Voice Note #21 - These Days
Dispatch from nowhere
THESE DAYS
These days my heart feels tender, open. Like a split orange, like a raw steak. Perpetually caught off-guard, the half-second between opening the shower door and stepping out onto the bath mat. Still dripping, still warm, coming into the cold. No defenses. Here, I grieve each day as it comes—or doesn’t. The parts of myself I worry I’ll lose in the rubble, after the quake. Everything feels hard and yet I am softening. Blinking my eyes open to a dream bigger than I could have ever imagined. Searching for the magic I thought only somebody else could carry, finding it in myself. I clutch it close to my chest. No bitterness, just grace. And a promise to be kind. In the mirror I look straight into the eyes of a girl I may never meet again. In many ways, I know she is precious. This soft underbelly still earnest. There’s a tornado in my heart. There’s a fire on your street. I worry that when I walk back out into the world it will be too much, and I don’t know who I’ll be when I greet it. These days I feel as though I have been free falling for years, all this time desperate for a place to land. I am bracing for impact. Maybe this world was built to break our hearts, but we were born to piece them back together. I am leaving the doors of my heart unlocked, wide open, a vulnerable target for the robbers and thieves. That’s the only way you let the sunlight in.
I did this at midnight over a karaoke track on Youtube but I enjoyed doing it all the same <3
THIS YEAR
Pearls need warmth, or they lose their luster. I learned this in a poem I read in middle school. The poem was about a maid who must wear her mistress’s pearls throughout the day, so that they continue to shine. In the story the pearls go to waste, beautiful things sitting in their owner’s boudoir unworn. Every day they are warmed around somebody else’s neck, like clockwork. Nowhere to go but downstairs at dinnertime. Keeping their luster for nobody to see.
It’s the first week of September and most of the year is over. What did I do with all that time? I don’t really know what I can offer you. I guess it’s not much, but I’d like you to have all of it. Today I walked past a blue building and it looked like poetry against the sunburst sky. A few blocks away there were dog walkers and their dogs standing in the grass and the clouds looked like something out of a Ghibli movie. I passed by strangers in masks I was beginning to recognize. Ah, the sexual tension of standing across another person at a crosswalk, waiting for the pedestrian lights to signal green. We’re all out here going on our silly little walks just to stay sane—ain’t life grand?
I visited an apartment that was for sale. No reason, just because I could. The front windows faced another building, rows and rows of windows lit up from the inside. Someone had set up their Christmas tree. A few floors below: a large couch and an armchair sitting side by side in the warm glow of a living room full of cozy-looking furniture. It looked just like a scene out of Gail Albert Halaban’s Out My Window series. (If you end up having a look—the New York photographs are famous, but I like the Paris ones best). It has always fascinated me to see other people’s homes through windows from the outside. The distant intimacy of witnessing the interiority of strangers’ lives—like a soul museum. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things in the world.
All the rooms of the apartment were empty except for telephones. One telephone for every room, still plugged to the walls and sitting on the floor. The telephones made me feel just like that, like we were in a soul museum. Once, these phones had carried somebody else’s secrets. They had caught somebody else’s tears. We moved through the empty rooms like ghosts, the floor dusty with the memories of its last owners. I don’t know what it was about the telephones on the floor, but it was all so very romantic. Like an old movie; heroine in gray sweatpants sitting cross-legged, eating takeout from a box. Unrolling a rug with her best friend. Watching baseball from the TV set in her bedroom and calling a date to cancel. In the kitchen I examined the countertops that had been preserved exactly as they had been built back in 1997 and thought of dinner parties and midnight snacks. When I walked out of the apartment, I could have sworn I heard people singing happy birthday from inside the flat across the hall. On the door was a silver balloon in the shape of the number three. Still, the world turns and babies are born and people sing happy birthday from behind apartment doors.
This past year felt like an empty apartment, and I still don’t know if it was more like one that had just been vacated or one that was about to be occupied. What did I spend my days doing? Writing to-do lists. Shaving my legs in the shower. Typing at my desk. The small quotidian tasks that amount to a day’s work. Responding to texts. Deleting photos. Folding laundry. Holding back tears. Thinking about Somewhere Else. Thinking about all the people I’ve ever cared about bustle into rooms, take off earrings, peruse menus, set bags of groceries down on the counter, talk to strangers, walk past closed shops, put on makeup in a hurry, sit in libraries, order coffee exactly the way they like, ride bikes and text and try not to get caught.
