the epitome of love
Hi, sometimes I write these in one sitting and then I don’t look back at them, don’t edit them, just let them fly. It makes it feel like these are what they have always been — letters jotted to you in a moment of time. So forgive some errors or repetitions. Read it later or mean to read it later and find it again in a couple years. I’m thinking of you from both places.
Last week a lifelong Californian earnestly described me as “a chill person” to someone else. I have never wanted to zoom out of my body so badly to see the slight shift in my face as I processed what she was saying, without interrupting, because it was shared briefly in a string of things, and it wasn’t meant with any real weight or magnitude.
When I was a teenager I used to spend a decent amount of time daydreaming about being in movies just so I could see myself; so I could have some sense of who I was and how people saw me. I thought if I just…saw myself outside of myself, I could sort out some kind of equation to understand if I was likable or not.
It’s sweet and it’s sad, remembering that.
I’ve lived in California for almost six years now.
That number feels ridiculous. When I left D.C. I told myself — and others — that I’d finish grad school, maybe stick around a year, and then I’d be back.
I’m not sure I’d know how to be back now.
I love it when I visit the east coast. Everything sort of settles and I know exactly how to just be.
In California, there’s still some kind of dissociation, some kind of disillusion or fuzziness or imperceptibility, that permeates everything. When I’m walking here, it’s familiar, but it’s not bones known. I know what birds are what and I can tell you a bit about some of the rocks and the weather systems and the lizards and such and I know exactly what creosote smells like when it rains and how to get from one side of town to another using only dirt roads and I could write about it and describe it well and accurately but. I experience it, know it, love it, but I don’t feel it in my bones.
What I feel in my bones is the scent of melting snow and when a robin is near and the way water rushes suburban storm drains and how it feels to slide a foot in mud and steady yourself and what Canadian goose shit does to my temper and how I can steer through a blizzard while holding a mug of coffee and if you say something that hits me at an angle my first response is smart, not cruel, something I think all east coast people get. That stuff is built in, bones deep.
I miss it sometimes, the way, maybe, someone misses their mom or dad when they first go off to college dorms.
If you’ve been reading these for any amount of time, you know I’ve been thinking about how to leave and where to go and that I’m also always—sometimes loosely, sometimes very tightly—circling what ‘home’ means.
Being called “a chill person” really did something to me.
The other friend present nodded her head in agreement with it. That was wild, too.
I had to sit with it later. I thought it was funny and then a few days later I thought if me of six years ago got to me meet of today she’d fall down crying with gratitude and ask her how, through sobs.
I’m not a chill person. I’m really not.
But I am a profoundly less pained person than I was then.
It’s weird. I went through a solid three years of hating myself in California — we’re talking, destroy my body and my spirit, visibly, hating myself — and it was still better than the years before that when I was so numb to any real contact with myself.
I thought about making a list recently of everything that has gone into making myself a more whole, to myself, person. It’s got everything from Kambo to acupuncture to ketamine to howling at the moon, drunk, and shooting guns on it. It’s got a lot of life, time, loss, grief, self-indulgence, scarcity, dumb heartbreak (the kind where you just plain chose stupid), and a lot of time in bed staring at a wall thinking oh my god, I can’t possibly be alive.
I’ve been lamenting what I’ve lost in the years I’ve been desert locked, but it has also been the perfect container for combusting, over and over.
I’m moving into gratitude for all of it. Absolutely all of it. You’ve got to. You absolutely have to in order to be alive (in any sense of the word alive that I’m interested in).
These days, I’m content. I’m really, genuinely content. Things are, arguably, not the best. Finances are tight, the future is confusing and bleak, the world, truly the whole fucking world, feels sick and off-kilter, but I’m content. I’m here. I’m doing what and how I can.
I made a post-it of people I feel devoted to today. It was easy. I wrote it on a yellow one with a red marker and everyone’s name is in all caps. I can feel a sort of altar to others regrowing inside of me and I know who, at least right now, I want to pour everything into. I wanted a visual as simple as how simple and tangible it feels to do that now.
I haven’t felt capable of pouring myself into others for a long time. I believe that ability comes from giving a shit about yourself.
I give a shit about myself again. Despite the everything, despite the lack, despite the how awful the world can be, I give a shit about myself again.
Yesterday a college student interviewed me for a documentary she is making about libraries and homelessness. I don’t like doing publicity or interviews or events about Overdue anymore. I say no to most things that come in. I haven’t been a librarian since 2018 and I don’t keep a pulse on libraries like I used to. I can’t. It’s not in me anymore. I’m working on other things; my life is something entirely else. But I always say yes to students.
She opened the interview by telling me that she read Overdue when it first came out, when she was still in high school. She said it was the reason she was making the documentary.
I’ve gotten good at catching myself when an emotion hits. I felt like I was going to cry and then I tapped into what I was feeling, which was gratitude, and I blinked my eyes and focused my attention back on watching her face, being in her presence, and enjoying who she is and what she’s trying to make.
After we finished and she’d stop recording, she told me how she had always loved libraries, but she felt like she got them wrong. That her experience — one in a nicer neighborhood of Chicago — wasn’t accurate.
I told her that this was the epitome of love. Taking her experience, broadening it, and going deeper into it for the sake of sharing it with someone else. I repeated it to her. This is the epitome of love.
I said a few other things I can’t remember, but I know they came from whatever part of me that is recognizing I’m older now — nearing 40 — and that there are moments to say something to a young person that may or may not mean much, but could. That it’s a must that we say them, even if we’re half guessing.
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