forever young

Lately I’ve been having dreams about a younger me. About is perhaps a misnomer: I’ve been dreaming as her. Me at seven, eight, nine. Me on my old grade school’s playground, shepherding my little sister. Me in my grandmother’s driveway at dusk, catching a last glimpse of her front porch light as we pile into the car, feeling that sleepy safety you feel as a kid at the end of a grown-ups’ party.

In truth, childhood plays in my head more like a dream than lived reality: vivid colors, larger-than-life surroundings, but as if they happened to someone else. I can remember an outfit I wore, other people’s expressions, the music we always played in the car. But my own feelings and reactions, the inside of my head — I almost never do.

---

I was what you’d call a “creative” kid. I made up stories for games and puppet shows, put together homemade magazines, submitted poems to Cricket magazine, wrote songs and led my sister and cousin in choreographed concerts for my family. (That one makes me laugh, looking back. I’ve taught myself to enjoy performing over time, but dancing is still off the table.)

There is a video from my kindergarten year that is somewhat infamous in my family. The mother of one of my classmates had taken it upon herself to document our school year, and in one segment she asked each child what they wanted to be when they grew up. When little Paola flashes up on the screen, she bares her fox-sharp teeth and says, An actress. When she’s asked why, her eyes dart off to the side for a minute, and then back to the camera, before she replies with an even bigger grin and a little flip of her blonde bob, Because I’m pretty. As if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. My family loves this video — something about my naïveté, my smile, the indomitability of my spirit at that age. For me, it’s baffling, a curiosity: seeing some version of me so at ease with herself, so glad for attention. It almost doesn’t make sense.

That’s because there is a parallel truth about little me: I was wildly, almost pathologically shy. Scrawny and quiet, always daydreaming or reading, I got my fair share of attention from both teachers and bullies. I usually had only one or two close friends a year, and often they were much louder, bolder, prettier girls than I was. Outside of school, I wouldn’t even give my own order at a restaurant or ask for something in a store. My parents tried over and over to give me practice talking to other human beings — always well-intentioned, but often leaving me in tears.

When that happened, it would get labeled a tantrum, and I would be scolded for being dramatic — a word I learnt to avoid attracting at all costs. When my parents’ divorce coincided with my first really challenging school, something in me seemed to harden. After a while I sang only for myself, showed my stories to no one. I kept reading books that took me to other worlds, but only because my own made me want to shrink away — desperation, now, instead of wonder. The girl with the mischievous fox-grin had gone underground.

---

It’s an age-old story, though, isn’t it? The child who grew up and, by doing so, lost something. As author Marlon James says, there’s “something about the idea of dismissing the imagination as a sign of growing up” that has persisted, especially in stories. Just look at Peter Pan, or any film having to do with Santa Claus, to see that belief — not just the faith itself, but also the confidence behind it — is seen as something belonging to the child, something that later has to be either let go or recovered, depending on how optimistic the plot is. I have managed to coax some of my first loves back into bloom: music, which I manage to have fun with despite a penchant for melancholy, and writing, provoking seven years of NaNoWriMo participation and yes, the birth of this very newsletter. But the belief, the breezy certainty of that girl in the video, escapes me still.

Over the course of this year, I thought what was happening was growing up in fast-forward: trying to protect my health and that of those around me, forced to deal with the reality of being jobless and transient, carrying all the world’s anxieties like Atlas. But I realize what has actually happened is that I have slipped back into childhood — in all its humblest elements. I used to cry only rarely, but this year has turned me into a human faucet. I get easily irritable, a baby who hasn’t slept enough and won’t stop fussing. I defer to distraction: a filling meal or a comforting movie. I think we have all had to be children, a little bit: escaping into fantasy when we can, when reality becomes too much to bear; charmed by the most unexpected things, tempers flaring at the slightest provocation. Our brains constantly screeching, I’m hungry! I’m tired! I want to go outside! When is it over?

