THE AWARD GOES TO me for eating a roasted sweet potato with cottage cheese for breakfast! Such a practical meal, so healthy, so tasty, so real.
I’ve already told you my current feelings on time—how we trek the horizontal, dream of the vertical—but I haven’t mentioned any of my possessions, what might get catalogued in the identity slog. I own many things but they’re all for sale. I still need to feel like I could pick up and leave at any moment.
A lingering instinct.
Can’t remember the last time I danced at a party. I used to host big parties to ring in the new year, and for a while, I even handed out the lyrics to “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, and led group singalongs in the various living rooms of my thirties. Those were fun nights full of hope with just a dash of fear to keep me on my toes.
Later, I would become a flawed caretaker—character—chair actor—caregiver to my sweet daddy, after running for years away from home, I landed in the heart of it all.
Some people spend their whole lives learning to leave. I spent most of mine learning to stay.
“The afterlife of madness” means letting go of the “definite idea” of the warped reality that shaped your dreams and visions in the first place.
An old friend of mine lost her old friend when she fell down the stairs. I don’t know my old friend anymore but I know the tumble of this tumultuous friendship left imprints.
Sometimes I feel like I can write about people I’ve known and loved and sometimes I feel like doing so shakes the jar too hard and breaks it.
Fears, we all have them. I haven’t befriended mine but every Sunday I dread walking over the bridge to Monday. I’m never quite ready to leave the week and face a new one, even though I know time is an illusion.
Kitchen alchemy applies to mental health, too. Pepper. Cardamom. Cumin. Three spices that radically shift the taste of a dish—imbued with hope—expanding its scope.
“Becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable,” writes Rachel Aviv in her latest, You Won’t Get Free of It.
Curiosity is an emotional risk.
Like I said, I had to learn how to stay when everyone else around me figured out that plotting one’s escape offered great relief.
I was gone ten years and no one ever mentioned how impossible it would feel to return. The self one forges on the road will eventually forget her way around the homestead.
“Everyone is the other and no one is himself,” wrote Heidegger. A quote I stumbled upon while reading a bit of Deborah Levy’s writings.
I forgot Heidegger had a wife. I was too obsessed with his affair with Hannah Arendt, and how her Jewish identity became quite the problem for these two lovebirds, how her intellect and ideas seemed to shrink in the world's eyes as hatred grew toward her people—and a systematic campaign ensued to kill them all.
“The appeal of writing as I understand it,” writes Levy, “was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure; to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.”
My dear friend Jamie said as much on the porch the other night, looking at the triangle-shaped tree in front of us as we ate our blueberry crumble with whipped cream and iced cream. She’s a friend who’s studied trees and knows how many worlds coexist in their branches.
We sat on the floor later that night and read aloud letters she’d written to me from various locations in her twenties—the islands of Indonesia, the islands of Hawaii, the islands of the suburbs of Chicago. All along, we’ve been cheering each other on with words of encouragement.
“Be strong,” she wrote to me more than once, “I’m here with you!”
She Who Sleeps in Late, you can introduce me as such these days. She Who Swims in Old Letters, my middle name. Lady of the Haunted Childhood Home, will do. Madame Writer of Micro-Essays With Unknown Readers, perhaps.
She Who Carries Black-Glazed Gazelle Statues Home from the Thrift Store.
Anoint me, and I may annoy you. Recognize me, and I will reconfigure you. Name me, and I will remember your name, too.
I’ve already told you my current feelings on time—how we trek the horizontal, dream of the vertical—but I haven’t mentioned any of my possessions, what might get catalogued in the identity slog. I own many things but they’re all for sale. I still need to feel like I could pick up and leave at any moment.
A lingering instinct.
Can’t remember the last time I danced at a party. I used to host big parties to ring in the new year, and for a while, I even handed out the lyrics to “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, and led group singalongs in the various living rooms of my thirties. Those were fun nights full of hope with just a dash of fear to keep me on my toes.
Later, I would become a flawed caretaker—character—chair actor—caregiver to my sweet daddy, after running for years away from home, I landed in the heart of it all.
Some people spend their whole lives learning to leave. I spent most of mine learning to stay.
“The afterlife of madness” means letting go of the “definite idea” of the warped reality that shaped your dreams and visions in the first place.
An old friend of mine lost her old friend when she fell down the stairs. I don’t know my old friend anymore but I know the tumble of this tumultuous friendship left imprints.
Sometimes I feel like I can write about people I’ve known and loved and sometimes I feel like doing so shakes the jar too hard and breaks it.
Fears, we all have them. I haven’t befriended mine but every Sunday I dread walking over the bridge to Monday. I’m never quite ready to leave the week and face a new one, even though I know time is an illusion.
Kitchen alchemy applies to mental health, too. Pepper. Cardamom. Cumin. Three spices that radically shift the taste of a dish—imbued with hope—expanding its scope.
“Becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable,” writes Rachel Aviv in her latest, You Won’t Get Free of It.
Curiosity is an emotional risk.
Like I said, I had to learn how to stay when everyone else around me figured out that plotting one’s escape offered great relief.
I was gone ten years and no one ever mentioned how impossible it would feel to return. The self one forges on the road will eventually forget her way around the homestead.
“Everyone is the other and no one is himself,” wrote Heidegger. A quote I stumbled upon while reading a bit of Deborah Levy’s writings.
I forgot Heidegger had a wife. I was too obsessed with his affair with Hannah Arendt, and how her Jewish identity became quite the problem for these two lovebirds, how her intellect and ideas seemed to shrink in the world's eyes as hatred grew toward her people—and a systematic campaign ensued to kill them all.
“The appeal of writing as I understand it,” writes Levy, “was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure; to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.”
My dear friend Jamie said as much on the porch the other night, looking at the triangle-shaped tree in front of us as we ate our blueberry crumble with whipped cream and iced cream. She’s a friend who’s studied trees and knows how many worlds coexist in their branches.
We sat on the floor later that night and read aloud letters she’d written to me from various locations in her twenties—the islands of Indonesia, the islands of Hawaii, the islands of the suburbs of Chicago. All along, we’ve been cheering each other on with words of encouragement.
“Be strong,” she wrote to me more than once, “I’m here with you!”
She Who Sleeps in Late, you can introduce me as such these days. She Who Swims in Old Letters, my middle name. Lady of the Haunted Childhood Home, will do. Madame Writer of Micro-Essays With Unknown Readers, perhaps.
She Who Carries Black-Glazed Gazelle Statues Home from the Thrift Store.
Anoint me, and I may annoy you. Recognize me, and I will reconfigure you. Name me, and I will remember your name, too.
