, and how lucky I am for these things to move through me, and to love so much and feel overwhelmed with everyday specificity and banality and the infinity of it all. Oh my god!!!!!!!

How could I forget, even for one moment only, that I am surrounded by people who love me so much and whom I love SO MUCH!!!!! and my cat and the little unfurling leaves and that phoebe that sat on the string of lights in the backyard, and the little spider that was sleeping on the orchid in my kitchen, and the acorns that look like cheddar cheese inside, and people on the bus and saying hello and feeling all abuzz and the way clouds frame and mirror tree branches just so and so often

Remember, remember, remember

Something so terribly scary happened and so easily it could’ve been extra terrible and I wouldn’t be laughing and laughing, teeth full, alighting down the street riding my bike feeling so moved — wow, wow, WOW I feel like I need to scream my wonder, shout it. I want to burst into the room and tell everyone. GOOD MORNING I WAS HIT BY A BUS AND IT WAS VERY SCARY BUT THE ACTUAL THING ABOUT IT IS I AM ALIVE AND I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU AND YOU AND YOU AND EVERYTHING AROUND ME

What a gift, like truly, I am overcome. I am okay. I am so, so, so, so deeply and wonderfully and magically and mournfully and fully and sweetly and achingly okay!!

Thank you, it feels good to tell.

I’ve been self-conscious of how often the word “like” litters my speech since I learned in middle school (or something) that this makes the speaker sound like a stupid girl. Ha ha! Actually, of course, the “like” is just a pause, a moment of thinking that happens between words, much like an “um,” and whatever — I’m glad for it. Now, I only notice it when I read the transcripts of my voice memos in a text thread, especially when I’ve forgotten what I said but am not in a place to listen aloud. The “likes” are rampant! And I guess that’s the difference between writing and speaking, huh. I’ve also practiced taking pauses mid-sentence, as an antidote or alternative to the “like,” and this creates an opportunity for shifting a thought as it goes along. Before you speak (the “you” here is specific), you take a sharp breath then a pause, and I am eager to hear what you’re about to say. The anticipation of it is electric.

Yesterday’s sunset looked stretched across the sky, like gauzy sheets of cotton pulled gently along the weave to create these layers of softness. When we’d drive to Arkansas to visit my grandparents in the summer, we’d stop at a cotton field along the road to pick a couple bolls each. I loved the softness of the cotton inside its shelll, the luxury of it. I loved to stretch the fiber then hold the sheet up to the car window, to watch light filter through. The sky was like this, pink but also lilac, and clouds gathered around the moon and glowed. A group of Canada geese cut through the sky as we drove over the railroad tracks on Sawtell, and the moon and the clouds and the birds and the duskiness of it all felt like watching a movie or witnessing something perfect. Just after this, coming over the hill on Claire, a little pair of clouds was lit just so to be shockingly, dazzlingly electric pink, like a neon sign, buzzing among the much gauzier, paler, softer sky. I gasped, I wanted to pull over and take a picture, but I know that the picture wouldn’t have captured the charge of it and instead I thought about these two clouds (“the neon clouds, the neon clouds”) over and over for the rest of the drive so that I wouldn’t forget them.

If you asked a child to draw a picture of a fire in a fire pit, it would look just like the one Elroy and Jacqui built in Darah and Tanner’s backyard from their brush pile. I’ve never seen a fire more formally perfect in the sense that it was hot and roaring and triangular, with logs poking out just so to make a wheel under the flames. Incredible how fire is mesmerizing, every single time, and I can get lost in the gazing, it never gets old.

I’m concerned about the observer effect. I’m curious if I (or anyone, any system) can resist it or contend with it in a way so that it doesn’t disrupt or tarnish the thing I love (the thing that’s being observed). Or the thing that’s being observed in me. I want to tell you (again, specifically) all of the things I love — the sharp breath, your generosity in your appraisal of others, your curiosity — but I’m wary of the reductive danger of listing out what I love. What of the other parts? Don’t change anything: or, actually, don’t change on account of my looking. Change!! I’ll tell this to myself, too, over and over and.

Everything is romantic! Everything. The love that I like is generative and expansive, it grows and grows (as all things do when attended to), the sine waves amplify, it is patient, it is all around. I’ve just started reading a collection of Rilke’s essays and poetry on love as a starting place for getting to know his work. I am certain that I’ve been looking for Rilke all my life, that I’ll feel flooded and ripped open and radiant. Already —

I thought about sending a picture or a video of these clouds to my crush but then thought twice. As soon as I was about to turn to finally go home, I noticed something new - a shadow, a stark shape against a softer background. The heat lightning! The light moving. How the yellowed lights of the parking lot made the sky glow purple. How the blinking red tower (is it for planes?) lit little pockets around it, how the glare from my phone floated little alien lights through the frame, reflections of the lamps above me. I laughed and I considered crying (I didn’t), and I said hello to the person driving a golf cart around collecting trash, and he said he liked my pants, and I said thank you. Earlier, in therapy, I committed to expressing my love more freely and ecstatically and spontaneously, as the feeling comes. I want to love everyone and everything that is breathing and pulsing and moving and shifting and also things that are not “alive” in a specific sense but that give shape to the wonder of being and the magic of it all. I expand I expand and the feeling grows and grows and it is limitless!!!! Everything is possible, WHAT ELSE AM I CAPABLE OF?

In the parking lot at Red’s, after the first or second softball practice, Tyler and I were talking about sports and what feels good, what’s fun, what’s hard, and how to find a nice balance between the things. Tyler is a capital-A athlete; you can tell in the way he moves through the world, you can tell that he grew up playing sports. He coaches table tennis and maybe other sports, I don’t know for sure, but he described his approach to coaching as starting with safety. Catching the ball like this will prevent you from twisting your wrist in a weird way, or whatever it is. Simple. Conveniently, this tends to be the more elegant, more easeful, more fluid way to do things, anyway - an easier catch. The pleasure of this success is striking, and an appetite grows. Especially for the inexperienced player, especially for someone who’s not caught a ball before (or whatever it is), the pleasure is two-fold: first, this moment of success; then, the expansive possibility - I didn’t think I could catch a ball so easily; what else can I do? When he’s telling me this, describing this experience, Tyler’s eyes are wide and bright. He’s grinning and this electricity is, like, vibrating out of him. I feel like I am looking like a real fool in the parking lot, shiny-eyed and full of awe and eating this up, because I know what he’s saying is true, and I know that yes! this is one of my very favorite feelings, this is what I’m seeking. WHAT ELSE

“What else?” is a sister question to “and yet,” both mutable in their meaning or disposition. I don’t think of myself as a pessimistic person, though maybe I am on a grand scale. Like, largely, yes - I carry a crushing existential dread that sometimes feels nearly unbearable in its agony. But day-to-day I tend to believe in the wonderfulness of things small, and I feel buoyed and overwhelmed (with delight) regularly. Anyway, though, my first inclination is to inflect “what else” and “and yet” negatively - everything seemed great, and yet … but maybe it is exactly this predeliction for groaning that makes the flipside sparkle in its possibility and potential for great wonder. WHAT ELSE IS POSSIBLE !!!! It seems unlikely, and yet …. !!!!!!!! I’m screeching! Just considering the expansiveness of this thoughtline (not even actively doing anything - I’m sitting in an armchair at home alone) is thrilling - the buzzing of it!!!

One thing that I’ve enjoyed about getting older is that it is easier to tell the truth.