We have recovered something of the child, all right, but now it seems a howling changeling — not the creature of wonder we wanted.

---

These days, maybe in part due to the dreams, I find myself wading through memory, old photos and recollections, reaching for what has always eluded me: the me I was then. What I wanted and liked, but more than that, what made me feel like I was enough. Like a gold prospector scouring a river, I push aside layers, hoping for my younger self to come up shining under the water. To her, patience is stupid, the future is an endless fog. So in this present that seems to last forever, what does she want? What can I give her?

One morning the other week, ahead of a stressful phone call, I took out my set of acrylic paints — untouched since college — and brushed color on paper. The shapes that emerged were abstract, usually my least favorite thing; but anything real would be something to get right, and I wanted something that had no right.

On a neighborhood walk, I noticed a fallen leaf beaded with rainwater. I crouched on the wet pavement, moving my head to see all the ways the light shone through each droplet. I must have stayed there for at least a few minutes, people passing me by and throwing me glances. I just couldn’t look away.

Admittedly, each of our current realities looks different — working from home, working at risk of exposure, taking care of kids, job-searching, some alone or with roommates. Finding space for our own imagination or pleasure might feel indulgent at best and impossible or insensitive at worst. But if our younger self can make us spiral into despair, clamor for more sleep, eat too much or not enough — why not give it the attention it is so desperately asking for? Can’t we also get back the sweeter things about that time — a moment of literally or figuratively coloring outside the lines?

At the grocery store just yesterday, I noticed a roll of Halloween stickers sitting on the next till — usually reserved for accompanying children. Just before gathering my bags, I gathered the nerve to ask the cashier if I could have a few. Barely blinking, he tore off seven of them for me.

I couldn’t tell you why I did it — the shadow of that painfully shy girl still flinches from talking to strangers sometimes. I do know that along with the stickers I carried home a secret piece of delight, and under my face mask, I could swear I felt a hint of a fox-grin.

---

Parting notes—

• Why You’re Regressing to Your Teenage Self During COVID-19 (TIME)

• The surprising way nostalgia can help us cope with the pandemic (National Geographic)

• In my state of limbo, I’ve been delving into Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for the first time. Described as a “creative recovery,” so far it has felt like a deep dive into my self, my long-held fears and beliefs, and yes, my childhood dreams and wants. If you need some guidance, I recommend buying it from your favorite bookstore (not Amazon!). Here’s a funny article/review on the book.

odes/omens

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

- Louise Glück, “October”

---

I wake in a light that strains the eyes, the back of my mouth bitter, as if someone had forced open my throat in the night and poured in the cordial of my own loss. Loss in the bloodstream, loss like a language: have lost, am always losing, will lose. Solid ground, my keys, my mind.

October always comes as warning. No sirens, no slap at the back of the head. Just something creeping and certain, tarry undercurrent.

*******

I grew up in New England. Don’t tell me I don’t know autumn. I know what she looks like wrapped in her goodnesses: a beauty in her best dress, swirling red rust. Seduction of cinnamon and nutmeg, apple cheeks. Sky so crisp and blue above her, you could take a bite if you were tall enough.

It isn’t that I don’t like her. I like what she brings: a quieting, a resentless frugality after summer’s reckless and necessary joys. It’s here, in the harvest, that I rest. I remember what is good.

---

We drove north for a few days. I hadn’t been doing well, hollowed out and too quiet, finding it hard to find reasons to do anything at all. Aloud, we hoped the mountains would do something. In secret, I was sure they wouldn’t.

But for three days, autumn showed me her best. I slept to cricket-song and picked orchard apples as I haven’t since I was young. I climbed trails crisscrossed with tree roots and drove roads dripping gold-leafed. I felt an uncurling in me, a hard wax melting, frenetic stuttering mind going still. I stretched into the season like a warm and unmade bed.

