September 2024: It's fired
My original plan was to update this newsletter once a month. Reliable! Like clockwork! Probably aligned with a moon phase or something! I didn't write in August because my summer job took up most of my time, but I knew I'd get right back on the horse in September!
AND THEN.
I had a medical event that meant leaving my summer job early (I’m fine)
My partner of 8+ years went through a major breakup
My boyfriend and I were ordered to evacuate from the ranch where he lives in Los Angeles county because of the Bridge Fire (It wasn’t just us——everyone in that part of the county was ordered to evacuate. We're not special. At least not like that.)
Not 7 days after that, on the way to the Bay Area, my boyfriend was in a car accident that totaled his car (he’s fine)
Just a week after that, I got the stomach flu
So yeah, September was a bit of a rough month. By the end of it, when people asked me how I was doing, I would say things like "Living the dream" and "We abide beneath a curséd star." God laughs while we make plans.
As you might imagine, I've not gotten any real writing done this month other than journaling about everything that's gone on. That kind of keeping-my-head-above-water writing is a well-developed coping mechanism, it dumps my brain's buffer so I can keep doing the non-writing things I need to do to keep my life together, like laundry and cooking and, oh right, my day job.
I’ve never been the kind of person who can turn acute stress into creative work. Being able to write anything during this kind of crisis is actually an improvement——journals that I kept during traumatic periods of my life in college and early adulthood have three or four blank pages where something awful happened and I just… skipped ahead, a physical fast-forward that resumed a few months later when I started writing about the clean-up. I never wrote about the events.
I’ve been able to write about this, though. Here’s an excerpt:
My clearest memories are visuals: the wall of smoke blowing north, curtaining one row of hills after another, each closer to the ranch than the last; … hugging him outside our idling cars, telling him “At the end of this we’re gonna be alive, and while we’re alive there’s hope, and hope is fuel.”; climbing the ladder to the roof to move a snagged electrical cable and seeing the smoke cloud looming up over a dip in the nearest mountain range. Firelight illuminated it from the other side of the ridge, a color I’d never seen in the sky before, a lurid candy pink, the pink of a little girl’s birthday party.
Anyway, this year won’t quit. God willing, here’s to a quieter October.