To Purge
Hello from Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.
I arrived two nights ago to stay for two weeks.
The last time I was here, I was possessed. This time I feel like I am performing an exorcism.
I scrubbed the bath tub out the first morning and took a long bath while reading. My pink toes pressed against the pink tile made me smile.
It is small things like this — the opposite of paper cuts, in my mind — that make me go, “Ah, I’m where I’m supposed to be.” Earlier in the day it was my left foot totally soaked in a mud puddle while my right foot was fine. Last night it was the shower caddy collapsing and me assuming, first, that it was a ghost.
I am in the studio space that my friend Pat Evangelista wrote from when we were here together in 2022. Her book, Some People Need Killing, came out in November to rave reviews in just about every publication you can think of. When she was here, the walls were covered in chapter outlines and she would sit inside the windowsill, smoking or taking phone calls. She would never say she gave the place good juju, but she is present.
When I say that last time I was here I was possessed, I mean that I was so lonely I was dating a man I didn’t like. When I say that this time I am performing an exorcism, I mean whatever parts of me that used to be who I was, then, are expelled or expelling. I am exorcising him, too.
It feels cruel to write some of this because I loved him.
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