anniversaries
In 2015 I went to Seattle to mourn.
In 2016, I went to wait.
This year I got to go to celebrate.
Which also means that two years ago I was just about to sell SONG, and I had newly started writing GRACE, and then last year I had sold GRACE, and was about to quit my job and then make a bunch of other supremely stupid decisions. Time piles up, doesn't it? When you can flip back not just through a calendar but your texts and tweets and Instagrams, and reconstruct so many particulars of your days. Each one becomes a palimpsest you can unfold if you're in the mood for it. Time simultaneously collapsed and infinite. Here those years are again like yesterday. Here is proof of the distance that exists between then and now.
And still: the irreducible concrete reality of any particular moment. I was sitting on the floor with Mila on Sunday, watching her crawl around, wishing I could tell her something. What? I don't know. Something urgent. Wishing, I think, that she could understand that fierceness with which she was wanted: what it felt like to be in the room where she wasn't, and then, in an instant! a room where she was. A thing I will never be able to describe: the way Allison's mother and I collapsed into each other's arms the first time we heard Mila cry. How utterly shattering her birth was.
This weekend I sent K. a video of the baby reaching for my phone, and then smacking a kiss on the empty palm I offered her instead. You can hear me babbling in the background, calling her by pet names: a litany, a recitation, the beginning of a ritual. We celebrate anniversaries in order to marry the flux of experience to the linear implacability of time.
K. texted me back, oh, you are in love.
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This week I wrote about mundane things: how nutritional supplement powders are sourced and processed, and how a couple of girl skaters feed and clothe themselves, and what it feels like to wear a particular kind of pants. I don't mean mundane as an insult. I mean grounded, maybe, or concrete, or just something other than my own feelings, mostly. After this it's going to be a while between pieces, I think-- I have a book to write, a book to edit, and a book coming out. I'm getting really tired of the way I describe things, so many bodies and bodies of water. I want to take a vacation that involves sinking into a cold pool and letting the water stay over my head. I want to feel something other than this constant imaginary pressure on my skin.