Hi-ho readers,
Here I am, dropping in. Here you are.
I always liked this Roz Chast cartoon because it’s morbid, funny, and a riff on “turn on, tune in, drop out,” popularized by countercultural psychologist and psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary. I wonder what it says about me that a favorite book of mine as an 11-year-old was a signed anthology of her work.
I tuned out these past few months. I felt extended summer bliss. Fall cooled like the heat of sweat after readjusting to the room temperature. I lost weight, bought new pairs of pants, and had to rebuy a smaller round. The transition to winter was sudden and challenging—a jagged break. I had issues in my apartment that were not fully resolved until last week and sustained for almost two months. There was a massive leak, then my walls peeled off, revealing a black mold problem.
I became difficult for every city agency, council member, and management representative I could get on the phone or over email. I couldn’t afford to move and had nowhere else to go. Everything in my life came to a screeching halt while I project-managed violation on violation. It was my life. I curled up nightly, surrounded by crates and clothes off of hangers and broken plater, and cried after picking at some wretched takeout. Several social and romantic situations I’d cultivated coincidentally ebbed with no flow back. I was left without human contact for days, sometimes weeks, save for mold remediators in black sweatsuits. I felt afraid to ask anyone to hold my hand, literally or figuratively. I let the water out. I let all other life just happen to me. Not even to me; I felt in this perma-November of the soul that everything happened at me for a while. And then, suddenly, it was all done. The workers completed the final day of repairs early, and they even installed my new curtain rods as a favor. I was sitting in the Brooklyn Public Library on my third day without Vyvanse, trying to stay awake when I got the call to come home. I stared at my walls, glistening eggshells, for hours.
I am a person with a large capacity for joy. As my friend Conner would say, I like to opt for joy when the option is available. I still had my moments this winter: eating cannoli; going onto my roof during my first Christmas alone.
And this one long January walk in particular.
The miracle of each season is its end, in the first day that feels different even if the next is just the same. The dark ager in me: 300 days without snow, and I still wonder if spring is coming.
I break hard and fast like a horse when I sense that I’m close to the water’s edge. Crazed, crying, pulled past something. My walk so fast and my eyes so wet that there are only daubs of faces. You can cry wherever you like in New York, but I’ve always chosen piers. I don’t know which condition precedes the other, but: the fact that I walk to the water. The fact that the water is there. The fact that I can.
My phone died 30 minutes ago; I am without music. Still, I feel within me a pop song for which a tune has not been written, a theme song for which a show does not exist. A factory reset. A factory. I start to see the cranes, which look like…well, cranes. Simile escapes me. Their long necks bowed to industry I don’t understand.
The old pier pilings, each gull like a fat ashen wick atop a thousandth candle, screeching happy birthday, fastened to their brigade. I celebrate your shit, celebrate the bridges, and the babies waving something like aloha or shalom. Their waving is not a hello or a goodbye. It’s like a gull calling: here I am! Here you are!
I turn and throw my hands up at the sunset that is every orange, even red. I run to the edge of the pier, past the skaters and runners, and look through the tower viewer at the Statue of Liberty, who I always greet on the Q train. As the sun descends, I turn around, and no one else is looking, not even at the tawny light made fluorescent in the glass windows. Doesn’t anybody else see that building is on fire? That I am?
The buildings grow dark and darker against the sky. A ubiquitous shadow. Not looming, not an omen, just present. The art deco ziggurat where I used to work. They are some of the ugliest towers I’ve ever seen. The air is colder. I turn toward the park and see old ladies over- and young ladies under-dressed. Each camera flash, each roller blade. Everyone is married today. The Brooklyn Bridge lights a suspended string of pearls; the twilight river borrowed blue.
My feet and heartache after the pavement hits, even in sensible shoes. The afternoon and I both turned inside out and yielded to pink. I find a bench and chase a loose-scootering kid back to his mother. She yells and laughs and thanks me. I start scrawling to myself: thank you for the stationery I packed with my name printed on it, the pen I put in my pocket, the phone charger I didn’t. Thank you for each pebble on this ersatz beach. Each block I walked west, from east on Bergen Street.
I still have moments like this, but once the completed repairs lifted the weight of the residential problems, every bad and complex feeling I’ve had, every task I’ve put off, both professional and academic and emotional, has dropped like an anvil on my head, and I’m here with piano-key teeth. I have been getting upset over things that I usually don’t. Boys not texting me back. Having to leave the house. Not leaving the house. I even became deeply upset about feeling indifference this week, which is abnormal for me to feel indifference and deep upset. I have had a lot on my mind concerning my next steps in dating, and I have also been listening to a lot of Joanna Newsom (the only woman who could make me sign up for an Apple Music trial).
This whole year I’ve been trying to find something; I don’t know if I’ve found it. About myself, other people, my body, my abilities, my heart. I felt so turned inside out by the breakup, even though it was what I wanted and needed. I’ve managed to turn myself back outside in mostly, and I’m not the same as before. Things slipped around and got rearranged. Things weren’t where I had left them or were gone, with new things in their place. It always makes me think of this section of “In California” and the difference between “I don’t belong to anyone” and “I don’t belong to anyone,” or the difference between a drum as an instrument and a drum as a container. Or how I let myself be taken, as opposed to giving of myself, with intention.
It’s strange being at a threshold, a doorframe, a holding pattern, for so long, and on purpose. In my current mode of singledom, I’m intentionally leaving something out, making a meal of negative space. But I guess that’s why it’s an open doorframe. Not just a door I’m behind or in front of.
I spiral, and have more recently, maybe with the cast of time. In partnership, would my loss be greater than my gain? What if someone is never all the right things for me (or at least most of them)? What if the right person doesn’t want to let me in? It makes me feel like I’m gathering kindling for a light that’s dying. I said this to someone about hobbies, but I also feel this way about people I connect with on my end – once it’s work, it’s harder to love. I don’t think that will ever stop me from trying to include people in my life because I’m so profoundly unenigmatic and welcoming and incapable of muting or masking myself, but it makes me feel small.
I felt small and needed a reason to live (hyperbolic) on Thursday night, so I spent about an hour in the 110th St H Mart. When I came to, I was on the 2 train home with a dead phone and $84 poorer. I unloaded my snack haul at home and ate a carton of ripe strawberries over the sink with my shirt off. For that moment, it did the job.
Media Diet
The below is from Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl, which I haven’t read yet, but this excerpt was on the Tinder profile of someone I met and liked and has me stressed and fluttery:
TILLY:
Do you ever have the feeling, when you wake up in the morning, that you’re in love but you don’t know with what?
It’s this feeling—
that you want to love strangers,
that you want to kiss the man at the post-office
or the woman at the dry-cleaners—
you want to wrap your arms around life, life itself
but you can’t
and this feeling wells up
and there is nowhere to put this great happiness
and you’re floating—and then you’re falling—
and then you have to lie down on the couch.
FRANCES: (simultaneously) JOAN:
Are you still in therapy Tilly? I know what you mean.
This poem by the late and great Mary Oliver is a response to that feeling of mine.
I Don’t Want to Be Demure or Respectable
from Blue Horses (2014)
I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
I was that way, asleep, for years.
That way, you forget too many important things.
How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing.
How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before.
What traveling is that!
It is a joy to imagine such distances.
I could skip sleep for the next hundred years.
There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes.
It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room.
The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot
was missed by everyone else in the house.Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that.
Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy.
Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?
Listen to me or not, it hardly matters.
I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.
I’m just chattering.
Songs in My Heart
(with playlist) (did you miss these?)
No footnotes this time, but I wrote it in one shot. I hope to write more to you.
See you soon,
Emily