crushing
I woke up on Monday morning hardly able to get out of bed, I felt so sad. The sadness caught my breath, the spreading of it, like molasses. Some days I feel like a puddle, just flat and spreading and light-less and dull.
Good day, I think, I am the queen of projection. All I do is project, project, project, it is what I do best.
It is what I do best: project, project.
And the grief, I tell you! Surely (oh, really?) there is nothing so wonderful as what I have crafted in my mind, and so the disappointment is inevitable, in time. Oh really? It is what I do best, I do it again and again. I have no way of knowing.
It’s incredible how impassable a feeling can be (can feel), yet in a moment or two (or days or), the trace of the once-absolute feeling fades and it’s almost impossible that, so recently, you felt overtaken. On a Tuesday in New York the other week, in the dark, in the morning, on the couch, still half-sleeping, I woke with an intense anxiety and distinct dread for the day ahead. I think it’s the empty time, the needing-to-fill-it that gets me … though in a different headspace, I love nothing more than an empty day to fill with wandering around, noticing. The cold makes this trickier, which is why I love spring and summer in new places (or alone places) best.
Anyway, I was imagining the minutes ticking along, one after the other; and then it was practicing the things I wanted to say, to ask, that I felt (feel) nervous to, like, literally talking out loud with myself, trying things on; and then I was feeling like my brain was a flat puddle, one that doesn’t catch the light or reflect anything at all, but instead spreads and thins and evaporates; then, I remembered that I accidentally booked a nice return flight, which means it comes with a no-fee flight change, and I whirred and whirred, re-booked, and almost instantly regretted it.
one thing about you is you like all things
I feel, often, like I feel too much
I’m watching the finale episode of The Bachelor and writing this in between, during commercial breaks. It’s kind of incredible how contrived this show is, and the whole “Bachelor Nation” thing is mind-boggling. This is the first season I’ve watched all the way through, in real time, and until recently, I think I underestimated the effect that watching this stupid show has had on me. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, that gets under my skin, but in the last few months, I’ve felt lonelier than I’ve ever felt before, ever. I don’t think this is entirely the fault of The Bachelor, ha ha, but it’s certainly not helping. Is this similar to listening to sad music when you’re feeling sad already in order to amplify the feeling?
Someone somewhere was saying about how a person really only has a handful of ideas/interests, and these few ideas just keep getting jostled around and tumbled up like in that machine for making rocks smooth, forever and ever, and they might expand and twist a bit but, wholly, they’re the same handful at the end of the day. And wow, I loved hearing this, because often I feel obsessive and dull because I’ve been turning over the same things for always, I’m occupied with a set of concerns that remains constant, for the most part. I do like the feeling of obsession, it is intoxicating, but it is also isolating – how can you describe a dream without dulling its brilliance, how can you capture the wonder of something that obsesses.
This morning, I was sorting the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, on my bed, on the bathroom floor into clean, worn-but-wearble, must wash – hanging up things that need to be hung, stuffing cleans and worn-but-wearbles into their drawers – and listening to a story about Tony Hawk. In the story, David Koestenbaum of This American Life describes watching a video Hawk released of himself as a 52-year-old trying to land an Ollie 540, some skateboard trick that sounds really hard and honestly a little magical in its use of physics and force. He tries over and over again, keeps falling, but when he finally lands it, he feels sad – sad that this is the last Ollie 540 he’ll ever do. Koestenbaum describes watching the video and tearing up every time, and I’m threading a hanger through a neck hole and crying, too. I’m thinking about time, about what it might feel like to be 50 years old, how that is not so distant, and yet, in some ways, feels impossible to imagine. I wonder what it will be like. I feel very, very sad about time marching on, and I feel an acute and sharp, like, truly like-a-knife painful ache for lost time and my childhood and what it felt like to be, oh, 15 and completely unable to imagine what it might be like to be 30 … what happens in between?
When I was 25, I lived in Ecuador for a few months. I’d hoped to stay there longer, but I don’t speak Spanish and the sorrow of this incompatibility was too much for me. I remember returning to the States and feeling wildly, ecstatically glad for a casual greeting to feel easy and open to possibility. At the time, I was feeling madly in love and wrote emails to my beloved weekly. In retrospect, this feeling was seated in me, in a desire un-placed in any other person, but I do love the lust, the limerence.
It is like this:
It is four p.m. and I walk through the orchard of dead and dying granadilla trees. Their twisted branches curl around and clutch the tattering strings that support their heavy fruits, now dried up or rotting or paper-thin, like ghosts. I’m looking – I look and I look.
Sunday malaise is not site-specific.
I am listening to a young woman tell a story on stage about her mother while I crouch in the greenhouse, plucking tiny weeds out of the ground to add to a growing pile. She makes a joke about Mormonism and, inexplicably, I lose it. I cry and cry, and the greenhouse is hot, and my face is streaked with dirt.
Fernanda laughs at me when I use my hands to speak; she shakes her head at me and grins during every almuerzo.
Little things that make a difference: a lamp, extra coffee, a tiny peach, a tea spoon.
A taxo is just a little sack of clitorises.
After the first day of work, my hands are blistered and sore. I wrap them in tape but the acedone wears down the bandages, quick. I bury the torn wrapping in the potatoes. At night I can’t hold a book to read on account of my trembling hands.
Roses grow straight stems only at the equator.
It is one p.m. and the guinea pigs got loose. I am on my hands and knees in their shit, poking a little rat in the corner of the shed, coaxing it out. Lauren laughs, and in my mind’s eye I can see myself kneeling, and I see her crouched with the broom, and we are both laughing.
Finally, finally, a tiny avocado is soft enough (anywhere else, it’s days from ripeness) – a sliver, a spoon.