"I'm on intimate terms with this prairie."
In college I co-produced on one (1) play*, and on opening night the director addressed us by saying: "I've never before worked on a show with so many physical disasters, and so much emotional brilliance."
That is precisely how I would describe the last two weeks of my life: physically disastrous, emotionally brilliant. Or, like, disastrous sounds maybe overwrought but it's been-- my body has been frustrated with me, and I with it.
I flew to New York two weeks ago, left in the earliest dark of Friday morning and slept fitfully on the plane. I'd put in my contacts, forgotten to pack my glasses; by Monday morning, my eyes were so irritated that I woke up weeping, and cried all day. The pain was not tremendous but it was restless and constant: sometimes better eyes open, sometimes closed, sometimes very bad either and both. It kept drawing attention to itself. There was no getting used to it, no long minutes where I might find even a measure of quiet in the discomfort. There was just this burning, and the [blink, blink, blink, blink] knowledge that I had no control over when it would stop.
Now I'm in St. Louis and my throat hurts. The rest of me is fine but I keep coughing and my throat aches with the use. It reminds me that I had tonsillitis two summers ago, in a gap in health insurance coverage; I got antibiotics from an urgent care clinic somewhere way down Hoover, near the 110. They were too strong, knocked my immune system out, made me sick in other ways for weeks and weeks.
I told this story on a date recently, to a man who was very impressed with himself for having pulled a fishhook out of his finger and decided that was as much care as he required. He's already lost some degree of feeling and motion in the digit. The idea of paying for health insurance annoyed him. I didn't know how to say to him: you know that's not going to get any better, right? If it's bad now, when you're this young, when the injury is this fresh-- but listen, I mean, he wasn't interested in listening to me.
The best part of New York was getting to see old friends. I haven't lived on the east coast for five and a half years now, so all of the friendships that are left there have survived some measure of distance, and time. I had breakfast with E, my college roommate, and lunch with N & V, then crossed the river to meet R's baby in New Jersey. I thought how lucky I was that this place had gathered up so many people and kept them close for me, so that I could fling myself across the country at intervals, dip into their lives, hear their laughter and make them listen to mine.
On the plane there I had been reading my college diary-- a Word document I started at eighteen called these things they go away, which is a line from REM's Nightswimming and also all you need to know about how I am disposed towards impermanence and flux and change. I had forgotten that I used to have these like, full-scale idiotic existential crises whenever I flew from one coast to another. It seemed like a betrayal to me that I could be in one place and then just like, be in another. That didn't seem at all right or reasonable.
In New York last weekend, at N's blue table, in A's familiar apartment, just now, sitting on M's porch like I did in November and before that last spring, I think maybe I understand things a little bit better than I did at eighteen. (Thank god.) Travel, at the very least. I get on planes three, four times a year, in my adult life; there's always something somewhere else, calling. I live in Los Angeles and I live wherever I am. I know where the light switches are in bathrooms in Texas and Massachusetts and Missouri. I recognize the blocks leading up to apartments in Brooklyn and San Francisco. The whole world is full of little pieces of the same home. I am not abandoning or betraying one when I walk, expectant, through the doors between one and the next.
-
One of the best things I've gotten to do probably ever was profiling Francesca Lia Block for LitHub. Her books, which I started reading young, left, like, glacier-sized carvings in my brain-- in the way I understand language and myth and how to write about Los Angeles.
Her career has been long, and varied, and not always easy or successful. Talking to her was-- I don't even know how to put it, exactly, except to say that it felt contextualizing for me? To get to have this really honest, personal conversation with a woman who's a writer in a lot of ways I want to be a writer about what that's been like for her. To see a specific example of someone saying: not gonna be easy, not gonna unfold the way you want it to, not gonna unfold the way mine did, even. But look: it can be done.
*The play was True West, from which the subject line of this email was drawn.
That is precisely how I would describe the last two weeks of my life: physically disastrous, emotionally brilliant. Or, like, disastrous sounds maybe overwrought but it's been-- my body has been frustrated with me, and I with it.
I flew to New York two weeks ago, left in the earliest dark of Friday morning and slept fitfully on the plane. I'd put in my contacts, forgotten to pack my glasses; by Monday morning, my eyes were so irritated that I woke up weeping, and cried all day. The pain was not tremendous but it was restless and constant: sometimes better eyes open, sometimes closed, sometimes very bad either and both. It kept drawing attention to itself. There was no getting used to it, no long minutes where I might find even a measure of quiet in the discomfort. There was just this burning, and the [blink, blink, blink, blink] knowledge that I had no control over when it would stop.
Now I'm in St. Louis and my throat hurts. The rest of me is fine but I keep coughing and my throat aches with the use. It reminds me that I had tonsillitis two summers ago, in a gap in health insurance coverage; I got antibiotics from an urgent care clinic somewhere way down Hoover, near the 110. They were too strong, knocked my immune system out, made me sick in other ways for weeks and weeks.
I told this story on a date recently, to a man who was very impressed with himself for having pulled a fishhook out of his finger and decided that was as much care as he required. He's already lost some degree of feeling and motion in the digit. The idea of paying for health insurance annoyed him. I didn't know how to say to him: you know that's not going to get any better, right? If it's bad now, when you're this young, when the injury is this fresh-- but listen, I mean, he wasn't interested in listening to me.
The best part of New York was getting to see old friends. I haven't lived on the east coast for five and a half years now, so all of the friendships that are left there have survived some measure of distance, and time. I had breakfast with E, my college roommate, and lunch with N & V, then crossed the river to meet R's baby in New Jersey. I thought how lucky I was that this place had gathered up so many people and kept them close for me, so that I could fling myself across the country at intervals, dip into their lives, hear their laughter and make them listen to mine.
On the plane there I had been reading my college diary-- a Word document I started at eighteen called these things they go away, which is a line from REM's Nightswimming and also all you need to know about how I am disposed towards impermanence and flux and change. I had forgotten that I used to have these like, full-scale idiotic existential crises whenever I flew from one coast to another. It seemed like a betrayal to me that I could be in one place and then just like, be in another. That didn't seem at all right or reasonable.
In New York last weekend, at N's blue table, in A's familiar apartment, just now, sitting on M's porch like I did in November and before that last spring, I think maybe I understand things a little bit better than I did at eighteen. (Thank god.) Travel, at the very least. I get on planes three, four times a year, in my adult life; there's always something somewhere else, calling. I live in Los Angeles and I live wherever I am. I know where the light switches are in bathrooms in Texas and Massachusetts and Missouri. I recognize the blocks leading up to apartments in Brooklyn and San Francisco. The whole world is full of little pieces of the same home. I am not abandoning or betraying one when I walk, expectant, through the doors between one and the next.
-
One of the best things I've gotten to do probably ever was profiling Francesca Lia Block for LitHub. Her books, which I started reading young, left, like, glacier-sized carvings in my brain-- in the way I understand language and myth and how to write about Los Angeles.
Her career has been long, and varied, and not always easy or successful. Talking to her was-- I don't even know how to put it, exactly, except to say that it felt contextualizing for me? To get to have this really honest, personal conversation with a woman who's a writer in a lot of ways I want to be a writer about what that's been like for her. To see a specific example of someone saying: not gonna be easy, not gonna unfold the way you want it to, not gonna unfold the way mine did, even. But look: it can be done.
*The play was True West, from which the subject line of this email was drawn.
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