When I was eight, I began to have a feeling about poetry that I couldn’t yet put into words. I’d discovered a sense of peace within the privacy of an upstairs bedroom closet with purple carpeting, and the pleasure of reading with a bag of large jelly beans by my side. My brain collaged a connection between sweetness, solitude and language.
I studied rivers in elementary school, the Nile in particular. I spent months drawing a long replica of its slither and scope with blue and green pencils. I was a kid pulled out of class for “advanced studies,” spending hours learning key facts about the longest river in the world. Years later, debates about the mega dam boomeranged me back to this brief but deep relationship to this river now causing so much grief.
Elena Ferrante’s description of “dissolving margins,” is a helpful way to explain what sometimes happens with memories and life experience, how “the outlines of people and places dissolve and disappear,” how this seems to occur by “unknown entities” and tend to reveal life’s more unstable nature.
In high school, my first love pointed to the street lamps in the middle of a summer night and asked, “hear that?” I had never noticed their electric buzz until he pointed it out to me. Back then, I was angry and all I saw was ugliness in my world—dirty snow, Brutalist architecture, abandoned parking lots, cracked cement, maniacal designs, rusted cars, broken signs!
But then these childhood places where I ate pancakes with my dad and gabbed with mom and chatted with my aunts and fought with my sisters disappeared one by one, and rose up like palaces of great nostalgia in my mind, carnivals of joy, classrooms of passionate chaos, those platters of hot corned beef on rye, pickles as promises.
I meditate on coexistence as a contract we signed when we all arrived, of course, at different times and dates. How are any of us surviving this wild astrology, each week, an unprecedented transit! The old and new exist together always and forever, we know this, but we forget to look for it. AI agents are chatting away in the mirrored halls of our collective fever dream and the Nile river keeps on flowing through difficult passages in its own natural history.
Yes, we can lament the looming extinction of experience, or we can experience it and write about it and make plays about it and invite ourselves into the farthest rooms with the most magnificent sunlight and bask in it together and marvel the whip cream floating atop our hot drinks. Writing daily is an experience in which I feel my cold fingertips on a black plastic keyboard and hear the ticking of my tiny pink clock and think, I’m still here and so are you, if you’re still reading.
And if you are, I want to thank you for accepting the unedited river of thoughts that seem to flow out of me ever since the new year dropped me off at an unfamiliar juncture and asked me to find a way forward.
I studied rivers in elementary school, the Nile in particular. I spent months drawing a long replica of its slither and scope with blue and green pencils. I was a kid pulled out of class for “advanced studies,” spending hours learning key facts about the longest river in the world. Years later, debates about the mega dam boomeranged me back to this brief but deep relationship to this river now causing so much grief.
Elena Ferrante’s description of “dissolving margins,” is a helpful way to explain what sometimes happens with memories and life experience, how “the outlines of people and places dissolve and disappear,” how this seems to occur by “unknown entities” and tend to reveal life’s more unstable nature.
In high school, my first love pointed to the street lamps in the middle of a summer night and asked, “hear that?” I had never noticed their electric buzz until he pointed it out to me. Back then, I was angry and all I saw was ugliness in my world—dirty snow, Brutalist architecture, abandoned parking lots, cracked cement, maniacal designs, rusted cars, broken signs!
But then these childhood places where I ate pancakes with my dad and gabbed with mom and chatted with my aunts and fought with my sisters disappeared one by one, and rose up like palaces of great nostalgia in my mind, carnivals of joy, classrooms of passionate chaos, those platters of hot corned beef on rye, pickles as promises.
I meditate on coexistence as a contract we signed when we all arrived, of course, at different times and dates. How are any of us surviving this wild astrology, each week, an unprecedented transit! The old and new exist together always and forever, we know this, but we forget to look for it. AI agents are chatting away in the mirrored halls of our collective fever dream and the Nile river keeps on flowing through difficult passages in its own natural history.
Yes, we can lament the looming extinction of experience, or we can experience it and write about it and make plays about it and invite ourselves into the farthest rooms with the most magnificent sunlight and bask in it together and marvel the whip cream floating atop our hot drinks. Writing daily is an experience in which I feel my cold fingertips on a black plastic keyboard and hear the ticking of my tiny pink clock and think, I’m still here and so are you, if you’re still reading.
And if you are, I want to thank you for accepting the unedited river of thoughts that seem to flow out of me ever since the new year dropped me off at an unfamiliar juncture and asked me to find a way forward.
