new teeth
Welcome to the Sunday post.
A few days after starting the journal I tested positive for covid for the first time. A few days before I ended the journal my family received definitive news about my partner’s diagnosis and a several months’ plan for treatment. I notice myself being vague in some spaces, speaking freely in others, texting the most detailed information to just a few. I answered the door without a bra and our friend handed us our child and two pizzas. On a Monday afternoon, the Monday we’d been waiting for, we spent an hour with a bunch of women, strangers to us, all of us sitting among trees and plants smoking a spliff. It feels like I’ve grown new teeth, and they’re sharp, sharper than the originals. In July, I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen since 2019. When I snuck up on him at our meeting place I immediately thought, What?? This is Dad now, and knew I was seeing the updated version of my friend, and I enjoyed talking with him as much as I always have these past 20 years. I texted him the other day from the beach where we’d met up and told him what was happening. And that the day we’d met up was the day things changed, when my partner went to urgent care, and then the snowball of it. Thank goddess for Palm Springs. A friend I’ve known since Olympia sat across from me last week while live mariachis played next door, so loud we almost had to shout across the picnic table. A task arrives via email: Locate that one photo of you from when you were 15. And I do. After hours of sifting. Aside from the presence of friends this has been the absolute worst Mercury retrograde ever, terrible, do not repeat. I listen to an audio message from a friend I’ve had since we were 15. Cancer hooky I almost caption a photo. I lock down my Instagram and wonder why I’d ever open it up again. When things start to feel normal I remember the truth and I’m a little shook. Strength. All the reserves slowly siphoning into my system. Patience. At the start of the summer, my summer, which began when I tested negative for covid in early July, I planned to apply to writing residencies. Life in flux. You have bigger fish to fry, my friend told me, and I have repeated that phrase to myself in various situations, contexts ever since.
