after the ecstasy, praying

On Monday night, after therapy, I stopped by Lowe’s because I was in the neighborhood already and like to feel prepared for work without worrying about it in the morning. When I left the store, I walked past a person holding their phone up to the sky, taking a picture of the changing clouds. The light was fading, and these lush purple storm clouds were blooming across the parking lot. The moon was hazy and just a little fingernail, a little clipping up there in the sky, just above a tumbling pile of clouds. Like pavlova. I wanted to stand with them, to look at the sky together and watch it change, but instead I just said something like “it’s really stunning” and they said “yes i couldn’t help myself!” and this kind of guilt-tinged admission (of corniness?) was so tender. I started to walk back to my car, but the decadence of the sky was too much to leave. I stood in the parking lot and watched the clouds and took pictures and videos and felt so corny!! But not self-conscious.

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.

we're thinking the same thing

Darah and Tanner had a baby two nights ago, eight days early. Tanner included me in a text thread of unfamiliar numbers, first with an update that they’d made it to the hospital, in a room, that the doula was on the way — and then, incredibly!, a few hours later, that Baby was in the world and everyone is healthy and They Did It. This is not my first friend to have a baby, but there is something deeply special about this one, about this perfect family. Darah first told us that she was pregnant floating upon a raft on mirrored water in the summer. We brought a watermelon with us and left it, uncut, in a bed of pine needles on the shore.

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.

over and over and

I went to Mexico City for a week at the end of October (I think?) and when I got back to Atlanta it was fall. Leaves littered the floor. The beautyberries were all yellowed.

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.

oh oh oh

What is holier, what is more divine than a little bumblebee nestled in the tender blossoms of an obedient plant? The purple flowers look electric in dusky light, little neon bulbs lit all up and down the stalk. 

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 

The bells are ringing, people!

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?

since 4:15 pm today

My computer’s clock runs several minutes ahead, inexplicably, and it’s reading (right now) 11:11pm. Is this lucky, even still? Do I get to claim double luck in four minutes? In the last few days I’ve slept so little. I feel like I can’t let time go to waste, like there is something important that’ll be happening late or maybe in the middle of the night and I would hate to miss it, sleeping. What is this about? I expect what will happen is I’ll go home tomorrow after this long weekend of my little fantasy pretend New York life and fall immediately to sleep, though I feel so at sea as to wonder what that even will be like – that which is being home, where I haven’t been in what feels like a very long time but actually isn’t, just that time is a little loosey-goosey itself lately.

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?