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.