Just as the sun does
A few weeks ago I started drafting a letter about how my key to the front door of the building where I am living stopped working. I wrote about all of the doors, all of the homes and apartments, where keys have stopped working for me. Where I can’t get in.
It’s been a weird occurrence throughout my life—it’s happened in several other countries, many friends’ apartments and houses, and many apartments and houses of my own. It’s always a little funny in hindsight, but a real panic in the moment.
After she let me in, a woman in my building asked me to try to open the door in front of her. When I couldn’t get it to open still, this woman, this stranger who I’d just introduced myself to, said, “Oh, Amanda.”
It was Oh, Amanda like I’ve heard it before. With a tone that implies they think I’m being ridiculous or absurd or not trying hard enough or the way that they would. I don’t know if it’s my name or my face or my whole personality that lends itself to people saying this to me like she said it to me, but it has happened with infuriating frequency for decades.
I stared back at her for a while and eventually said “I don’t know what to tell you, Dawn” and then went upstairs and took a nap.
Later that same day the super told me it was fine. When my roommate got home from vacation, they weren’t having issues either. But I kept having the same problem every other time I left the house and tried to return.
//
I lived in New York City for only a brief time, in parts of 2010 and 2011. I petitioned my MLS program to let me move here to do my practicum in a New York City public school. I figured they’d hire me when I was done, but the year I graduated there was a hiring freeze, so I ended up moving to DC.
I visited New York every few months for a stretch of years and then I stayed away for almost 10. I got drunk once and said why, though I’d never had the thought sober: I’m afraid I’ll still love it.
I do still love it. For all the typical reasons a person loves New York—the people, the museums, the food, the possibility, and the fact that New York itself is a living, breathing, and often heaving being.
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T and I spent a few hours at The Frick last month. I kept pressing my chin to his shoulder to whisper a joke and he kept sneaking photos where he shouldn’t and I thought about how those few hours held more than some whole months of my life in recent years have. More art, more laughter, more people, more sounds, more touch, more stairs, more everything.
When T got on the subway to fly home a few days later I wanted to chase him and yell Don’t! but the city made it easier.
P and I walked from Crown Heights to Greenpoint on Thursday, stopping into bars and shop along the way and taking photos as we went. Somewhere in Williamsburg he said, “I feel like every ten seconds of this city is a story” and I laughed and said I was trying to write about that, but so has everyone.
//
A few years ago my mom told me that her mom used to draw asterisks next to lines in books she was reading. Sometimes my grandma would lend the books to my mom when she was done and my mom would try to sort out what it was about the line or paragraph that my grandma had loved. When my mom finally asked my grandma about them it turned out that she used them to mark where she’d stopped reading for the day.
My cousin’s boyfriend lives in the same apartment building here that a man I had a relationship with over many years used to live in. I went inside of the building again last month and got fish hooked by memories I’d forgotten—feet out the kitchen window while it rained, sleeping the highest up in a building I’d ever slept, simultaneously crashing our drunk bodies into subway turnstiles, running home from the corner store with condoms and ice cream.
Being there felt like one of those asterisks. There was no deep emotion, no pain or missing, but a mark in time. A held place.
There’s so many places like that here for me.
//
I’ve spent a lot of the last eight years feeling split in two and half pretending. Like there was me, very deeply from the East Coast, and me, living in California.
I’ve never quite taken the shape of the container that is California. Little about me there is fluid and I am always aware of the edges where I don’t dissolve.
Sometimes, a person wants to dissolve. Sometimes a person needs to.
//
When I got on the subway yesterday, an older woman in a nice coat and a fur hat started preaching about how much God loves all of us and how we have to be good to each other. That whatever we do unto other’s, we’re doing onto Him, so be mindful. Nothing new or mind-blowing for a lapsed Catholic and nothing wild for the 3 Train at 9:45 in the morning, but I keep thinking about her.
I’m re-reading W.S. Merwin’s Garden Time, which he wrote while he was losing his eyesight, and the woman got me thinking of this poem:
The Scarab Questions
Out of full shadow your sound emerges
at the end of that last morning in May
as we call the days on our calendars
but where did you begin without numbers
where did you come from this late morning
what do you remember as you ride your one note
on its dark sunbeam out into the daylight
your note is the time of your radiance
arriving once just as the sun does
but where were you before now where did you
come from before you were today
Everything feels like trying to write lately. So many places are branches of memories here. So many places are new but unconfusing. So many people arriving truly just once. That woman was her own whole poem.
What I’d write is happening constantly and I’m pretty happy with not yet catching up.
//
It’s hard to say that California has been like wearing clothes too bright for my comfort. How it has almost always felt neon fucking yellow.
//
It’s a particular kind of panic, standing outside a place you belong in or paid for, performing entry and failing. And when it keeps happening, it’s hard not to deduce the problem is you.
But a week after the first time I couldn’t get into my building I saw someone else struggling with the door. And she said it had been happening for a while. And I thought Oh.
And then last week I came downstairs and a locksmith was fixing it for over two hours because no one could get into the building.
It wasn’t my key and it wasn’t me. The lock mechanism was ancient and had been breaking and then it was fully broken.
No Oh, Amanda about it.
The door opens easily now.
I’ll say the hokey thing: When something doesn’t open or fit, I often assume it’s me. That I’m doing it wrong. That I’m just not trying hard enough, or wasn’t built in the right way for the door in front of me. That the Oh, Amandas are warranted. But a lot of the time it ends up that the door’s just broken.
I’ll say the not hokey thing: Once, in the cruelest writing workshop I’ve ever been a part of, a famous writer told a woman who workshopped a chapter from a memoir about her husband’s fatal overdose that Someone already wrote the book on grief so if you want to write about grief, you’d better be better than that and he meant Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I know Joan Didion already said much of this better than I can in Goodbye to All That. But it still feels worth it. (Also Joan Didion eventually moved back to New York and died here. So there’s that.)
//
I read Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed last month and it’s one of the most crushingly beautiful novels I’ve ever read.
This article about older women in fashion made me happy.
I’m finally reading Richard Power’s The Overstory and it makes me cry every other page.
My agent, Monika Ostrowska, published a book of poetry recently that’s full of gems.
I had the best lunch of my entire life at Luncheonette in Portland, Maine earlier this month.
I finally bought the Le Bon Shoppe arc pants last month and haven’t worn much of anything else since.
//
Happy spring.
xo
Amanda