In traditional Korean wedding ceremonies, the groom presents a wooden goose (or pair of geese) to his future parents-in-law. The wooden geese represent fidelity and lifelong commitment, since (most) geese mate for life. “Very low divorce rates,” says the Cornell Lab (Canada Geese specifically). I like that it’s “Canada Goose” as opposed to “Canadian Goose.” This reminds me of magnetic poetry (remember? the fluidity of parts of speech?) and I like the experience of saying something out loud that feels incorrect in my mouth, and yet.

There’s a special exhibit up at the High Museum right now of Kim Chong Hak’s paintings. I don’t know his work, but I love to park in front of a painting and look closely at it for ten or fifteen minutes before moving on to the next one. This is what we did with kids at the art museum in Oberlin. The group would sit down in front of a painting and just look for five or so minutes (which is a long time for a group of third or fourth graders - and feels especially long in a quiet museum). I was struck, over and over, by their capacity to just look - and look and look. The prolonged looking changes the thing, really makes it move and quiver and feel alive, and this is how I like to move through a museum. There are, like, five people on the planet Earth with whom I enjoy visiting art museums. Katie is one of them, Floy is another. I love how Katie observes, what she notices, the relationships she detangles. Looking alongside her is revelatory. I love Floy’s curiosity and narrative-making around what she’s looking at. I love how she relates to art in this way that is both urgently corporeal and so emotional … like her feelings become embodied, it’s remarkable. At the High the other week, I wished so much that they were there with me to look and look and mimic the motion of the gestures and gasp at it all. I’d like to go back.

I have a Note saved in my phone of things that I noticed and wanted to recall later from a late May trip to Jekyll Island. We’d planned to camp on Cumberland Island, but when I called the reservation office days before the trip, we learned of the Sea Camp closure due to sewage issues, which is incredibly terrible timing and I really felt like I’d been hit in the gut. Thank god for Eli, who found a site on Jekyll and booked it without hesitation, because we are alike and he knew what to do. We camped next to another couple who’d come from New Jersey (or somewhere far away, maybe Ohio?) to camp on Cumberland that week, too. We shared their soap.

I’ll tell about Jekyll Island and the Okefenokee and Oberlin later, I think. One thing: in Ohio, I wake up early each morning, make coffee, and sit or lay down in the driveway in the sun. MJ wakes up next (maybe once before me?) and comes outside, too. They walk around the field next to the little house where five of us are staying, which is a place out of time - wood paneling, one of those old-fashioned doorbells, thick carpet - and make field recordings. The birds are chatty and the mourning doves are dopey in their way. We take a walk together to a pond that glows this eerie electric green color, and MJ shows me a knife that’s stuck in a stump. A creek that is almost too wide for “creek” runs along behind the pond, down a hill. MJ tries to catch a recording of the train; I think they get one eventually. Catbirds, too. The morning I like best, I’m sitting in the driveway on the asphalt when MJ comes outside. They let me listen to their band’s newest recording in headphones. We sit next to each other while I listen. A couple minutes into the song, it changes in this way that makes me gasp aloud, it’s startling! I love it. Portal Rental is their band, and everything they do is awesome.

One other thing: on Jekyll, we watched an enormous cargo ship glide across the horizon, slowly. Back and forth - one way in the morning, then returning later. The ship looked like a kid’s drawing, the Platonic ideal of “boat,” dark blue on the bottom half, light blue on the top, cut horizontally across the middle. Another cargo ship in a similar color scheme, just slightly off, passed our ship on the second day, and Felix and I imagined the passing as a kiss.

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By December, Darah was too pregnant to come to Cumberland Island for New Years Eve, but we’ll show the baby this special place as soon as she’s ready. Alex, Cat, Jonny, and I spent the last days of the year on the island, an extra day longer than originally planned because of the holiday ferry schedule. What a gift, this extra day. We laid on the beach, spooning under blankets, pointing out constellations, falling in and out of gentle sleep, until midnight. We watched the tiny fireworks on the next island sparkle silently just above the horizon.

I found my first sharks’ teeth at Raccoon Keys, at the south end of the island. Cat is a master seeker; she has film canisters full of teeth she’s found. Her affinity for spotting teeth along the road, while walking and hardly looking, reminds me of Olivia and her talent for spotting four leaf clovers. When we graduated from high school, Olivia pressed a four leaf clover she’d found for every graduating student, 170 of us. Last year, the beach was littered with angels’ wings; this year, olive and moon snail shells were abundant. Whelk egg casings look like long paper lanterns. A diagram of the different shell types collected by a Ladies’ Shell Club is framed above the water fountain at sea camp. There’s one called a lady’s ear or something like this — it’s flat and curving and beautiful. In the afternoon in winter, the light on the beach across the sand looks like an I Spy book. Every shell is lit so starkly, and the shadows cast a dark grey across the sand.

I’ve cried so much in the last week — really, since the beginning of the year, but especially more recently. Everywhere: in the kitchen, in my car in the driveway, in the high tunnel, at my desk, in the bathroom at work, in my house, pacing. Wednesday was another snow day, and I spent the morning sobbing (unrelated to, but I’m sure exacerbated by, the snow and weirdness of the day). Wracking, heaving, bigger-than-my-throat sobs, until I felt completely emptied out, hollowed, exhausted. I am so tired. The grief is for time passing, for choices made and not made, for the realization that, for all the parallel universes and realities that I’m certain are buzzing alongside this plane, it is this one, this life, that I can’t wake up from – this is the one I’m inhabiting full time; the others I can visit only fleetingly. Oh my god. In a message last week, Theo described an inverse architecture, one that is constructed of all the choices not made and paths not taken, a bizarro counterpart to this waking life. Depending on the day, this feels either expansive or devastating, or both. Both are always both.

— two sides of the same coin. Last week, maybe Tuesday, I woke up early and drove to work as the sun was rising. Across the painted sky, pink and red and orangey and clear, a big flock of swifts swooped all in unison at the Lee Street highway exit, from a set of telephone wires, up to a tree, back down to the parking lot, then over the Popeye’s. They move like fabric in a breeze, each body part of a bigger body that undulates and quivers. I was listening to this song, witnessing this most gorgeous and truly unbelievable feat of synchronicity and elegance, and I am so glad to be overcome by something so gorgeous, and so early in the morning. And the music! And the birds! And I feel possible and ebullient and like I want to laugh and laugh and sing and say hello to everyone.

In late spring, I would like to set up a long table that curves like an unending “s” in the backyard. It’s easier to reach across to talk this way, than when we’re sitting all in a row, in straight lines. On the table, each place setting is in keeping with the spirit of the party, but each is singular. A tiny fork, here. A special plate, the one with the drawings all over, here. No one is wed to their seat at the table; we trade places as conversations bloom. This is a party in May, so the first flowers from the yard fill vases and jars and other funny receptacles arranged down the table length, in no particular pattern or scheme, just where they fit. Salads and pastas are passed around in big bowls. Candles burn out and are relit. None of the chairs match. We’re drinking fizzy lifting drinks, hovering gently above our seats. Maybe there is music, but when the iPhone dies or the speaker gets fuzzy and cuts off, no one notices. We eat little scoops of lavender ice cream from angels’ wings shells, collected from Cumberland Island. String lights dangle in the trees and stretch across the yard, casting just enough light so that everything glows. I look around and feel absolutely full to the brim with pleasure, delight, gratitude. When the last guest leaves, I don’t feel alone.

