They gain a piece
Please forgive errors, unclear thoughts, and the like. These are, and always have been, letters from me to you. Nothing more, nothing less. I write them as I am, in that moment, and I intend them to find you as you are, in your moment.
I kept looking at the date (June 11) two days ago and thinking hmmm. When I think hmmm like the way I was thinking hmmm it almost always means I have forgotten something important from another time.
I briefly saw a therapist for EMDR a few months ago. It took over a month for my health insurance to approve working with her and then another month to get in with her and by the time I did I was slightly annoyed and then immediately didn’t really like her. My first reactions to people are usually instant, palpable, and correct. Every time I’ve pushed back on that — thought I was off, thought I should give them a little more time — I’ve been dead wrong.
The first (and only) EMDR session we did felt sloppy even to me, a novice to the modality, and it sent me to a place where I didn’t want or need to go. I’m not sure I’ll try traditional therapy again for a long while for a variety of reasons, almost none of them her fault, per say, but she did say something to me that I’ve been carrying around ever since: Trauma can correlate with seasons. Seasons can get stuck in us.
I remember saying, “Seasons?” and she repeated back “Seasons.” and then my eyes filled up with tears because it was spring and all of a sudden it made sense that things always felt the worst in spring as I did a quick roll-call of Bad Things That Have Happened to Me and made the connection that almost all of them happened in spring.
But summer? I love summer. And so June 11 stumped me until midday on June 12.
Yesterday was my ex-boyfriend’s birthday. Not the terrible awful ex-boyfriend, but the good one. The really, really, almost and so easily a whole life together good one.
I’m bad at remembering birthdays. I always have been. And I’ve really hurt people I really love by not remembering them (I’ve gotten better with age and phone calendars!) and so when I met N and I fell in love with him I knew I needed to really remember his birthday.
The month is never a problem, it’s the days. So when I was 27, I took 11 and broke it into 1 1 and I stood in our little kitchen together and proclaimed “June 11! One one! I will always want two of you!” and he smiled back.
A few months ago I started doing Jungian dream analysis and shadow work with a brilliant woman who lives out here in the desert and Who am I? has become a real bitch of a question ever since.
A lot of my identity right now feels tied to where I live. Sometimes I forget how strange my life is here until I’m on the phone with someone on the East Coast or visiting a friend in a city talking about Kambo and what my 70-year-old acupuncturist said and that I’m working with someone to analyze my dreams.
I guess none of that is all that strange, but it’s in conjunction with the fact that I live so far down a dirt road that you can’t see my house until you’re a few hundred feet from it, and that that house is backed up against a mountain, next door to a professional rattlesnake wrangler, and one more house over from a taxidermist and that we’re all good friends and that I know how to wrangle rattlesnakes now, too, and also that I can walk to the taxidermist’s death pit and see how everything’s doing in there.
It’s also in conjunction with the fact that I have a PO Box because there is no mail (or food or really anything else) delivery to my house and the only person who works at the post office is Michael and we chat for at least 5 minutes every time I go there and the only person who worked at the post office before Michael is named JT and she still sends me a Christmas card in the mail every year with a note that she loves and misses me. Also you always run into someone you know at the post office and oftentimes one or both of you is in some version of pajamas.
It’s also in conjunciton with the fact that I ran so far away from myself for so many years that really the only place where it started to make any sense to unpack myself or maybe, I guess, put myself together different, has been out here, in a whole lot of silence, with a whole lot of weird fucking people, wild animals, not great food, an assortment of bars, and a lot of drugs, should I want them.
The desert is a weird place. The options of what to do here are weird. You can implode, explode, and have the time of your life all in one day.
My friend was out here recently and texted about how the desert is strange and people need to write about it more. I have a very long substack drafted about this — partly about how odd life is here and partly about how little I’ve actually written about that in the last four years — but I wonder sometimes if I can’t bring myself to publish it because actually living here is not at all private within the community, but it is exceptionally private outside of it, and I kind of like that. A lot of writing about life out here is from visitors or frequent visitors and is so comically imagined or incompletely explained that I’ve tossed down most things I’ve read about it, though, so, maybe someday.
There’s also the other book. The one that isn’t Overdue.