The last night, we made a fire in the garden. A fire! A strange world, ours, when such primal element turns rarity. A fine rain-dust fell on us, made the woodpile spit sparks. The flames moved like hands, I wanted to hold them with mine. Instead, my plate empty, tracing the edge of my glass over and over, I proclaimed myself to be happy.

Really? he said, grinning. Who could blame him for incredulity, I hadn’t spoken the word in months.

Really, I said. I’m so happy. Sleeping animal, it nestled in my chest, quiet and content. A joy wrapped up and held, rather than on display. A joy that seemed only to exist in this minute, belly-full, with him and the crickets and the low blaze.

I’m glad, he said, the light dancing in his glasses. We stayed until the flames slept, until the embers hissed, and the creature in my ribs slept on.

---

I’m not saying it was false hope. I’m not saying I was lying. It was a lifting of the veil, to know that I could still feel that way in a season and a year like a hammer, beating down and splintering.

But the quieting season is also the dying season. Zinnias browning on the bush. Rotting fruit, sweet and wasted, ringing tree trunks like sores. Pumpkins too small to pick, shriveling green-grey on the vine. I saw them and I looked away. I saw them and knew what was coming.

*******

Something I will never forget: the animals.

It was on the drive south. Even with a bag of fresh-picked apples and a gallon of cider in the backseat, I could feel something precious draining from my blood, a truce ending. A weight seemed to grow in my stomach as the miles ticked down to the city.

A sound escaped my throat as I saw the first one, a mangle of fur and crimson on the asphalt. The skies stretched bloodless, unforgiving. They came maybe every twenty feet after that, for too many miles: Chipmunk, squirrel, raccoon, stag, none were spared. I started counting, and then I lost count. A procession of bodies, too full and too strange to ascribe to bad driving. I never saw anything like it in my life. Ancient omen spread across twenty-first century highway. What are they trying to tell us, what is it that’s coming, I thought.

A thought that didn’t occur to me then: Maybe it’s already here.

---

I know what you will say: it’s fixed. It’s necessary. It will all come back.

In my head, Paul Theroux replies: You never come all the way back.

I come to winter like I come to a fight, armor-plated and terrified. I fight breathless and bloody-knuckled, and it feels like only a shred of luck sees me out of my head and through to spring.

I survive. I heal, for the most part. But I never come all the way back.

I know what you will say: why tremble, why shrink from it, why can’t we have the good things. I never said we couldn’t. (The apples, the mountains, the fire.) But I never said they came without a price, either.

We are closing in on a year that has already been hard-pressed for goodness, sick-ravaged and deadly, authoritarian and violent. And this is all before the short, dark days. So yes, by all means, seek out the sweetnesses. We will need them to hold. We will need them to hold us.

I know what is coming. I am enjoying what I can. I am making my armor. I am not ready, but I will be.

---

Parting notes—

• If You’re Already Dreading Winter, Here Are Some Small Ways to Prepare Now (Vice) — a supremely helpful article for winter-dreaders, listing small but actionable ways to improve your surroundings and day-to-day lifestyle season. I bought winter boots and a lap desk because of this article.

• Check your voting options via Headcount if you are eligible in the US. This won’t fix our collective dread, but it’s step one in taking care of one another.

• If you’re all set with a voting plan, consider 1) supporting this organization focused on restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated citizens, and/or 2) finding a mutual aid fund in your area (US) to support your neighbors, because we are still in a pandemic. Let’s help each other.

• A few favorite recipes to hunker down with on cold dark days: a 5-ingredient vegetarian chili (can be made with meat!), brown butter banana bread, and fudge brownies.

learning to walk

“And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!”

—Work, Sometimes by Mary Oliver

I’ve been taking walks lately. Not something I have done often in New York this year, between the weather and the pandemic. I tend to step out at the end of the day and walk west, a drumbeat in my headphones, the sinking sun blinking orange between the tops of buildings. It’s September now, and my beloved summer is slipping away, I can feel it. There’s a cool lid now on the scorching streets; even the daylight seems a different color, sooner on its way.