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I stayed in bed until four p.m. today, in and out of sleep, which feels extravagant and dramatic. I find that if I stay in bed for long enough, eventually it becomes nearly impossible to get out or to wake up fully, and all of a sudden it’s dark again. Eventually-eventually, though, I did get out of bed to make some food, write two letters, and work on a puzzle (carefully flipping each piece right-side-up so that I can look at them all at once – I enjoy this meditation almost as much as fitting the pieces together). Now, four hours later, I’m back in bed and exhausted. I haven’t slept like this in ages, it’s been at least several years, where I feel like I could just keep sleeping forever and ever. I have such vivid dreams, always, but particularly in a long sleep – this time, I was carrying a large, round table through a maze of tunnels after a performance. Somehow, it kept fitting through narrow halls and twisting staircases, which was a relief. This sounds uninteresting, and I guess it is, but in my dream everything felt very charged.

Have you visited the City Museum in St. Louis? It is one of the most magical places I’ve ever been, largely for the surprise of it all. Our journalism class was in St. Louis for a conference in high school, which felt very cool and important, and one of our outings was to the City Museum, where we all expected we’d learn about the history of St. Louis, etc. Instead – oh my god – oh my god!!! – it’s like walking into somebody’s twisted dream reality, there are slides and caves and tunnels and one that gets narrower and narrower as you move through, and caverns that are several stories tall, and it goes on and on and I’m certain we didn’t explore it all. When I consider the landscape of my imagination, like where I most often find myself in daydreams, it’s a world composed in equal measure of City Museum, Pippi Longstocking, the garden in Harriet the Spy, and someplace wooded and hilly.

I didn’t realize until very recently that Pippi Longstocking is Swedish, and that the version I watched obsessively as a kid was dubbed, and poorly. I don’t know how we had it, maybe taped on VHS?, but I loved this show. Pippi keeps glass bottles of lemonade in a tree in her yard, which I found absolutely enchanting. I’ve always been charmed by the idea of a beautiful or special snack. Two of these include peppermint ice cream in a glass dish, as described in Meet Samantha, a book about a Victorian girl; and a smoothie and pretzels, an afterschool snack suggestion in the book my mom got for me in fifth or sixth grade about puberty, hygiene, nutrition, all of that.

I’ve been thinking about Freud’s death drive lately, related to my feeling out of sorts, like time keeps plodding on endlessly forever and ever and wow the expanse of that coupled with the grief of time having passed (lost opportunities) is, at times, unbearable. I listened earlier to an interview with Adam Phillips about his most recent book, On Giving Up, during which he talks about practicing un-focus by going outside and actively resisting focus – just being outside and letting your attention wander however it might, with a willingness to follow that attention wherever it may go (much like stream-of-consciousness writing, or whatever). The goal, here, is to create space for curiosity and comfort with unknowing, an openness to whatever might enter the frame, as an antidote to this death drive. He talks, too, about the potential of pleasure to be just as unbearable as pain, about the fear of this, which resonates in me so strongly my breath catches. The depth of feeling – how can one body hold it all? I think about this all the time, you (reader) know this. But oh, I love the way feeling so strongly FEELS IN MY BODY, I really do, and yet I forget this, and I am lonelier for it. The task – remember, remember. The source of the fear is two-fold: on the one hand, it’s the cliche fear of being too much for other people. On the other, it’s a fear that I will fall so deeply into feeling, whether ecstasy or grief or sorrow, that I will never recover – but more and more this is morphing into something exciting – to surrender into feeling SO MUCH and ACTUALLY, then see what happens (I think, rather than wreckage, what comes might be good).

Another thing Adam Phillips said is he really believes that he is the most uninteresting person he knows – that I am the most uninteresting person I know (and you, you). I love this, I feel electrified. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are back for the winter, and the same pair (I choose to believe) visits my feeders every day. The birds have gotten more used to me sitting outside with them; they skitter away but return shortly once I’m settled, then they go about their business like I’m not there.

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I feel so moved by this. I feel drenched.

I love to feel big feelings, which is something I only recently named out loud. I have a lot to say about this, I think, and honestly the thought of trying to detangle it all and lay it out in ways coherent and crystalline is tiresome to even think. But I’ll start, and we’ll see.

Oh, but related to this – Alex Wolfe is an artist who I feel so akin to; he writes a really lovely newsletter that I highly recommend, especially if you, too, are into noticing, and looking, and agree that walking is maybe the surest way to create the conditions for close looking; like, when you’re walking around, you can’t help but notice, and everything glows different when given attention. 

Oh! I was reading poems from Mary Oliver’s Evidence and lately, every time I read her, I feel a keen sense of anxiety for how much time and patience and energy and commitment it takes to really see what’s around, to really give the reverence that each – every single – flower and bird and tree and critter unseen deserves. Oh my god, I feel this in my body now, writing this, a sort of welling up in me that feels like a flood. I am so sad that I can’t cradle every little bird and give each one a little drink of water and tell each one, every single one, how miraculous it is, how holy, how deeply in love I feel. Every tree, every leaf, every little slug and worm and moth. It is sorrow, and it is a compulsion to try – and anxiety knowing that I can’t possibly. Attention, attention, attention – what a gift, and I can never give enough. This anxiety is so present in Oliver’s poems too, though, and this is grace. I love The Gardener in particular for this.

I’ve always felt overwhelmed by vastness. I suppose most are. As a kid, I couldn’t think about the ocean or space for more than a few minutes at a time without crumbling into a little panic. I remember feeling scared to start thinking about space, like I might literally, physically fall into it if I spent too much time thinking of it. I distinctly remember standing on the sidewalk outside of Winnona Park Elementary after school, I was maybe seven or eight years old, panicking about space and feeling like I was going to be swallowed up by the thinking of it. Maybe this terror was inspired by Neverending Story or something, a movie that I will not rewatch ever again on account of I’ve never seen anything so disturbing. Honestly, I don’t even remember the story or what it’s about, but as it exists in my memory, it’s about falling into a fantasy world, or like a world of your own imagination’s making, and being trapped there. Is that accurate? If not, maybe I will watch again – but regardless, this is an acute fear of mine, always has been. I live so much in my mind: I create stories and fantasies and play them out and spiral and obsess and worry and think and think and think (you too?) and it feels like, at any moment, I could slip fully, physically into this imaginary world and be trapped. This is what thinking about space feels like.

Oh my god, I wish I were a faster typer or could press “pause” on the things that I’m thinking about – everything is everything, everything is connected. I’ve been feeling out of sorts this week, high highs and very low come-downs, and only in this moment am I drawing some connections and teasing out some things. Amazing how writing does this – writing, or anything that makes material what has been buzzing around in my brain or sitting, heavy, in my body. This week I bloomed a brief crush and lost myself in fantasy – it feels like it’s been double time in the last five or six days, like time has been stretched out; I’ve been living in my head. We talked briefly about this, my crush and I, about our mutual delight in fantasyland, hopeless romanticism, the deliciousness of crushing, the trickiness of translating a fantasy into real intimacy. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that conversation and, truthfully, I think about this all the time anyway, specifically about the space and lack (and fantasy, and unknowingness) that desire requires. Anne Carson writes about this beautifully: “We see in [the triangle] the radical constitution of desire. For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components – lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. … The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on the screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. … Desire moves.”

This is similar to my feelings about space-thinking and the terror there because, for as much as I dread the possibility of losing my mind over to itself – of walking through the cabinet or wardrobe or whatever and not finding my way back – when it comes to intimacy, whether platonic or romantic, the dread hits different. I have more thinking to do about this.

