I’m inclined to agree that I am dust, and that it’s inevitable I will return to dust. Yes, I’m Catholic, and it’s Ash Wednesday, so I’m thinking of the literal dusty cross on my forehead that sprinkled down onto my young nose. But I also find relief in the words that can sound so harsh and self-flagellating.  

I am dust, and I’m sitting in Wuthering Heights with my sister, crying. The movie was a fanfiction (as my brilliant Cath said), but it unhooked a latch in me, and, damn, it felt good to cry in the dark of a movie theater. As I listen to the audiobook of Wuthering Heights, I think, Even Emily Brontë is dust. Is the point of writing a masterpiece, though, that it should be untouched, unadapted, put on a pedestal? I don’t think so. At the same time, the movie would have been more unhinged and awe-striking if it had been truer to the book.

Thinking of myself as microscopic is a relief because it lets me play or cry or rage without thinking it’s too consequential. Deliver me from self-importance! As a child, I was prone to melancholy and often lost in thoughts that seemed so huge I feared I’d slip and not find my way back to reality. I sometimes feel like I’m failing at projecting adulthood because I’m porous, undecided, my self shifts and circles. (Probably most of us think this way, it’s not just me.) Returning to work, to feeding myself and others, to reading, to walking, to sitting around with friends, to dust, to dust, keeps me alive.  

I can dip into the well that is vast and terrible, through a movie or book like Wuthering Heights, and then let writing, responsibilities, a conversation bring me back to the bricks and mortar of life. When I’m in one realm, I never want to forget about the other side. I don’t want to be so productive and driven that there’s no room for mystery, or so swayed by daydreams and fears that I take up sole residence in my mind. And dust, somehow, embodies all of that for me.      

As I finished writing this, Nick Cave sang Waiting for You through my shitty iPhone speaker. Waiting for you / To return is how the song ends, and that is how I exist. Perhaps I don’t mind the idea of returning to dust because my life is already so altered by grief. Existence crumbles and I catch at the fragments, dirtying my fingertips as long as I’m here.  

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