Howdy.

How are ya?

I snapped this photo while walking downtown the other day and find it quite unconventionally beautiful. Who put the umbrellas there, perfectly together? Who draped the pink sweater? Did they know it would be art? There’s something very cool about that to me. A bit apocalyptic, but cool.

Meanwhile, there’s a miraculously chill breeze coming in through the window as I write this that makes me feel closer to heaven than I have since April. There’s something so nostalgic about a fall breeze, as if bits of your childhood home are dancing through the trees and into your living room. In honor of that feeling, this is about searching for home and finding love in the folds of the past. Plus, for fun, what I’m reading.

SEARCH-AND-RESCUE

I just finished Casey Gerald’s memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, and am thinking about what it means to write. About why we do it. Why we need it. There’s a line at the very end that reads:

“I set out to find that little boy, somewhere in the rubble. I had no search-and-rescue animals. No flashlight. All I had were words. These words became the bread-crumb trail that led me back to him…He teaches me what joy is…we learn together—how to live. All that time spent learning how to die. How to run.”

-Casey Gerald There Will Be No Miracles Here

And that’s it. At least for me. Writing, a memoir specifically, is an act of excavation, one that pulls back the thick vines that have grown over your life and dares to expose what lies beneath them. It is, at it’s best, a love letter to the child, the adolescent, the young adult that you were. That you still are.

Maybe that’s why, more than anything else, I find myself writing about my girlhood. It’s this thing that I didn’t let myself believe was a big deal for a very long time. I didn’t think that it was allowed to be. I had yet to learn about precarity, about the sheer vulnerability that accompanies growing up a girl. Anyone that reads this blog will tell you that I can never quite seem to stop writing about such things. Gerald reminded me why. I am on my own search-and-rescue mission, out looking with lanterns, as Emily Dickinson wrote, for answers. For anything that I can find under the rocks that are the years I have known. And like Gerald, I am always learning things from what I find. The little girl that I was might as well be walking by my side throughout my day, for her world is latent in the one I see before me.

PLANTED LOVE

What I mean is that the older I get, the more that I understand how heavily my childhood really does influence my experience of the world. I always thought that that was just a therapy trope tossed around by psychologists about people who had rough upbringings. But then I grew up and moved out and saw immediately how my mother’s recipes are burned into my brain and my father’s humor and my brother’s quick wit. I see my mother’s hands in my own as I peel sweet potatoes and arrange flowers for the living room. I feel the love that was poured over me in a way that I never did at fourteen or fifteen. It never even occurred to me then how much love I had. All I could focus on was what I didn’t have.

I see now, especially during these months, when a breeze blows through the window and I stir a pot of soup and play old jazz, that there is love planted in me that I did not have to do anything for. Love that doesn’t ever leave. The older I get, the more of a gift I understand that to be. 

WHAT I’M READING

Speaking of gifts, I have somehow managed to finagle my way into a class that has Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? on the syllabus. This was no small victory. I’ll be carrying that gem in my bag for the next week or so. I’m also, in a somewhat psychotic manner, considering the amount of school reading that I have, reading Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, for fun. I usually only have time for a few pages at a time, but each one is like a piece of hard candy that lingers on my tongue for the rest of the day.

I was talking to a friend in class the other day about what we were reading, (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and I must have looked a little bit too excited over the antiquated literature because he asked with a joking smile, what are you going to do when you graduate? I laughed. It seems that all of the people in my life agree on one thing—that even if I don’t know it yet, this will invariably not be the end of my academic career.

SOMETHING SURREAL

They have a point. It actually scares me just how much of a point that they have. I mean, I came out of class this morning smiling like a total nerd from inspiration. Walking to my car, I was working out a thesis in my head about what a particular scene we were dissecting might have been implying on a deeper level. Who does that? I practically fell down the stairs. I came home excited to spend the afternoon typing out assignments and analyzing texts.

I’ve never been in love, not really. I’ve never experienced the strength and undying nature of caring for another human in such a way that I want to spend the rest of my life with them. But I have fallen in love with words. I have fallen in love with books and writers and been utterly electrified from watching interviews with Joan Didion and Colson Whitehead. I want to know more and more. More words, more books, more stories. And from that, I can begin to understand what they mean when they say that love only grows stronger. How nauseatingly cliché, but how true. Every day, every book and every essay, only increases my love for it all. I feel like a broken record, but it’s kind of the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced. It just won’t die. I think that if it ever did, I would too.

Which is to say, thank you for being a part of my endless endeavor to keep learning.

Love, m.

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