Related to this (I think?) is a sense that sometimes the feelings I have might be just too big to hold in a body and they’ll tear me right apart, or at least this is something I worry about. Yes, this is dramatic, but it does feel this way sometimes – like if I let myself feel things as fully as they are without temperance I will be washed away, I will never recover. This is true for big feelings of any flavor, that I am teetering on the edge of control, and if I lose grip then whoosh! there I go. Not always, and honestly sometimes I go weeks without feeling big feelings, and this is the grayest and most unsettling state of them all. I love to feel electric in my body, and the concern is lessening. Still, though, I think this is integral to my fear of intimacy (!), how cliché, the too much of it all. This is not quite it, now that I’m re-reading and considering, but when will it ever be? This is just a thought in process. Anyway, this is something that has been rattling me up this week and every week.

When I was considering topics for a brief PowerPoint presentation last week, I thought about talking about the celestial sphere, double stars, how to use constellations to track time. Instead, I talked about earworms and thoughts that get stuck in my head, including desire and language around it. Over, and over, and over, and – the same thing. I remembered reading a quote from an artist or an author, or maybe I listened to it? about how anyone only ever has a couple ideas, then spends their whole life making the same things or working out the same creative problem over and over again. Maybe I’ve written about this before, how this brings me such solace and grants me such grace. In Wolfe’s most recent newsletter, he described this same thing, which seems synchronicitous – it is it is 

Eli, Felix, Emily, and I played hooky on Tuesday and rode our bikes to the High Museum, where we looked at quilts and cried, among other things. One applique flag in the folk art wing is adorned with different animals, each a symbol of a god or character in a story. These little creatures are stitched so beautifully, especially their little claws, I could barely stand it. By the time we were walking through here, we were all suffering from light museum fatigue, but I can’t wait to go back to look and look at these little claws. I hate that the High isn’t free. I got a Museum Pass this go around, which is essentially a cheaper membership, so I can’t bring guests or park for free or say “I’m a member” but I can visit during the day for a whole year for the price of two visits. Especially in winter, I want to go and look and look and get fed. I like the little objects and the soft things in the High’s collection best, but also I love to park in front of the same painting for half an hour, for longer, just looking. 

I like to think about what it feels like to roll my body along a wall of warm bricks.

I like to think about the sensation of a manta ray face massage, which is something I made up (unless?), which means you are lying down on your back or in some other comfortable position, maybe propped up on a couple pillows, but relaxed, and two manta rays are hovering over your face. You’re not underwater but the air is probably dewy in a nice way, and in my fantasy the manta rays are comfortable, too, it’s not like they’re out of their element. The manta rays are next to one another, hovering, and they’re stroking across your closed eyelids and over your lips in a very rhythmic and soothing way. It feels like weighted silk sheets sweeping across your cheeks, cool and slippery, but soft like the creamy underbelly of those little frog gummies from Your Dekalb Farmers Market. Wouldn’t this be so nice?

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Earlier this afternoon, I was walking up and down the street in Park Slope, looking around and remembering being here several months ago, in November. Today, I got off the train in a neighborhood that reminded me of Dumbo in its proximity to the water, but also reminded me of what I imagine a no-place is like. There is a bridge over a freeway, each of the bridge’s steel legs (are these called legs? what am I describing?) wrapped in what looks like a frosted saran wrap, like that sticky kind that stretches over porcelain bowls from the kitchen like skin, the underside of the bridge fitted in foil that twists, like silver waves. A bridge near Broadway Junction had the same coating, like fish scales, like a sculpture. Katie pointed out this funny architecture. The underbelly of this bridge reminds me of Katharina Grosse’s work, though the similarity in form isn’t particularly striking. Maybe it’s the feeling. Anyway, I got off the train into this strange landscape, a great place to visit if you’re in need of tools: White Cap, Harbor Freight, and Lowe’s are all stones’ throws from one another, a real one-stop-shop and the gamut, quality-wise. Harbor Freight reminds me of Howard, or, really, Harbor Freight reminds me of Taylor talking about Howard and his shitty Harbor Freight tools. I have no opinion of my own, here.

Also before the bridge is a McDonald’s, which seems like it’s on an island all its own, and it is, if the one-way streets which encircle (entriangle?) the little McDonald’s building make its moat. I’d had a headache all day from not sleeping, from not drinking water, from walking, from crying, from screeching. Floy taught me a year or so ago that a frozen coke from McDonald’s is a foolproof hangover cure, and she’s right. I wasn’t hungover but it felt awfully like it, so I stopped to get a frozen coke, which is something I never thought I’d do in New York City. A small frozen coke is the same price as a medium which is the same price as a large, at least this is what the cashier told me when I ordered a small to start with. I didn’t want any more than a small’s worth of frozen coke because I’ve tried that (more) before and it’s true, too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing, and I’ve been feeling particularly concerned about my very sore and tender teeth lately, and surely a mouthful of frozen coke wasn’t going to be particularly helpful, here, and certainly not any amount more than that, but I felt a little like he was glad to share this hack with me, it felt like we were together in this, especially the way he smiled. So yes, fine, I’ll take the larger size. He asked which – I chose medium, which was surprising, I think, because why not a large? But medium, medium, and I threw half of it away after all, once it melted and I accidentally (without thinking) pressed the straw up against the bookshelf in the thrift store that smelled like thrift stores always do but even a little staler than that. I got to thinking about what all is on the surfaces of the bookshelves in there, even on the table with a sign that said “do not place anything on this surface NO coffee NO books NOTHING do not touch!!!” – what is on that surface, even, just falling out of the air. As soon as I walked in the store I regretted not throwing my coke away beforehand. Pawing through t-shirts and weird coats is hard one-handed, and besides, I felt like the air was seeping in through the straw and through the wide mouth of the domed top that comes with frozen cokes and I was feeling a little icky about drinking it. I really considered leaving the cup, half full, on a shelf in the back, maybe among the other glasses or in the section that is just random things, small things, where you tend to find handmade ceramics or pottery by kids (my favorite). I didn’t, though, and instead carried the coke around for 45 minutes or so, looking at books with one hand before I got excited, enough to need two hands, then pushed the coke cup onto a bookshelf and pressed the straw tip up against the shelf above.

I bought one used book for more than $4. I hadn’t heard of the book, but the reviews on the back were intriguing, and I flipped through a little bit and it looks weird. One of my very favorite books that I’ve ever read I picked up from a bookstore, last minute, never having heard of it, just interested in the snippet of review printed on the back, and maybe this will be a similar experience. That book, the one that is one of my favorites, is called Fowl Eulogies and it is a book so strange and beautiful and terse – I think about it all the time, and I recommend it almost as frequently.

Okay anyways, I was walking around Park Slope, mostly down 5th Avenue, but then up a street to make a block then back to the Avenue again. The wind was whipping all around, really blowing hard, and little bits of leaves and trash and dust and dirt were spinning around the sidewalks. Everyone’s faces in the wind are so funny to me, and I love the shared stupid looks we’re all making. Lots of scrunched noses and squinted eyes, like it’ll help. The sky was darkening and the clouds were collecting in places, but there were also still pockets of blue sky and lightness that made the weather confusing. It’s been windy all day, I was trying to work outside earlier and couldn’t stand it, the wind like this makes me feel all mixed up, like I’ve been picked up and shaken and tossed all around, the feeling is nauseating and my reaction so visceral. I can’t remember where I was the last time I felt like this, the windiness, maybe in Atlanta? Yes! It was unbearable, I felt like all I could do was scream, I felt so turbulent, like I’d swallowed up the wind and I just couldn’t take it anymore, like my body was full, the cavities of it all, yet I couldn’t surrender fully to just being lifted away and so had to withstand this, like, crazy pressure pushing every which way in my body. How do people live in Chicago or other famously windy cities?

