west

Mornings when I wake up to the sound of rain, or just to the smell of it. The grey light. I love when someone asks me where I'm from, because I get to say the word. I get to name it. 

Lately I've been missing my home fiercely and actively, but also with a worrying logic: worrying because I don't feel ready to leave, but there's something more tangible and rational calling me back. It feels like an adult desire, counter to the things that keep me in New York - the energy, the potential, the unending surge of human life. There is a part of me that is starting to silently nudge at my collective here, to be less vehement in my protestations whenever one of them mentions leaving. They might have to go first. It's the most concrete reason I have for staying: my community is here. My people. And this is undeniably true, but there's a pull there, too, and I can't help but feel like I'm waiting for something to tip the scale. I've said I will wait out the three years of my visa in this city and then decide, but those three years suddenly seem - maybe - too long. And when I close my eyes at night I have started to conjure up a beat-up old car, the rain on the windshield, familiar green streets, the ocean, lights at the end of a driveway. It's a lucky problem to have, I know: so many places I might be happy. But for someone who has always had trouble being present, carrying the weight of a country on your shoulders isn't the best way to live a life. 

Vancouver, by Cat. 

i will miss your heart so tender / and i will love this love forever

the chestnut trees/the wishing well

Tonight I'm packing my small bag and drinking hot water with lemon and honey. My body is currently 98% zinc. I'm sick, which cannot be, because on Sunday I will put on my navy silk minidress with the gold sequins and stand next to two dear friends as they say their forevers. Tomorrow, Montana.

I'm considering the practice of radical vulnerability, considering these earrings (isn't there a thing with bloggers where they say, wow, these earrings, and then the next post is like, oh my, what kind and generous person sent me these earrings I loved so much? at what point of blogger success does that happen?), considering the playlists I'm compiling for this wedding. It's very daunting, being charged with making people dance.

It may not have been the best time for me to have lifted someone I love out of my life, right in the middle of these weddings, when it honestly becomes somewhat necessary to have someone with whom you can drink a few whiskeys, someone who you can marvel at, someone who marvels at you. At some point, after all of this is done, I'll write a bit about what a horribly selfish person I've turned out to be, or these weddings have shown me to be, and how truly difficult it is to be purely happy for the people you love without any of your own jealousy and sadness and loneliness and anger seeping through. But not yet.

For now, I'll listen to this song, and think about how I hope to sway gently to it, against it, in a barn in the foothills of Montana, thinking of my friends, and the love I have for them, and thinking, as always, of you.

fall list, a sampling

apple picking

go dark

bake

practice sobriety

read more

write, pitch, publish

turn it into something productive

wear more black 

finish the behemoth 

host a dinner party

walk the AT at Pawling

find a couch 

knit

my vagina has no biography

Zimmerman: Right, vaginas are only properly activated by penises, by means of some kind of cervical toggle switch.

In this, the brilliant hate-read of Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography. 

(UGH.) 

Also, my favourite passage from Ariel Levy's New Yorker review: "Wolf claims that vaginal slander - referring to the vagina by its ‘awful' feline moniker, for instance - ‘apparently affects the very tissue of the vagina.' She bases this conclusion on a study of female rats whose vaginal tissue showed signs of change after periods of stress. The experiment did not, however, entail researching yelling ‘Rat pussy!' at the animals; stress was manufactured physically. Wolf's interpretation of the science is, as usual, rather free."

it becomes a lot easier to exist

I wouldn't mind if things were different, but they're not and, truly, I have always enjoyed my space. I love turning the key in the door at the end of the day, being able to decompress, knowing where I left the remote control to the television. I am partial to hot water. I like being able to come home late and collapse into bed without worrying about waking anyone with my drunken shoe removal.

This is not a matter of statistics or trends; it's my life. There is no advertisement for it. Funnily, that's one of the better selling points imaginable: once you realise you're not obligated to persuade others about your existence, it becomes a lot easier to exist. 

                                                                                               - Sloane Crosley, on living alone. 

According to that article, I'm part of a trend, part of a new legion of solo dwellers. Well, sure. Why not. Today I wrestled my A/C unit out of the window and only narrowly missed launching it down to the street. It would have been easier, yes, everything would always have been easier, yes, this would all be easier with someone else. But that is not my life, which is what I keep reminding myself. That is not my life. This is my life. 

On that note: Something happened recently that I'm struggling to get through, or past. A rift. In many ways I think it will change the way I've been living, day-to-day, yes, molecularly. It's not a change I want to make - rather one I have to make, and I feel lighter, if also more heartbroken, for having taken those first, necessary steps. 

And on that note: Someone once asked me if I thought the guy I was seeing was brilliant. He yelled it, actually: "DOES HE FILL YOU WITH AWE?!" And I knew the answer, knew it immediately, and knew that meant the end of us. 

There's a list, there's a rough-knuckled fist of people, and I clutch them with such ferocity, those who have entered my life, and stayed, and who continue to dazzle me right to my core. I will not close my eyes against that light, and if you have it, I'm going to tell you, even if that contains the implicit bargain: I'm asking you to live up to that, now. And for my part, I will wait for that light. I'll wait until I can feel its slow heat thrumming, somewhere out in the crowd. 

And on that note: This fall, I'm going to stop dating men and date my writing instead. I'm going to take my writing out to dinner at the restaurant around the corner with the incredible octopus pasta and I'm going to sit it at the bar and feed it. I'm going to carve date nights into my calendar, long, cozy nights where I woo and tease and coddle my writing. I'll make it tea, or whiskey, whatever it wants. I'll talk softly to it, worship it, give it what it didn't know it always needed. I'll take it to bed early. I'll wake it with the sunrise. I'll maybe even knit it something warm to put around its neck, and then ask it to be amazed. I'll see where we might go together. 

a symphony, and some fish

Some new (or old) words about the cold up over here.

Thank you, in advance, for sharing with me.

we were blessed

and I saw, again, how blessed my life had been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting behind me,... / and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have / lost someone who could have loved me for life.

- Sharon Olds

via Emily, who knows. 

preach

"Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."

DFW. 

random act of bravery

I painted the walls and steamcleaned the floors. I hung curtains and shouldered my weight behind a drill. There are holes in my walls and I covered them with thick coats of white primer, with furniture positioned to hide the cracks. Some nights I just walk slowly back and forth along the length of this apartment, feeling the silence around me like something with form, like a new partner.

It's an adjustment, this living alone. I wonder how many times I have to listen to this song before a neighbour calls suicide watch.

The day we moved out, I went back to my old apartment to drop off the keys, sometime around midnight. Earlier one of the guys who helped me move told me my new place reminded him of his grandmother's home in Puerto Rico, and that allowed me to find its decrepitude charming in a way I hadn't before, and I was thinking of that as I bounded up the two flights of stairs in my old building, slipped the keys into the lock for the last time. I was halfway down the hallway when I realized the new residents had already moved in. Their belongings were piled in the centre of our kitchen and living room, a couch standing on its end, a desk tucked up against the stove. I froze. By some stroke of good fortune they were out, so there was no one to catch me there. But it made my heart lodge itself in my throat - not just the fear of being found in someone else's apartment, but realizing that it was now someone else's apartment - that in less than 2 hours, the rooms I had called home for a whole year, the rooms in which I'd raised two cats, held my roommates as they wept and been held in turn, had sex, had a fever, baked loaves of zucchini bread, broken my heart, broken at least 4 glasses, changed my plans, changed them again - these rooms belonged to someone else now. I was bowled over by the temporary-ness of this, of living in New York City. By the realization that I will only ever be an interloper here.

I slipped the keys from my ring and left them on the stovetop. I turned off the light.