The people I pass are faceless save their eyes, peering out over masks of every color. We are even stranger to each other now than we already were as strangers. Most businesses close early now, their neon signs unlit and ghostly. Up ahead the rolling gate on a closed storefront has been painted over in a myriad of colors, the words No justice, no peace at its center. These are new things, markers of this year. But still I can’t shake the thought: I have been here before.

I have. Sort of. The last time I was unemployed was precisely this time of year, the lazy tip-over from August into September. The unsteady shifting of the seasons somehow magnified the limbo I found myself in. In a lot of ways it resembled this one: barely leaving the house, seeing very few people outside my household, filling out job applications, filling the hours, or at least trying to. Trying to clear, like fallen woodbrush in a storm, the panic and hopelessness that would alternately come over me.

Sometime in September of that year, I decided that if I didn’t have a reason to leave the house by mid-afternoon, I would force myself out for a walk. I had to stay out for the length of a podcast episode, or a short album, and then I could go home. I walked past busted fire hydrants and the screaming children running through their spray. I walked past the invisible border between the lower-income Queens rows I lived on and the hip, string-light-terrace, renovated-balcony cluster that was slowly creeping east. I walked over broken asphalt and under a magnolia tree overhanging from someone’s yard. I got to know my neighborhood better over those never-ending weeks than in the year I had already lived there. No matter how many robotic cover letters I had banged out, no matter how much I wanted to curl in on myself until the sun went down, I always felt better after that slow afternoon loop, a soundtrack in my ears.

I am there again, but it’s different now. I have no sanctuary of my own — I’m a guest in the apartment I’m staying in, with a welcome that is wearing out by the week. My walks are punctuated with wariness, watching for maskless faces, for sprawling dining sidewalks. This time I don’t know how long this Lethe season, this fugue state, will last.

---

In coming back to walking as a practice (I say practice, because it is something I have to consciously choose, even when it feels difficult or the conditions aren’t ideal), I’ve thought often of the poet Mary Oliver. She considered walking an essential part of the work of opening herself to the world — and consequently, letting in the poem she would write from it: “I take walks. Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. It's a joke here in town: I take a walk and I'm found standing still somewhere. This is not a walk to arrive; this is a walk that's part of a process.”

In the early September haze, I walked a handful of blocks south to meet a couple of friends on a park bench. I stretched my arms toward them, my hands curling longingly. We laughed the kind of laugh that covers grief like paint. We marveled that it had been six months of this version of reality. My friend shook her head: Remember when we thought it would be back to normal by the summer? Only now, with the distance of calendar pages, are we realizing how foggy that arrival seems. How imprecise and wobbly of a fawn-walk it will be.

I told them they were the first friends in the city I had seen in person in six months. They looked shocked — six months? Not even sitting in a park with someone? No, I said, I’m still learning what feels safe, I only now feel safe. Part of the process.

And sometimes the process feels like it runs backwards, tape rewinding. Yesterday, after hours of anxiety pressing in on my skull, I ventured out just before sunset — and found the streets choked, the patios full, stoops crowded. I was back at my doorstep after a mere ten minutes, my throat tight, my head pounding worse than before.

In a year like this one, there is little room for respite. The steps to it feel long and numberless.

---

Mary Oliver’s poems are known for the way they somehow bring together the minute and the magnificent. She both pulls focus on nature’s details (“Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. / Here the clam deep in the speckled sand”) and thoughtfully encompasses presentness, life, and death (“Every morning I walk like this around / the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart / ever close, I am as good as dead”).