I was walking down a street with Street in its name, so one perpendicular to the Avenue, and the wind was doing what it was doing, and the clouds kept collecting, then I heard this thundering crack – I thought, at first, that it was literal thunder, though to be it would’ve meant lightning striking right there because it was so loud, but then I looked up and just a little ahead, and a huge limb of a London planetree was cracking and falling, and I had this feeling in my body, like, the weight of this thing will feel like so much and like so little, and I turned and ran out of the way. The limb cleaved from the trunk of the tree, tore down and left a gaping hole, and the limb and all its branches and leaves covered completely the car parked beneath it, the sidewalk, too. I don’t think anything was crushed, incredibly, or if it was I didn’t hear or notice or take a closer look. I’m not sure if it was actually a close call, like, I had enough time to mistake the sound for thunder and still get out of the way.

Now, my clock is saying 12:12, another special number, and four minutes too early.

I tried to write a little bit about our trip to Utah, starting with the first day and recording everything I could remember, including feelings, including very small and mundane things. When Taylor and I drove up the east coast collecting antiques to bring back to Atlanta (“collecting antiques” which was mostly hanging out and going into abandoned buildings and finding weird auto shops on the side of the road and yard sales and Bennie’s across the street from the junkyard where I found the most pristinely preserved paper dress from the late 1960s that I still wear today and harvesting mussels and crossing the railroad bridge, crying, and swimming in the river on the other side and going crabbing and sitting in traffic in a lawn chair on the freeway) I took copious notes in a little book I carried with me, everyday I would write about what happened, how it felt, and I made drawings and really described things in exacting detail for some reason. I guess the whole trip was one of those, a “for some reason” where that reason is either unknown or illogical or, like, not-reason-enough if you think too long about it, and so I knew it would be special in some way, and I wanted to remember every moment. That’s something, too, like memories beget other memories, it’s a jogging, and so even if not every little thing is actually recorded, remembering bits and pieces brings up more and more, and it’s helpful to start from somewhere, rather than from nowhere (with nothing).

Katie and I arrived precisely two minutes early to Courtney’s. Anna brought with her two cheeses and two baguettes. Courtney made the most beautiful dinner, corn salad and watermelon salad and little cups of gazpacho and pasta designed for hanging onto and salty cheese and crackers and bread and – and! – pavlova for dessert, which is objectively the most sumptuous dessert ever devised, the softness and chewiness and lushness of its mess, all of it, the cream and berries and it’s like a pillow, it really is, and oh pavlova is a muse. We drank out of little sake glasses, those ones with drawings on the glass that come from the grocery store with little foil pop top caps. The sky outside matched the sky in the painting, Splendor, this rich royal blue, at once brooding and electric and dark and deep. I am overwhelmed, I can’t describe. The beauty of it all, the beauty of it all, the glow. What will come?

Maybe, if given the opportunity, I’ll become swift and agile in this genre; maybe I’ll enjoy the practice. There is, admittedly, something distinct about writing about myself (yourself, oneself). It is something particularly difficult. Maybe they’re not the same thing at all, a cover letter and a grant proposal, but what I do know for certain is writing is hard. Do I even like it? Ha ha I do I do I wonder I wonder

For now, anyway, my brain feels like a fried egg after a couple hours of staring at this smudged screen, typing a single sentence, then deleting it, then typing it again (one comma shifted), then deleting, then –

My mom (hello!) observed, once, my perfectionism in this regard. In my Wish, in my Fantasy, each sentence arrives fully-formed and perfect, as it ought to be. Ta-da! I have a hard time sitting with sentences I know are not right, I don’t even like to have them on a page, anywhere. I wonder about patience, if leaving things behind even when they’re absolutely awful could mean something later on. What the coming-back-to could be like. I can sometimes trick myself into writing it all out – everything, no matter what, just a mess, it can clean up later – but often this happens only when, finally, I’m feeling frayed and like I simply! cannot! Then, the good stuff.

(“good” and “awful” and “right”, whatever)

So, anyway, I’m thinking about writing.

– I can’t believe no one told me about Patricia Highsmith. Really, I can’t believe no one ever implored me to read her. I’ve just started reading The Price of Salt, inspired by this essay in the New Yorker, and I am smitten. In my group therapy, we do this Thing called present time, during which we’re allowed only to respond to, interact with, and exist in the present: what’s in the room, what we’re feeling in the moment, what comes up without any outside story. This is excruciatingly uncomfortable at first; each time, I feel like I’m completely emptied out, like I’ve been absolutely vacuumed. After a while, though, you kind of give in to this, like, what else are you to do, and you can’t help but notice the great waves of feeling and sensation that move through you, and it is a revelation. Never have I felt so expanded, so open, than during present time – it’s hard to describe, actually, but if you ever want to try it, let’s. It’s like drugs. Anyway, this reminds me, too, of what using magnetic poetry is like: in both cases, the limitations/the container (nothing but the limited and weird vocabulary in front of you to use, nothing but the hyper present to anchor into, respectively) necessitate this newness of experience, some kind of freshness, and suddenly you’re describing things as you never would have before, and this is, then, seeing/experiencing/making things anew.

Which is related to Highsmith and her language, how she describes canned peaches like little fishes sliding around on a spoon, it’s delightful and true and you feel it. I love this freshness, I can’t wait to read more and more.

Oh, I loved the eclipse and its shapes. I was surprised by the shape of the thing after the moon and sun moved apart from one another, just after 3:04pm in Atlanta yesterday. I expected a shape so different. I was sure to see an opposite crescent, mirroring the one created by the moon’s passing. Rather, a cup – like a little cup for holding a soft-boiled egg, for dipping. The moon moved “up,” not over, and I puzzled over this motion and, finally, think I understand it, but actually all I care to think about, really, is the shape and its loveliness. I wish I’d taken a picture, but I can draw it. I felt regretful for not traveling to the path of totality (the gravity, here), but this, too, passed. I loved our shapes, and I loved the glimmer of the light, and I loved the shimmering crescents reflected through the tree’s leaves, little pinhole cameras, a canopy full. I feel lucky that this eclipse happened for us in spring; have the trees in New York flushed? What were the shadows like there?

I feel so full of wonder! I feel so in love, no object in particular except for everything wonderful, I feel so glad for April. I told someone on Sunday that I’ve been feeling a little stale, like I haven’t been surprised in quite awhile, but this is actually completely untrue. That conversation itself was a surprise; seeing the little blue eyes of the grass peep open in the morning is a surprise; the crispness of the afternoon, its sharpness was a surprise; – seeing with new eyes, seeing with new eyes.

Good day, I think, I am the queen of projection. All I do is project, project, project, it is what I do best.

It is what I do best: project, project.

And the grief, I tell you! Surely (oh, really?) there is nothing so wonderful as what I have crafted in my mind, and so the disappointment is inevitable, in time. Oh really? It is what I do best, I do it again and again. I have no way of knowing.

It’s incredible how impassable a feeling can be (can feel), yet in a moment or two (or days or), the trace of the once-absolute feeling fades and it’s almost impossible that, so recently, you felt overtaken. On a Tuesday in New York the other week, in the dark, in the morning, on the couch, still half-sleeping, I woke with an intense anxiety and distinct dread for the day ahead. I think it’s the empty time, the needing-to-fill-it that gets me … though in a different headspace, I love nothing more than an empty day to fill with wandering around, noticing. The cold makes this trickier, which is why I love spring and summer in new places (or alone places) best. 