I made big plans for a change in scenery; they didn’t push through. I won’t get into the details now, they don’t matter here anyway. And besides, I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s alright. There is nothing else to do but carry on. All we can do is to give things our best shot and accept whatever comes. I know this in theory but I’m still learning to practice it. I can’t control my external circumstances. I can’t be certain of anything, ever. But I can make a commitment to greet the day exactly as it is, to meet people exactly where they are, to enjoy what’s there. What’s there is all we ever have. The change in scenery wouldn’t have guaranteed that I’d automatically become the person I wanted to be or have the life I wanted to live, just because I was somewhere else. I’d still be the same person, just with a different address. Wherever you go, there you are—I had always written that off as a Facebook status cliche. I never understood it. But now I do.
It was May or maybe June and the world was opening up again. This was before things got bad with the Delta variant. An essay on Dirt covered Lorde’s “Solar Power”—fresh after the single release—and how nobody wanted to talk about the pandemic anymore. In the essay Allegra Hobbs wrote, “There is, understandably, no desire for pandemic-themed content, for art situated in the reality of the past year, for any kind of post-crisis debriefing,” and then later added, “(‘Solar Power’) made me feel unsettled. Somehow, it deepened my feeling of dissonance with my surroundings. But isn’t this what it looks like to pretend that nothing happened? Wasn’t this the plan?” The last paragraph read: “I want desperately for everything to be the same, but everything is different” and I understood exactly what she meant but it made me angry all the same. On Instagram stories I watched people meet their best friends and lovers at parks and museums, strolling to coffee shops, hanging out. I felt like I was getting left behind. People were living their lives and mine was still on pause. I felt like I no longer had an excuse, but I also didn’t have a choice.
I listened to music and walked aimlessly around my neighborhood, entering the supermarket for no reason, going wherever I saw people doing the same, just to simulate some sense of company. I was lonelier than I’d ever been. “All My Friends” came on shuffle in my playlist and I felt like my solitude could swallow me whole. I honestly don’t know how much more of this I can stand, I wrote in my notes app, standing on the sidewalk as the sun went down. I’m certain one day I’ll look back and wonder how I survived this at all. A whole year and a half of lockdown lifestyle while people around the world were forgetting the pandemic had ever happened. I felt as though I were being robbed of something. I’m not really sure what.
What did I spend my days doing? Curling my knees up to my chest at my desk while I worked, something I never could have done at my office job, so long ago already. Spending evenings on my bed, watching movies. I watched Frances Ha and thought about friendship as I turned a year older. I retreated to childhood favorites when I needed comfort, the kinds of sometimes-bad movies that will always be good because you loved them when you were small, like Robots and The Net and Over The Hedge. I binged the entire Before series in one week and read every issue of Helena Fitzgerald’s essays about them on Griefbacon. I tried to read books and failed—the books were good but I was not. I sleepwalked through weeks and sometimes months in a fugue state, trying and failing to take my own advice. Swinging between being hyperconnected and going into hermit mode. Some weeks Always Online, texting and Facetiming all the time, keeping in touch. Other weeks letting the messages pile up, hardly speaking, feeling too overwhelmed to function. Executive-dysfunctioning, as my friend Nikita likes to call it.
On a drive to the consulate, my dad pointed to a building that was about to be torn down. It had the kind of architecture I can only describe as “fusty” but he said it was an important building and had been designed by an important architect. I asked why they had to go through all the trouble of tearing it down; if they only needed a couple more floors, couldn’t they just add to it? (Clearly, I know nothing about engineering). Before the traffic lights turned green, my dad said, “It cannot be tall. It wasn’t built to be tall.” So they had to tear down what was there, and start over from the ground up. Life is tedious and sometimes you have to go back to square one for no reason but the roll of the dice.