I think of her often when I walk: I try to come out of my head — where all my thoughts jostle like so many elbows on the subway — and into my body, into the world. It doesn’t come easy when my backdrop is a busy, compact street in Brooklyn, rather than a pinewoods footpath in Provincetown. It isn’t easy when the country is metaphorically and quite literally burning on one coast and flooding on another. But oh, Mary, I am trying. Trying to see the process in it, not the arrival. I am trying to be as curious as I was the first time, the first walking season, when there was nothing but September’s fading light and the streets to hold me.

I feel it rising in my throat sometimes, the wild-hare instinct to bolt. I think about leaving New York for good, the exit I have imagined and abandoned for years. I think about my other citizenship, my motherland beckoning. To slip from this steel trap of a year that binds me, wounded and screaming, waiting for the inevitable shattering of bone.

But sometimes words are enough to temper madness. By which I mean, even the wildest thought turns tame when you find it expressed by someone else.

And Mary has the words for my madness, too.

“As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.”

---

Parting notes—

Mary Oliver poems I have quoted in this piece, in order:

• Work, Sometimes

• Messenger

• Landscape

I also highly recommend going on a walk and listening to this rare and gorgeous interview with Mary Oliver by Krista Tippett, from the podcast On Being.

to start to move

Newton’s first law of motion says: an object will stay at rest unless pressed to change by an external force.

I think about this gasping for breath on a mountain trail at the heavy green height of August. After months of staying apartment-bound, it is the first time I have moved my body like this all year. The honest way it articulates in my head is, F**k, I have to do more cardio. The heat presses thick beneath the trees; it radiates off me when I stop to rest, an almost palpable haze rising from my skin. It’s torture and feeling alive at once.

Since I left for college, this strange tradition has formed: somehow, whenever my life reaches a crossroads, I always end up traipsing up a mountain with my father. Between gulps of water, he asks me things; he is better now at waiting to give advice until I ask. Our boots follow the well-worn trail, but our conversation meanders, cuts new ground like a bushwhacker.

There are things I tell him and things I don’t, and the things I hold back are always the truest ones. I don’t tell him that after half a year away from recording, dreaming of the glorious artistic fever of working, I instead found myself deadlocked, staring down the condenser like it was the barrel of a gun. I don’t tell him about my latest doctor’s appointment, and my fifth specialist referral in a year. I don’t tell him that despite his brisk assurances — You’ll bounce back, you always land on your feet — I don’t know if I will, this time.

---

Newton never defined “force” beyond the word itself, and that vagueness suits this year’s endless uncertainties. Force is a strange player onstage, forever changing faces. My father and I cross several of them on our breathless path. Sometimes it’s an excuse — when he pushes me to think of a step forward, and I point out that I’ve lost both my apartment and my job. Sometimes it’s heartening — when we talk about the conversations we’re seeing and learning to have around systemic racism, the commitment so many people are making. Sometimes it’s fear, primal threat — when we see someone coming down the trail toward us, maskless, and their eyes move slowly over the masks we quickly hook on.

We reach the summit in a little over an hour, and whatever existential thread we were pulling on pauses its unraveling. The deep drinkable green of summer pines unrolls like a map before us. Nearer the horizon the water glints bluely, thirsty promise. Everything they tell you about a landscape like this is true. The nervous cogs of my brain stop their grinding, confounded.

Here, force feels like the sun pressing its fingertips into my skin, the wind pushing the tops of trees aside. It feels like something inside my ribcage, indefinable, that propelled me two thousand feet up. I am nowhere but here, overheated and relieved and utterly small.

---

There is another way to think of Newton’s first law — one that refuses the vagueness of “force” — which is this: it is easier to maintain the state of something than to push it into movement.

It is easier to languish in perfectionist limbo than to bring a piece of work into being, however imperfectly.

It is easier to manage pain with a clear-cut answer for it than to be seeking that answer with the pain following, a nameless shadow.

It is easier to let this world’s violent structures stay put, to play the part of comfortable indifference, than to work to dismantle those violences and rebuild more caring frameworks in their place.

It is easier, in this material case of my body, not to climb a mountain than to put my lungs and joints and heart to work.