Anyway, I was imagining the minutes ticking along, one after the other; and then it was practicing the things I wanted to say, to ask, that I felt (feel) nervous to, like, literally talking out loud with myself, trying things on; and then I was feeling like my brain was a flat puddle, one that doesn’t catch the light or reflect anything at all, but instead spreads and thins and evaporates; then, I remembered that I accidentally booked a nice return flight, which means it comes with a no-fee flight change, and I whirred and whirred, re-booked, and almost instantly regretted it.

one thing about you is you like all things

I feel, often, like I feel too much

I’m watching the finale episode of The Bachelor and writing this in between, during commercial breaks. It’s kind of incredible how contrived this show is, and the whole “Bachelor Nation” thing is mind-boggling. This is the first season I’ve watched all the way through, in real time, and until recently, I think I underestimated the effect that watching this stupid show has had on me. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, that gets under my skin, but in the last few months, I’ve felt lonelier than I’ve ever felt before, ever. I don’t think this is entirely the fault of The Bachelor, ha ha, but it’s certainly not helping. Is this similar to listening to sad music when you’re feeling sad already in order to amplify the feeling? 

Someone somewhere was saying about how a person really only has a handful of ideas/interests, and these few ideas just keep getting jostled around and tumbled up like in that machine for making rocks smooth, forever and ever, and they might expand and twist a bit but, wholly, they’re the same handful at the end of the day. And wow, I loved hearing this, because often I feel obsessive and dull because I’ve been turning over the same things for always, I’m occupied with a set of concerns that remains constant, for the most part. I do like the feeling of obsession, it is intoxicating, but it is also isolating – how can you describe a dream without dulling its brilliance, how can you capture the wonder of something that obsesses.

This morning, I was sorting the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, on my bed, on the bathroom floor into clean, worn-but-wearble, must wash – hanging up things that need to be hung, stuffing cleans and worn-but-wearbles into their drawers – and listening to a story about Tony Hawk. In the story, David Koestenbaum of This American Life describes watching a video Hawk released of himself as a 52-year-old trying to land an Ollie 540, some skateboard trick that sounds really hard and honestly a little magical in its use of physics and force. He tries over and over again, keeps falling, but when he finally lands it, he feels sad – sad that this is the last Ollie 540 he’ll ever do. Koestenbaum describes watching the video and tearing up every time, and I’m threading a hanger through a neck hole and crying, too. I’m thinking about time, about what it might feel like to be 50 years old, how that is not so distant, and yet, in some ways, feels impossible to imagine. I wonder what it will be like. I feel very, very sad about time marching on, and I feel an acute and sharp, like, truly like-a-knife painful ache for lost time and my childhood and what it felt like to be, oh, 15  and completely unable to imagine what it might be like to be 30 … what happens in between?

When I was 25, I lived in Ecuador for a few months. I’d hoped to stay there longer, but I don’t speak Spanish and the sorrow of this incompatibility was too much for me. I remember returning to the States and feeling wildly, ecstatically glad for a casual greeting to feel easy and open to possibility. At the time, I was feeling madly in love and wrote emails to my beloved weekly. In retrospect, this feeling was seated in me, in a desire un-placed in any other person, but I do love the lust, the limerence.

It is like this:

1. It is four p.m. and I walk through the orchard of dead and dying granadilla trees. Their twisted branches curl around and clutch the tattering strings that support their heavy fruits, now dried up or rotting or paper-thin, like ghosts. I’m looking – I look and I look.

2. Sunday malaise is not site-specific.

3. I am listening to a young woman tell a story on stage about her mother while I crouch in the greenhouse, plucking tiny weeds out of the ground to add to a growing pile. She makes a joke about Mormonism and, inexplicably, I lose it. I cry and cry, and the greenhouse is hot, and my face is streaked with dirt.

4. Fernanda laughs at me when I use my hands to speak; she shakes her head at me and grins during every almuerzo.

5. Little things that make a difference: a lamp, extra coffee, a tiny peach, a tea spoon.

6. A taxo is just a little sack of clitorises.

7. After the first day of work, my hands are blistered and sore. I wrap them in tape but the acedone wears down the bandages, quick. I bury the torn wrapping in the potatoes. At night I can’t hold a book to read on account of my trembling hands.

8. Roses grow straight stems only at the equator.

9. It is one p.m. and the guinea pigs got loose. I am on my hands and knees in their shit, poking a little rat in the corner of the shed, coaxing it out. Lauren laughs, and in my mind’s eye I can see myself kneeling, and I see her crouched with the broom, and we are both laughing.

10. Finally, finally, a tiny avocado is soft enough (anywhere else, it’s days from ripeness) – a sliver, a spoon.

Recommendation: spend hours standing before your refrigerator, rearranging the magnetic poetry that has been there for years but that you’ve never paid much mind. Enjoy categorizing the individual tiles by parts of speech (this, in and of itself, is a thrilling exercise, especially considering nouns become verbs so easily and fluidly, and all across the board, and so any category feels fragile and not quite correct, which is itself electric). Make poems. Forget time. Wonder how it is that the set only includes one “this,” and zero “sometimes”. Realize, delightedly, that you’ve completely missed the opportunity to use “-est” and “-ous” and “-ness,” but it is midnight. Tomorrow.

Here are three as they approximately are:

1. winter is like diamonds
   though an ache
   enormous and elaborate
   floods my waxy blood
   sweaty & sordid yet
   cool
   when I recall our summer
   still raw
   my urge was repulsive
   but I will worship
   your delirious beauty for
   a thousand springs
   

   an eternity

2. please
   let me have two moments of sky
   one
   the milky sea & stormy garden
   then
   light rain and panting wind
   an iron gown rips
   next
   show me what you are reading
   after
   place these smooth rocks beneath my head

3. love would ask
   have they watered the petals of those
   whose skin is rosy gorgeous
   smells of peaches
   and swimming

   from above and away he cried
   no no

   
   with sadness

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I like a fragment, I guess. I also like strings of fragments that relate to one another, but maybe in changing ways depending on the occasion or how you encounter them or how you (the reader) are feeling at the time. I think Maggie Nelson accomplishes this dazzlingly well. Anne Carson, too – Barthes, all those guys.

In the morning, light glances through the window in my living room. As the morning moves, sunlight pours in to puddle on the rug there. I like to wake up to the light, which is rare in winter. The cold is not discouraging, it’s the lack of light, and I wonder how my sister feels in Alaska.

I’ve been circling the drain for eons it feels like. Is this what growing older is? Is this a consequence of the last few years, during which the “future” has lost all shape and predictability on every scale, both day-to-day and much more broadly? “This time last year” makes me laugh (choke?) in reaction to its distance.

I love that, in New York, people will just be lying down on the grass in a park in their business casual wear like it’s the most natural thing to do. I don’t know why, exactly, this is so striking to me – maybe it’s the performance of leisure, or the ease, or the frequency. When I imagine a bird’s eye view of Prospect Park on a nice day, the lawn is dotted with these suits, lounging.

One sentence that I like: I can’t describe. It speaks volumes.

