The storms have been rolling through for days now. The moment before always feels like a wire hidden in cotton, metallic jolt in the thick air. And then — the sudden hiss and tear as the skies open. Summer storms are a language buried in me somewhere, one I always forget how to speak until the season comes round again. When I was little, I always knew a storm was coming by its color — a smokey sort of purple, crackling, sputtering with city lights.
The storms followed me across hundreds of miles this week, from the house I was a teenager in all the way back to Brooklyn. Some things have changed: everyone masked in the street, I see only their eyes, it feels somehow accusatory. Barricades stand abandoned in the streets, slogans and black fists taped to lampposts, remnants of June’s wildfire protests. (They’re still going, but I don’t hear the voices wafting over the rooftops anymore.)
Some things don’t change. Workless, the hours of my days roll off each other’s edges. I have to close the windows to stop the apartment drowning, the storms haven’t let up. For the first time I feel their menace, their steel-toothed hunger, saying where do you think you’re going, saying we’re not done with you.
I draw tarot. Not every day, but almost. A usually stable ritual, reminding me what I owe attention to. Now every card comes up on its head. I try not to think about the metaphor, but it’s hard with the cards berating me. Page of Wands — you have tried something and it has fallen flat in defeat, disillusion. Ace of Wands — you feel sluggish and stuck, something that should be easy isn't. Eight of Cups — you are lost with no solution to your problem. No end in sight. I think about my glasses, only a year old: worn for driving, concerts, menus tacked onto walls, things existing at a distance. Without them, the far end of my vision softens and seeps into itself, watercolor confusion, rain across the windshield. A lot of life feels that way right now — no room to see anything past the bridge of my nose, to plan or commit or even have the audacity to hope. No end in sight.
I write. I rewrite. I hate how many times I use the word “I.” I don’t know how to do this anymore.
Last week (only last week?), another knifelike storm hanging over my back, I descended into my parents’ basement. Rain slapping asphalt outside, I pored over the wreckage of two decades: composition books, birthday cards, photographs. It was the perfect task to chew on for someone whose gums are lined with nostalgia, sweetening everything that came before.
I found, in all of it, a letter I wrote at twenty-one to someone I loved. The love I had for him was bitter and hidden, a searing brand; the letter was meant never to be sent. I didn’t know there was a storm hiding in me, too, until I read it. The grief gathered under my breastbone, dark and swollen, crackled into a million volts through my ribcage, spilled out over my lashes. I wanted so badly to close her wound over, to tell her she would find what she wanted. (Which was what? Someone who loved her back, someone better.)
I think, maybe, I am trying to say something about growth. About what we want and how we get there.
I’m trying. I’m trying. The words are coming now.
Nothing in my days ever feels as important as what is happening outside of them. Old heartbreak feels like an airhead study, creative destitution is better than real destitution. Joy feels expendable, like it holds no weight, here, in this world where it feels like any move by any person could be fatal: death by pathogen, by institution, by skin color. My weather app shows storms every other day, crush of gravity on an existence already groaning at the joints.
There is something I forgot about one of the tarot cards. The Eight of Cups. A piece of its significance that escaped me until I thumbed to its page in my book. Experiment, say eight cups hanging empty from their pedestals, and find what’s best. Try to move forward.
Here’s the thing about that letter, and the love I wanted that me to find: she would. I did. I don’t think it was an accident, or fated. I think it was a choice, one I made over and over, to look for the love I wanted and deserved.
It was a covenant I made with myself: bound not by what would happen if I broke it, but by what would come to me if I kept it.
The cards will keep tumbling onto their heads, until they turn upright. The storms will keep coming, until they don’t. But those are things beyond my abilities. Whether as small as a good day or as vast as liberation, I have to keep choosing the things I want. Even — maybe especially — on the days they feel as out of reach as the roaring-sparkler skies.
But it’s still one hour after the next, one day to the one after. So I write. I rewrite. I read, in the way I used to as a child, hungry and obsessively. I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m making notes, saving melodies, listening when I feel the urge to speak. I hope this is what choosing looks like. I hope the choices lead somewhere.