I used to be someone who started things and never finished them. Novel manuscripts, work projects, recipes, important conversations. I used to think that starting was the easy part. Now, I think I have been misjudging what actually constitutes a start.

Have I actually been pushed, or pushed anything, into motion? If there is no change — even a minuscule amount, even in my own mindset — has anything really begun?

“How do you feel?” my father asks as we prepare to leave the summit.

“Good,” I answer, despite the sweat coating every inch of skin, the ache in my bones. “I’m glad we did it.”

He inclines his head, I can’t tell if in thought or in a nod. “You wouldn’t have known you could otherwise.”

I don’t reply, and we sit there with the oxygen, the scorching sun, the reverence. It feels like he’s talking about something other than the mountain.

---

Parting notes—

• Movement by Hozier — “You are a call to motion / There, all of you a verb in perfect view / Like Jonah on the ocean / When you move, I'm moved”

• Vote.org makes it easy to register to vote, check your existing registration, choose your ballot, fill out a census form, and more. Get moving.

• An explainer to Newton’s First Law of Motion by Professor Dave, if you’re curious.

a birthday index

Content warning, sweet friend: if you wish to avoid mentions or discussions of death, I would recommend you skip the 2nd paragraph labeled “Twenty-six” of this piece.

• Seven. Every birthday, I had the same kind of cake. My parents would always play through the farce of asking, at least: “You sure you don’t want something new?” I never did. Angel food cake, with store-bought strawberries pushed into the pillowy top, and canned whipped cream. I would tip the can into my mouth, my mother scolding me half-heartedly, until she smiled and I grinned back, clouds dissipating between my teeth.

• Eight. The June day of my classroom birthday party (remember when you could do that?), my mood ring got stuck on my finger during read-aloud time. By the time my father arrived with the cake I was in tears, my finger swollen beyond recognition, the ring still oiled and sudsy from the remedies my teacher had tried. There was no party; there was a ride to the local fire department, where a kind and broad-shouldered firefighter sawed off my ring. He gave me a T-shirt “for being brave,” soft and blue-black like the sky from my window, that came down to my knees. I slept in it for weeks. I don’t remember if I had cake at all.

• Eleven. It was the first summer my parents spent separated. My mother swept us overseas alone; neither my aunt nor my grandmother spoke of my father at the table. I begged my mother to let me get my ears pierced, not really expecting her to say yes after months. But on one of the hot southern-sea days leading up to my birthday, she finally relented. The posts ached in my ears; every night for the rest of July I rinsed the punctures with saline. Two little wounds I was so proud to carry, to put on display. It took me years to realize my mother probably caved because of my father’s absence: she knew I missed him, and that even stoppered as we were in this homeland capsule, nothing would be the same for me after it. What were a couple of holes punched in my ears to the ones my parents felt they had hollowed out in me?

• Seventeen. No time for parties. I was weeks headlong into a music program where I was a local among too many out-of-towners, where I would make no friends because I wasn’t in the dorms. I spent the morning of my birthday parsing solfège intervals in a cramped classroom; no one wished me anything because as far as they knew there wasn’t anything to wish. My boyfriend got me a melodica, and I learnt how much to breathe to keep a note going long enough to reach the next. He broke up with me barely a week later, saying he hadn't wanted to ruin my birthday. He left me sobbing, gasping for air under a big oak tree in the park. I didn’t come out of my room for a week. The melodica has remained unplayed in a closet at my mother’s house ever since.

• Twenty-five. I’ve come to think of my birthday as a gathering point, the sultry apex of summer. My favorite people crammed into too small a space, talking and laughing like bubbles in a glass. Lanterns strung on the wall, papery and fragile, the light bouncing off gleaming cheeks and throwing bottles into shadow. On a birthday everyone looks beautiful, not just the person who was born. I wear the nicest dress I have and flit from person to person and revel in the blush. Their love, my love, seeping together, winestains on the carpet. A mess I will not clean up in the morning. A wish I am always making, candleless, for it to always be like this.

