June 5, 2025

I live here now

The last three months have gone by in a blur, all the little parts moving too fast to keep track of them individually, Sonic the Hedgehog-style. At the beginning of March, it started to look like I would close on a house. By the end of March (following many, many delays that made those three weeks feel much longer at the time), I signed my name on 100+ pieces of paper, transferred more money than I’ve ever paid for anything in my life, and took possession of a cute, weird, quirky little house in a rural northern California county. I’m writing this newsletter in bed in the main bedroom in that house—a bed that’s still just a mattress on the floor, because my boyfriend has the bedframe, and his stuff won’t get here for another couple of weeks.

And that’s it’s own topic, isn’t it? After eight-ish years of living alone or with a roommate (two of those years married to someone I never lived with!), I find myself cohabiting. Sharing a closet. My dishes collaborating with his dishes, my pets sniffing noses with his pets. And that’s good, and weird, and it’s weird that it’s good.

I defended my independence for so long, even as I made plans to spend my life with someone else. I kept my shoulders big and square. I could carry a lot and I could push a lot away. And that’s true of my boyfriend, who left a marriage long before I knew him with chips on his shoulders that match the chips on mine. We’re both anxious neurotic defensive self-righteous little weirdos, and we trip on each other’s bullshit sometimes, but we’re doing okay. We’re figuring it out. The big pieces are aligned: he wants me to have room to see my other partner, who I moved away from when I moved out of Berkeley, and time to write, and laundry folded with ex-military precision. I want him to have room for his sheep, and an office to fart around in, and nutrient-dense meals that come from our kitchen. We’re each in the harness for each other.

I think that’s one of the big pieces a relationship needs to be successful, being able to take the other person’s concerns and champion them like they’re your concerns, even if some of them feel a little alien to you.

The last two months have been a fog-of-war style haze of moving logistics. Berkeley to here, here to southern California, SoCal to here, here to Berkeley. Trying to coordinate my apartment, my roommate, the livestock, the pets, the vehicles, the storage units, the stuff to sell, the stuff to keep, the stuff to get rid of, the stuff to give away.

And now, of course, after months of feeling trapped in the web of logistics (which is a kind of thinking about the future) and saying goodbye to a place I loved, but needed to leave (which involves a lot of thinking about the past), I find myself trapped in the interminable now-now-now of a shitty head cold, laying in bed feeling sorry for myself as finding out how my 38-year-old body feels aligns with the fucking around of burning too many candles at both ends for too long. Of course I would drive the last load of my shit out of Berkeley and bring a cold back to my new home in the very same trip. Of course I’d spend the week I was going to settle into my new house and my new routines instead taking more PTO from work to make trips to Walgreens for antibiotics and cold medication and finger splints (long story). Of course I’d sprain one wrist and sustain an infected wound on the other hand and then burn my fingers to boot, so I really really really couldn’t do all the things I’d planned to do.

Slow down, the world says to me. Listen.

I am allergic to slowing down and listening. I have shit to do.

But isn’t that part of why I moved out here? To be more intentional about how I spend my time? My husband’s death infected me with the terror of a life wasted. One of the stories I tell myself is that he imagined he had more time than he did, that in a month or next week or tomorrow he was going to get his shit together, stage a tremendous comeback. His comeback never arrived. The coroner did.

Now I spend my wakeful nights worrying that I’ll never write another book.

Of course I’ve been telling myself I haven’t had time for writing, because I persist in the self-deception that writing is something that arises in pools of still time, as if I have ever made space in my life for pools of still time. I fill my time pathologically. Instead of waiting for quiet, I must grasp the reins of the world for it, grasp them and bring the world to heel.

Pegasus was born in a burst of foam and blood, a burst of relentless motion. Hooved animals can arise like that, kicking and furious, an explosion of muscle fiber and shuddering feathers. Writing is done from the stallion’s back, and you don’t wait for the stallion to slow down. You just throw yourself up there and hold on.