August 25, 2022

on time travel

august is almost over, which means i’m insufferable: maudlin and nostalgic, mournful, sentimental, tearful, wistful.

the whole month is one long sunday afternoon. it’s the month i decide i should read more poetry. it’s the month i cut my children’s outgrown clothes into neat squares, for a quilt i’ll never have time to sew. it’s the month the cicadas are still loud and the leaves are still green, but the tulip poplars are beginning to dream, seditiously, of yellow.

i don’t sleep well in august.

it’s nothing new; i’ve always been weird about the passage of time. i remember jumping on the trampoline when we sold the old farm, ordering myself to take mental polaroids from every angle, to memorize everything. i remember telling my dad what i was doing, and he goes, “aren’t you a little young for nostalgia?”

thirty-two is probably still too young, but i started early. last night my husband played me a clip of this little love song he’s been working on: minor chords, fingerpicked;1 his voice running back and forth over the chorus, writing on the fly; i could never hold a note / standing next to you; in the background, the shrieks and murmurs of the boys playing pokemon.

and like, honestly, put it in the fucking Louvre.

it almost made me angry, how perfect it was. i had him email it to me and then i saved the attachment in like three different formats, so that when i am seventy, when i am ninety, when he and i and our children and their children’s children are all dust, there will still be these forty-five seconds of how it was. how we were.

i feel like i’m getting more intense about that kind of thing lately. maybe it’s just because the kids are starting school. maybe it’s just anxiety. maybe it’s just august.

but maybe it has to do with the world, too. everything feels so tenuous, so fragile. i keep scrolling facebook for posts about the floods in eastern kentucky, studying every picture with morbid intensity. public libraries knee-deep in gray mud; tired women hanging family pictures on clotheslines; volunteers packing rolls of archival film into refrigerator trucks, grimly trying to rescue footage of lives that have otherwise gone unrecorded, unremembered.2

then, too, there’s the wave of christo-fascist censorship, the book bans and obscenity lawsuits. the stories that are being removed from school libraries and then public libraries and then stores; the books that are not being carried, that are going out of print, that are never being printed in the first place. the shrill letters from concerned parents, the dark insinuations, the dog-whistling bullshit that makes you wish they’d just fucking burn the books in the fucking street, like they want to, like they used to.

it's having to realize, again and again, what an immense privilege it is to be remembered. to outlast yourself. for someone else to decide that your narrative is worth remembering. and i’m not talking about like, fame. i don’t mean i want to have a wiki page, i mean, i want someone to know how it was.

i want to tell it like a story. once upon a time we stayed up til one in the morning and he told me about trying to sneak back into his parents’ house, high as balls, and i laughed so hard i couldn’t speak. once upon a time i stood hip-deep in the river while the boys dove in and out, summer-freckled and slick, and i thought about the lake back home and cried a little. once upon a time i asked my firstborn son what he wished for on his birthday candles and he answered, instantly, “that time travel was real,” and i thought, aren’t you a little young for nostalgia.

it’s that one mary oliver poem: i want to remember everything. / which is why I’m lying awake, sleepy / but not sleepy enough to give it up.

it’s why i send out these little newsletters, every now and then. it’s why i used to write emails so long they had section breaks. it’s why, i guess, not that anybody asked, i write at all.

now in the spirit of fairness, i feel i should disclose that i just started writing a new book, which means i’m insufferable: anxious, thrilled, giddy, greatly affrighted, so afraid of fucking it up that i will literally email everyone i know a thousand words of august vibes rather than write it.

my kid asked what it’s going to be about and i tried to sell him on the parts that might appeal to first-grade boys—knights, dragons, swords--but i should have just said: time travel.

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news

• sort of been blown away by the reaction to a mirror mended. yall really showed up for these little books. <3

• the book formerly known as The Underland, formerly known as The Beasts We Could Not Bury, will actually be called Starling House, and will come out in fall 2023. (yes, that’s some time away) (no, i did not miss my deadlines) (for real!!!) (publishing is just like this)

• on monday at 7pm est, i will be virtually joining lee mandelo for the paperback release of summer sons!

• oh, and on september 8 at 7pm, i’ll be talking with olivie blake (virtually!) for the salem literary festival

further reading

• john wiswell has a new short story out! D.I.Y. is about the disabled kids who couldn’t afford wizard school, so they made their own. <3

• had myself a good cry over this interview with mike davis, too. i mean: “To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger…I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.”