I like to fish an avocado pit out of the sink drain when it inevitably slips through the rubbery mouth of the basin. I love the smoothness of this seed, its slickness, its shape. Erotic, it really is. I imagine what it would feel like (and, almost more grotesquely, look like) for the disposal to accidentally flash on mid-fishing. This is adjacent to the impulsive desire to jump off the edge of a rickety bridge or plunge the sharp knife I’m putting away into some flesh. It’s equally tantalizing and nauseating (sister pleasures).

I do like to read sentences that are jagged and sharp. I especially like when one is butted up against a sentence much longer, more languorous, more meandering – or couched among several, a paragraph of run-on sentences punctuated, tartly, with a sentence short and biting. I like to read aloud. I didn’t “get” poetry before someone suggested reading poems out loud – that they are meant to be heard, that the sound is important. This was a revelation. This continues to be, upon every reading, a revelation. The experience of listening was (is) so moving and delicious that I figured I ought to try it with anything, everything written – that this is what I’m seeking, a syntax that sings.

When Joyce Carol Oates says she works for five hours each morning, what do you think that looks like? Is she writing for that entire stretch? Is thinking working? Is walking around the block working? Is kissing my cat working? Is typing a sentence, then deleting it, then typing something else, then feeling discouraged working? When it’s not working, is this working? (Joyce, I think, would answer “no” to most of these inquiries.)

Listening to Dance Acadia feels like thinking of you. (You fluctuates.)

David’s neighbor, who lived in the upstairs upstairs, smokes weed and keeps in touch, still, with Alex, which pleases David. Their correspondence is just occasional, but, considering the temperaments of each, significant. On Tuesday mornings, Alex folds freshly laundered dish towels and thinks, fondly, of the double sets of stairs she’d climb to the third (or was it fourth?) floor. On Friday afternoons, the neighbor thumbs through The New Yorker for the poems, in the armchair facing the window that overlooks the street. He thinks of Alex and her tinkling laugh, nervous-sounding until you get to know her then understand that, no, it’s just the fairies in her throat.

Okay!

I like to make fleeting eye contact with the driver next to me when we’re both stopped at the red light. If I’m in the right mood, I like to really look. I love to catch people getting ready. This morning, I watched a woman comb her hair for minutes as we drove slowly along, combing combing, and the gesture looked so lovely, especially in the glint of a rearview mirror. Her hands, the comb. I took a zoomed in video but the effect is lost (trust me). Have you seen those diagrams detailing the proportion of space we give up for automobile infrastructure (roads, parking lots, etc.)? It is horrifying and absurd, like, literally absurd – and yet, daily, I sit in my car, alone, and watch people sitting, alone, in theirs.

My favorite tag in the city is scrawled on the bridge that passes over where I-20 west funnels onto the connector, heading north. SLIMES OR DIMES in this kind of bubbly script – slimes or dimes, slimes or dimes, the phrase gets stuck in my head. To my horror, someone painted over this masterpiece several months ago, but – blessedly – the tag appeared again a day later. I really do love it, I think about it a lot. Another one I liked was on the bridge across Moreland Avenue, headed north: “stacey’s satanic dystopia,” that’s all. Written so plainly. Honestly, it took me a long time to get the joke; really I just liked imagining this place, kind of bubblegum pink and bouncy. This whole bridge was painted over recently and I hate that.

I tend to aggrandize and romanticize things that are far away from me, things I can’t really ever get to know. All I need is the faintest taste, then I can stretch this into a totalizing and all-consuming, desirous fantasy that fills me up. The mania and delight in this is sharp; the inevitable disappointment (“reality bites”) is equally (often more?) so. This is a familiar tendency (at all ages); what has changed are the objects of desire. Growing up, I had such a tricky time differentiating between fiction and reality. If something was written down or in a movie or told to me, I figured it must be true. Do you remember that movie Splash? This one, in particular, rocked my world – maybe because the context of the fantasy is so mundane? E.T., The Goonies, all of these. Everything seemed possible. I would like to live in a world where everything (anything) is possible, thank you very much, and often I feel sort of silly for this, but actually I mean it. 

More than a decade ago, you told me that all we have left for each other is hurt. I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe it now, but in the between-time, you were right. How nice it feels (now) to have moved in and out and from this place.

That year, I lived on the internet to be closer to you. Was it Zoom, then? I don’t actually remember the platform, but the indicator sound of logging on rings (still!) in my body, it feels like.

I took my mom’s road bike with me to college, and I remember riding around the little Honors quad in circles, trying to get the hang of the awkward body shape the bike required. The bike was (is) slightly too tall for me, and for the first year or so I was too nervous to switch gears, to reach down and balance, precarious. Sometimes, we’d talk outside. I have a screenshot saved somewhere of one of our conversations (one of many screenshots, somewhere). I typed to you that the connection was poor, that I’m logging off, and you replied “don’t leave,” over and over. Then — “i am worth it.” And you were; you are. And again: I believed you then, and I believe it now, it’s just in the meantime that I wasn’t so sure.

“water under the bridge,” or something.

Nothing, nothing, nothing is sweeter than spending time making things in the company of, alongside, in collaboration with, others. I am so, so, so grateful for this. Thank you, thank you, thank you –

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I would like to make a painting on the side of my neighbors’ fence that runs between our backyards, but they (my neighbors) just moved in and I haven’t had a chance to ask. Their names are Anna and James. I’d like to paint just a little part of my side of the fence, a section that’s framed very nicely between two trees. It’s a panel asking for a painting. People are so weird about this particular flavor of property (fences), though, and I wonder what they’ll say.

Another set of neighbors (a block east; our backyards butt up caddy corner to one another) has been listening to Raspberry Beret by Prince on repeat, loudly, for the last half hour or so. I’m certain they would say “yes” to a fence painting, but we don’t share a surface. 

I love it when people tell about their dreams, and I especially love to hear when I appear in them. Is this self-involved? A little, probably, but I also just love the idea of visiting my friends in this liminal, sleepy space, just as I love when people visit me there. This is what dreaming about you feels like. I wonder sometimes if, when I dream about you, you’re dreaming about me. Regardless, I like the web of it all. 

I sometimes wish I could paint the scenery of my dreams, but to try would just mean fucking it up, I know it. Even describing them in detail does damage to the color, the shapes, the impressions. I’d rather the images exist crystalline in my mind’s eye, forever, and at the same time, I wonder how to hold on when forgetting is inevitable.

I read a poem the other day that is a list, and while I didn’t like the poem much, I love the transformative power of a frame (whatever shape that frame takes). I think, often, close looking can be frame enough; the consideration alone creates the conceptual container. Children are really good at this. One of my favorite dealers at the antique shop, Chris, would buy brand new lamps at HomeGoods, take off the tags, and resell them in his booth for double or triple the original price. He made a killing this way. It’s all about context, he’d say, and he’s right. What you call a thing, how you see a thing, changes it. (In some cases, creates it.)

Discipline is different than motivation, is different than inspiration, is different than Feeling It. The original intention of this project (lowercase “p”) was to be an exercise in discipline, and wow – yikes. Perhaps the discipline is in the coming back, the not abandoning, the returning. Okay, well then! I don’t tend to take lunch breaks at work, or if I do, it’s in service of some other activity (i.e. visiting Value Village). A while ago, in lieu of lunch I wrote 1,111 words and felt deeply moved to do so – like the energy in my body was electric and almost overwhelming, like if I didn’t keep spilling words I might collapse, and my sentence ended with exactly that 1,111. I wish I could collect that energy in a little cup to drink from more consistently, less manically, but I also enjoy the lightning strikes of really Wanting To – again, discipline is different than Feeling It. The feeling, though – it’s a rush.