• Twenty-six. When I wake on my birthday, it is under the sky’s swollen grey belly, the choking threat of storm. My lover tries to get me out of bed and I start crying from how little I slept, and then cry again seeing the balloons he's set up for me. I walk twenty minutes to pick up cake from a nearby shop; sweat slips down my back, around my waist, unwanted touch. It feels like another skin, thin film between me and the world, not protective but motionless. I walk without going anywhere, I go about the day that is supposed to change me without changing. I watch the same show I always watch when I need a layer of static, something to thin out the molasses in my head. Texts and well-wishes filter in over the hours: I try to keep answering them until finally I just stop. I notice that they all say things like, “hope the day is good,” and “sending so much love today.” No one says anything about the year to come. No one wants to talk about what comes next, because no one knows. Least of all me.

• Twenty-six. In the week that I am supposed to celebrate a new year of life, I seem be surrounded by — or maybe only able to notice — death. I think about how many people this year will never have a birthday again. How deadly of a year this has been. The news racks up death tolls and murders and tragic accidents like poker chips. Being alive feels like a gamble these days, a horrible joke with no punchline. I think about how many stupid and horrible and unjust and frightening ways there are to die. “I think about that just crossing the street,” my lover remarks when I bring it up. The offhand way he says it makes my arms erupt in gooseflesh. How do you feel about another year? I imagine someone asking me, microphone to my face. At least I’m alive, I’m grateful, the beauty-pageant version of me says, hand to her heart. But something else, feral, stirs in my chest and whimpers, I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?

Twenty-six. I told him all I wanted for my birthday was to see the ocean, so the day after, we wake before six and drive. The plan is to go straight to the beach three hours north — but when we arrive the lots are already full and the strip of shore is choked with bodies. I bite back the panic attack rising in my throat and Google Maps somewhere nearby, anywhere, that might be deserted and open. About an hour later we trudge down a hot dusty trail, reedy grasses swaying on either side. The ocean-roar nears and nears like a homing device between my ribs. I nearly miss it at first: a wood sign, unassuming arrow, reads “Shore Access.” I trip down the path not more than a sandal’s width, and then there I am. My heart catches at the sight of the waves, terrible and foaming, smashing over the rocks to spill over the pebbles at our feet. It isn’t the beach, but I’ve always gotten bored lying on the sand for hours, and this time I would have been at risk. Now I sit on a sun-singed rock with my soles in a salt pool. He kisses my shoulder. The clamor of the tide and the gulls circling is welcome, is chaos. Everything about this feels right: the blue savagery of the sea, the scorching sky, the world so terrifying and so beautiful all at once. Yes, I am alive. I’m grateful. I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?

in the cards

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.

a shelter we make

There is an image that keeps coming back to me lately: a science-fair volcano, the bubble and froth of baking soda and vinegar overflowing. Not because I remember making one — although I’m sure I did at some point.

The summer I turned freshly teenaged, there was a hot still afternoon when my father said something that sent me yelling and crying through the house — I don’t even remember what, but I knew and still know my reaction was out of proportion. When he came to find me after I’d simmered, he knelt and said gently, You’re like a volcano. You take in everything, and you keep all those feelings to yourself, but eventually they have nowhere to go. So you explode.

I’ve done a lot of searching over many years for healthier ways to channel what I feel, to keep those overflows few and far between. It has taken conscious effort, sometimes fighting against impulses that reach deep into the woodgrain of me. I have to choose it: choose to be vulnerable with the people in my life, choose habits like journaling, choose to face conflict and not run from it, choose to seek out help when I have no resources left. Some of it has worked: I’m not the pressure cooker I once was.

But I feel the rumblings more and more lately. You take in everything, my father said, and lately everything is, well, a lot. There is just so much. The periods of dormancy in me shrink faster than I can take a breath.

