a little death and not the sexy kind

I’m throwing a party tomorrow and I am cycling in and out of a particular anxiety associated with this Thing (Thing: hoping that people show up). I don’t mean to Pollyanna it or pat myself on the back or make it a big deal or be like “see!!” but I am, in this moment, feeling (funnily) brave for doing this, for making preparations and assuming that — yes! — people will show up, and I think it might be ~*&~healing~~** for me, so la di da I’m looking forward to this party. (I used a shopping cart at Your Dekalb Farmer’s Market for the first time ever and I filled it up. This feels, to me, like a leap of faith.)

I carry a social anxiety that was, for so long, crippling and totalizing and so spacious. I wish I could travel back in time and shake my 20-year-old (21-, 22-, 23-, 24-, …) self and tell her that, hey!, you’re cool and it’s all good and people are generally very sweet and wonderful and you needn’t be nervous or self-conscious. (Is this a wish we all share?) I worry about being somewhere for a reason, like, What Can I Contribute, and this can be paralyzing and demoralizing, especially when I have nothing to say. The feeling arises regularly, still, but I feel also so much more settled in myself – or maybe I feel readier to feel awkward yet okay with it, like, oh, the awkwardness is attached to a moment or a situation, not to Me Myself. Maybe!

Anyways.

Boy, I sure have been dreaming about dying lately – but, actually, that’s not quite right; more accurately, I think, I’ve been dreaming about time. Do you ever feel like longing (nostalgia?) could actually kill you, like you can barely stand the intense, throbbing, full-body pain of this desire? I feel this most acutely when considering particular people I miss, or places where I lived, or things I didn’t do. The terror of realizing that, no matter what, time moves and these things (i.e. particular moments in time) are lost (to varying degrees, but all the same) is so sharp. The grief here is often overwhelming, which I know you know. The “human condition”, blah blah blah.

Okay, what else? I’ve been wanting to read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life for years, and I finally did. Have you read this book? Can we talk about it? I’ve never read anything like it; I’ve never had so visceral a reaction to descriptions of violence and horror, and I can’t get the characters (or the experience of reading about them) out of my mind. I loved the book but wonder what to do with this, now.

I want to tell you, reader, about the existential boredom? dread? I’ve been soaking in, but I don’t know what to say about it, or how to describe the feeling. Louie, Grace, and I had lunch the other day and the topic came up, and what I was left with was, oh, the feeling is pervasive.

My favorite scene from one of my favorite movies is this one. In it, Frances describes the sort of love she’s looking for, and I think about this almost daily. Out of life, out of every close relationship, platonic or romantic or both or whatever –

thank you,