“It feels like only yesterday –” says the man at the bar to his partner of 46 years.

Two children sit at the window, reading. Their mother orders sandwiches – no pickles, no slaw – and delights at the well-seasoned fries. 

A set of twins sit across from each other at a small table on the outdoor patio. Eventually, a man joins them, perched awkwardly to the side. One half of the original pair departs, leaving the others in this weird formation.

It feels like forever that you’ve been gone, but when you open the refrigerator upon returning home, the kale is un-wilted; the avocados left on the counter are just ripe.

I remember my room in Tank Co-op on the third floor that I shared with Mariana (I think this was her name?). I remember the little bird outside my window that would wolf whistle every morning, I swear to you, it was distinctly cat-callish. I remember talking with Madeline and her sister in line for lunch.

I remember standing outside of the Feve with Theo, stepping out from a party. I remember walking home in front of him, and I remember the picture he took. Only recently, I recalled seeing the picture Tony took of us upstairs, inside, that was at the time horribly mortifying. What I wouldn’t give for that picture now.

I remember the big staircase in the Science building that led up to our Astronomy 101 classroom. I remember the dress I was wearing when Harry passed me a note complimenting this dress from the row behind.

I remember planting bulbs in the front yard at 123 South Professor Street, and I remember my delight when they bloomed. I remember Amanda in the kitchen, talking. I remember the little flies in the downstairs bathroom shower, and I remember the brown tile. I remember watching Cordelia dance in the house up the street the year or two before; I was smitten with her sense of ease. She was electric.

I remember sitting on the toilet at Short Mountain, looking out across the valley and mountains there, feeling very full of awe. I remember the brownies they made us. I remember the sauna, and I remember the big table in the kitchen of the Temple that welcomed gathering.

I remember listening to the Microphones in Jacob’s bedroom in the dark.

I remember watching Spiral Jetty for the first time, and I remember thinking it was very cool that our art library had a copy.

I remember sitting on the stairs up to the roof at the farm in Ecuador. The building was stucco and painted white, and it struck me as quite grand looking, especially in contrast with the surrounding landscape. I remember drawing a fig in my notebook. I remember transcribing the words to a song about penguins into Spanish to share with Fernanda and her daughter. I remember writing Theo one of many emails on my phone. I re-read some of these emails recently and felt embarrassed, they’re so saccharine and young-sounding. I suppose I’ll look back on some of this writing and feel similarly, but I hope not (at least not for the same reasons). I try to write things more straightforwardly, more honestly. I think plain language is the loveliest, but I also know that I tend to warble.

I don’t remember the precise date of my abortion, as in I don’t remember the year it happened, but I do know it was a Friday the 13th of some month, maybe April? May? When I called to schedule the appointment, the woman on the phone made some unsolicited comment about the spooky date. I don’t remember what I said. I remember crying after I hung up the phone because I was nervous about the logistics of the whole thing, not about the abortion itself. 

I remember going to dinner at my parents’ house the night I learned, for certain, that I was pregnant. I’d been feeling strangely for a week or two, like something was “off.” I don’t remember what this felt like any more specifically than that. I remember feeling kind of giddy at dinner; my boyfriend at the time was there, too, and it felt like this kind of unbelievable secret between the two of us. I think, for a moment, we entertained the possibility – but only in the soft light of my parents’ house, in this good company. I never had the thought seriously that I would do anything else but seek an abortion. I don’t know (or, at least, I don’t remember) how he felt.

I wonder if I’ll ever have children. Will I ever have children? Who am I asking?

My cat has a little tuft of hair frozen in a sticking-up position from where I applied flea medicine this morning. It’s surprising to me that it’s still (at 5:34pm) erect in this position, and I guess it’s a good sign of her inability to lick the medicine away. In case today starts to feel like several days in one, it’s a welcome reminder that, no, this morning was this morning.

Eli told me recently that Georgia State offers MFA degrees tuition-free, and it turns out this is true. I clicked through the informational website earlier today out of curiosity, and I am still curious. My friend Bailey is a paralegal and tracks all of her time down to six-minute increments in order to bill clients. Today, my log would begin like this:

.4 hours — checked bank statement for evidence of past mortgage payment (no evidence); paid two mortgage installments and a late fee

.4 hours — googled “atl to nyc” to check flights for early October; clicked through but didn’t purchase

.5 hours — perused Georgia State’s website, including portfolio requirements, arts faculty, timelines, financial aid

.75 hours — listened in on a largely unproductive phone call having little to do with my work/responsibilities

…

.75 hours — drove to and from Publix to pick up lunch and to gawk at the collapsed parking deck (unsuccessfully; the area is completely fenced and blocked from view)

…

on and on.

Once I read (or was taught?) that “suddenly” is a lazy adverb, but I can’t quite remember what’s lazy about it. Is anything truly sudden? Do things only feel “sudden” in a moment, then with further consideration or looking back become less so? Does the original feeling remain true in spite of this? These aren’t rhetorical questions, actually.

Anyway — there are so, so many things I don’t remember. The exercise (called Actively Trying to Remember, which involves starting with one memory then tugging the thread to follow whatever associations or other moments come up) is both so pleasurable and lightly devastating. I mourn all that I can’t remember, and at the same time, I don’t think I could hold it all, anyway.

Thank you!

I thought it would be nice to try a writing prompt or exercise or something, just to practice/upset the kind of rote machinations my brain sets into when it comes time to “write.” This got me thinking about observation papers we wrote in the first art history class I took with Sarah a decade ago. The assignment was to write a three page paper of pure observation, no analysis, no research, no opining, nothing but looking at an object, recording what you see. I found this excruciatingly difficult at first, and still, it takes me a long while to be able to drop fully into observation-only mode. Once you get there, though, WOW there is so much to describe!! Even of the smallest, most mundane, simplest object imaginable. It’s overwhelming, almost, to feel responsible for describing in the most exacting detail possible the looks of a thing. (That’s what it feels like to me, like a duty to the object in question – there’s a relationship here.) Anyway, I came to really love this flavor, it’s good for unlocking.

Two of my most favorite and beloved people on this green earth married each other this weekend, and let me tell you it was perfect in every way. Since leaving New York this morning, I’ve been reminding (convincing?) myself that not every single day needs to be magic for the wholeness of the thing (the thing, here, is my life, I guess?) to be special or meaningful or worthwhile. It’s hard when the longing is so acute, though! It is literally painful, this ache. The goal, here, is to avoid spiraling into a depressive nostalgia loop that leaves me feeling bleh (see what I mean, over and over). Instead, I’d like to savor the delight and tastiness of the actual, pure heaven that is spending time with people I love so much and find so inspiring and stan absolutely. I can feel myself already slipping out of the dazzling enchantment of the last several days, which is okay: I knew the feeling would dilute, and I’d be back to “reality” or whatever, but actually – surprise – it’s all reality, and I’m trying to hold on to the hum, to keep feeling that electricity. How GRAND it is and how LUCKY I am

Courtney, Cora, and I were talking about sincerity and weddings and how nice it is to witness people be so effusive with their feelings for one another; like, watching someone tell someone else how much they love them (and why, and how) is such a special thing, and that flavor of earnestness should be exercised daily, on the regular, no wedding or special occasion needed, okay? I am interested in delight, I am interested in wonder, I am interested in love and sweetness and care and tenderness and saying so. I am practicing, this is a commitment to practice; sometimes (often?) I get nervous, or I feel shy, but I will practice.