---

One morning last week, I woke to find I couldn’t. Breathe, that is. I watched the clock tick from six-thirty to seven to eight, trying to take a deep breath and feeling the weight like a river stone on my chest when I did, my pulse skyrocketing with the effort.

The two days before that morning were some of the worst of this spring: I had had the proverbial rug pulled out from under me and was in danger of losing my apartment, having to move out in the middle of the pandemic. I’d had a handful of meltdowns, a furious mad dash of strategizing, and the single most stressful phone call of my life. And — with willpower, a script, and a lot of restraint to avoid screaming — I’d managed to band-aid the situation, temporarily. My household congratulated me on how well I handled it. With grace, was the phrase they used.

Grace seemed to elude me that morning. By that point not being able to take a breath had scared me into weeping. I was terrified that the stress and panic had been too much for me at last, that this was my body giving out. I sat rod-straight in bed, facing the window, watching the sun come up over the trees, still weeping. Grace, I thought, would be seeing a morning after this one.

I spent four days with that terror, with my pulse hammering every time I even stood up, the river stone lodged in my ribs, pain shooting through different parts of my body as if in protest. My anxiety is a fellow at this point, a shadow, I know it well. But it’s also a shapeshifter, so I can’t explain it any better than this: it felt different, this time. It felt like some kind of end coming.

Some parts of the story are better not told, so I won’t tell you what changed the tide. But on the fifth day, though the weight was still there when I woke, I knew this time that I was safe, from this, for now. But I also had to reckon with the violence that the events of my life routinely wreak on me, that my brain and body had wrought on each other.

---

My therapist surprises me when I relate the week to her: She calls me sensitive. Not sneering with her nose upturned; she sounds almost admiring. She calls it my blessing, and my curse, to feel everything so intensely. Her eyes shine out gently over our video call. Feeling this much means you are alive.

I know she is trying to comfort me, but I can’t help thinking of a friend of mine, a conversation we had weeks ago. (Was it weeks? Time is a rubber band, constricting and stretching.) Everything is different, and nothing is different, my friend said. She meant that she can’t distinguish her feelings from one another, experiences everything the same. She meant: outside looks so different, but in here it’s fog. She meant: emotional flatline.

Is she less alive than me, just because feeling is hard for her right now? That seems unfair.

When we first spoke, I wondered whether I would swap my experience for hers. But it’s like the old question: would you rather be deaf or blind? — a ridiculous proposal, so incredibly insensitive that I feel embarrassed by it.

It’s not until my friend and I speak again weeks later that something changes. It’s probably my brain protecting me, she says. Like, if I actually try to process everything all at once, I’ll go insane.

A spark goes off in my brain when she says it. Of course: everything is terrifying right now. Everything is something that our brains want to protect us from. For some that means shutting down to stay safe, crumpling feelings down because they are just too raw, too much. For others it’s just the opposite — revving into overdrive by predicting every terrible scenario and honing in on every strange sensation.

But that’s what it is, the thread between us. We are our own shelter. We are trying to protect ourselves. From the threat always simmering, the rumbles waiting to break forth, the skies darkening with ash.

---

Knowing this, I am not suddenly immune to stress and anxiety, and my friend does not magically regain her emotional spectrum. But when I recognize it as a protective instinct rather than an attack, I make room for some lines to be drawn.

We are living through a crisis, and there will be overlapping crises within this one, to be managed as they come up. But if I can be sensitive to looming threats and the terror they give me, I can also be sensitive to the things that bring me calm, or pleasure, or outright laughter. If I can’t take a breath some mornings, I can stick my nose in a blooming bush and catch its earth-sweet scent. If I spend the day sobbing every other hour, there are still hours between them to make good simple food, and read old comic books out in the yard, and call my friends. Both falling ash and clear sky.

You take in everything, my father said. I can make that true again.