Objectively, things may not be ideal. That’s okay. We can grieve that. But I think we can still find pockets of joy, adventure, romance. Small thrills can thrive even in less-than-ideal circumstances—it just takes a little imagination and a lot of creativity. Or at least I want to try looking. When I feel really blue I remind myself of something Adeline told me over FaceTime, as she sat on the floor of her empty apartment in Brooklyn, the late morning light coming in from her kitchen window. There was so much to unpack but her boxes had yet to arrive and she was biding her time. “Just remember, this is just for now. It’s not forever. It’s just for now.” Her apartment might have been empty but what I saw was a realized dream. Thinking, she made it! She made it! Nothing delights me more than seeing people follow their dreams and make it. Good things happen to wonderful people and it’s so, so lovely.
My friends and I have gone back and forth over our frustrations, repeating iterations of the same sentiment: “Can we please fast forward to the good part?” Alie and I talk about the future and how it feels long and dark and scary. And it’s so real, to know things will get better but still wish you could jump ahead because right now feels shitty. Yesterday Alie sent me the poem Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy and I’d really like you to read it because I think it’s important. I read it and remembered that there’s a life I want to live, and I’ll have to start that wherever I am. Things are going to go out of my control and I’m just going to have to be okay with that. The way my life goes, the quality with which I live my days, is still up to me.
So I’m figuring it out. Trying to make the most of what I can with what I have. Trying to exercise a sense of wonder, still. There are facts of my life that I hadn’t really stopped to think about. Like the day I saw two security guards walking home from their shifts, crossing through the park, backpacks slung over their shoulders. An unexpected gift in the lobby, a pint of ice cream in a plastic bag catching me by surprise. Watching a friend’s comfort Youtube video and paying attention to something that gives another human being solace. Oranges that look like they’ve gone bad but are actually quite sweet. A note on my phone from December 9, 11:34 pm: I overheard my mom talk about me on the phone, with so much more kindness than I could have anticipated. I hovered by my bedroom door to listen. A continuing list of favorite feelings: bare feet on a hardwood floor, jazz music at night, being freshly showered and swaddled in clean clothing. The first half-minute of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, every single time, in spite of myself. Spontaneous FaceTimes and easy forgiveness when one of us is too tired for a call. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” goes that famous Annie Dillard quote from The Writing Life. A few weeks ago, my mom said, in passing, “Friendships are inefficient.” She said it with fondness. And if my life is inefficient, so be it. What a privilege that would be.
There’s this TED talk by Lori Gottlieb about changing the way we tell our stories. And how telling ourselves better ones about our own lives makes all the difference. Months ago Dani told me, “It helps to have something to look forward to.” We can’t fast forward to the good part, but maybe we can find comfort in knowing it’s there.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s probably too much. I just hope it helps. Maybe you’re going through the same. If you are, remember—this is just for now. It’s not forever, it’s just for now. One day you’ll look back and say I made it! I made it. You’ll wonder how you survived this at all, and you’ll be so proud of yourself for it. You’ll look around at the facts of your life and think, I remember when I wanted to get to this part. All the while you were wearing your pearls, keeping them warm. Retaining their luster.
Small Good Things
Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy
Jessica Dore’s Tarot Offering: August 2021
We Have All Hit a Wall from the New York Times, by Sarah Lyall (a very comforting read if you’ve been executive-dysfunctioning like me)
Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy, the poem I referenced at the beginning of the essay. I just read it for the first time in over ten years and realized it’s about a lot more things than I once thought it was.
Tiny Revolutions #76: Poking Holes in Our Stories by Sara Campbell
How changing your story can change your life, a TED talk by Lori Gottlieb
Who Are We Without Certainty? By Mari Andrew
Tarot Routine, a comic strip by Edith Zimmerman that is both comforting and wise (“Hidden within seemingly foolish acts is the experience of life as an adventure.”)
I wrote “These Days” during Line Breaks, a series of writing sessions hosted by Marla Miniano-Umali and Isa Garcia. If you’re interested, they post updates on their Instagrams (@marlamini and @isabadisa).
Thank you to Kara, who reminded me about piecing our hearts back together.
this is THE ONE !!!!
a warm, tight hug >:)<