I realized I was going to write the other book on May 25, 2018 when I was standing at a Do Ho Such exhibit called Almost Home at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery staring at a life-sized recreation of a home he had lived in, made entirely of colorful diaphanous fabric, reading the didactic wall text.
It started with a quote from him that said “Home is everywhere and nowhere…” That’s not really the kind of thing you can say with any impact at say, a dinner table with creatives, but it is quite impactful from an artist who had created what he had created.
I presented about this particular experience — seeing Do Ho Suh’s work for the first time and feeling compelled to capture Home into some kind of understanding, the same way Do Ho Suh could put the whole apartment into a suitcase and take it anywhere — when I was in residency for six weeks at an artist’s residency in 2022. I may have imagined it but it was the first real moment where I watched the faces in the audience light up with recognition, understanding, and (maybe) acceptance that I understood something about something in a way that would make others care about that something.
My bad ex was there, in the audience. I had the briefest of moments while I was speaking where I thought “I can’t look at you not understanding me” so I didn’t make eye contact with him from the artist’s pulpit. He had gotten upset — anxious? overwhelmed? annoyed? — at how nervous I was and could not, did not, understand that I could be both the erect woman at the front of the room speaking to a group of artists at a prestigious residency in addition to the one who was anxious all day beforehand. He might tell you he just wanted me to be my confident myself, or that he loved seeing me be all capable up there, but he didn’t want the shades in between. And that’s mostly all any of us are on the day-to-day basis. I’m not capable of being only the sunrise or only the moon. I possess daytime. I am the type of person who stands in front of a room full of people and says, “What is Home?”
I turned my life into the book or the book turned into my life over the last six years. I meant to and I also didn’t mean to at all.
What’s easier to ask and answer than Who am I or What is Home? is Who was I?
I think that’s part of what got me about June 11. It wasn’t just the memory of this person I loved so much — and, listen, I love him more in hindsight, in comparison to every other experience of life and love since, but we don’t know that stuff when we’re young, and we can’t comprehend the torture pleasure of understanding how deep that love went much later — it was that I also loved my life when I was with him. I loved that time, that me.
I miss the time of him. I miss those seasons.
We don’t get to go backwards ever. That’s a basic and obvious essential agreement of the universe, but I think it takes some years to really understand the depth of it. We don’t get back particular summers. We don’t get back certain springs or winters or falls. We don’t get back that day on the dock or that nap on that roadtrip and how it felt to wake up safe being driven by them. Decades pass. Decades pass. Seasons fly.
But it makes sense that they can still be inside of us, sometimes all which ways, sometimes in a way that feels stuck. It makes sense that they can revisit in terrible ways. And it makes sense that they can revisit as hmmm’s of vague recollection and then fish-hook-to-your-gut memories, too.
I think I will always want two N’s. Every once in a while, usually on a June 11, I will feel a familiar pang of wanting to be able to read a book next to him until I fall asleep. To have a second him, away from the him that is married and happy and could hurt someone by being asleep next to a me while I read. It’s not about grieving poorly or wishing wildly or not grasping reality. It’s not about believing or really even hoping it could happen. It’s about touching something that exists very deeply and also doesn’t exist at all.
The more I try to write about Home, the more I understand it’s only ever really that.
I hope you had a good spring. I mostly did. The wildflowers were plenty, I got in many hikes, and I saw some whales with my parents in San Diego.
It’s now hotter than hot in the desert. The water bowls I leave out for the animals are totally empty by the time the sun is setting. I’m busy with some things and not busy at all with others. I lay on the concrete in the evening while it’s still warm and enjoy the sunsets. I keep craving popsicles and ravioli. My friends are good. My hair has been coming out in clumps and leaving large bald spots, which is always how it goes when I start doing okay again. I’m lonely and I’m also largely content. Time is passing.
I’m heading back East for a couple weeks soon and then for a few months, hopefully. I miss grass. I miss creeks and rivers. I know I could reach all of that in California, but I miss it where I’m from.
It’s time for me to start writing. I feel ready to do it from not here.
Thanks for reading me.
xo
A
P.S. I saw this when I logged in and it felt worth sharing: