Howdy.

Here are some journal scraps, poetic remembrances, book recommendations, and thoughts on love.

MOONSET

The world outside my apartment windows has turned entirely green. The dancing skeletal branches that welcomed me in February have become something else entirely. Those first, fluttering, lime green leaves have given in to the deep, forest hue that will uniform them all summer. I’m sitting in my living room, staring into that ever-deepening green, thinking about the natural world.

I woke up early to the birds singing and rolled over to see the moon falling out of the sky. No one ever talks about the moon setting. It doesn’t really register as an occurrence, not like the sunset, for I suppose we’re never awake to see it. The last time I actually saw the moon setting was in Joshua Tree last February. I would get up before sunrise and stand in the purple desert as it turned pink, orange, yellow. To my left, the full moon sat like a luminescent orb just over the horizon, perfectly suspended as if by a string in a children’s play. And to the right, the brilliant sun was rising, spilling golden light across the desert floor like a wave shooting sheets of water onto the sand. I was ankle deep in honey.

I was standing in sunlight while still staring at the moon and I loved the poetry of that. I loved that for that for those few, ephemeral moments, the moon and the sun were in the same sky, dancing in opposition like repellant magnets, one always taking over for the other. I remember writing that in my journal. I remember thinking that if I lived in the desert, I would rise with the sun every morning just to watch that dance, thinking that humans were always meant to witness a thing like that first thing in the morning.

But then you leave, returning to normal life in the normal world where the moon does not set because you do not see it. You see work and school and family and city lights, forgetting that poetic dance of opposition that you witnessed in the frozen desert that morning. But it’s still there. If a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. Whether you’re standing in the California desert or staring out of your Brooklyn apartment window, it’s all the same.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

In other news, I’ve been reading a lot lately. If you need recommendations, here you go.

I finished Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone on the train, loving the final line and the O’Brien-esque unspoken meaning that it held. The kind that leaves you confused the first time you read it, only for it’s deeper meaning to then hit you and render the entire book a little masterpiece. God he’s a good writer.

I also just finished Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a book I remember my high school English teacher telling me I had to read and am finally understanding why. That woman had a gift for poetic prose and metaphor that left me entirely unable to put the book down. I read Song of Solomon back in college, but found the focus that this one has on girlhood to be hauntingly alluring. It reminded me a bit of Jacqueline Woodson’s underrated novel, Another Brooklyn, for each explore the vulnerability and heartache that invariably infest a girl’s coming of age. Highly recommend.

I just started Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and am enjoying the whimsical, creative brilliance that stains every word that man wrote. I’ve also been meaning to finally start Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, but am finishing Sag Harbor first. There’s a lot of time to read when you live in a big city, for you’re always standing in lines or taking public transport or sitting in sprawling parks. It’s amazing.

ALL THE FORMS OF LOVE

As for recent affairs with the city, I’ve been going for really long walks along the water, observing the general chaos of humanity, and strolling through idyllic neighborhoods that I fantasize about buying a home in one day. I don’t know how or why, but I feel a kind of peace and sense of belonging here that I never knew could be real.

Every time I call my mom I tell her the same thing—that every day is somehow better than the last. It’s kind of like how when people tell you how they met and they say they felt they had known each other all of their lives. I’ve never felt that way about anyone, but I feel that everyday here. I walk down streets I have never been on before and feel as if I am uniting with pieces of myself that have been waiting across the country from me for my entire life.

It makes me think of love and all the forms it can come to you in. I was raised around aunts who, whenever they would see me, would ask if I had a boyfriend yet. Any crushes? Do you have a boyfriend yet? Looking back, this was horrifying for so many reasons and psychologically damaging for so many more. Love was something you waited around for a boy to gift you with, not something to be found within the world itself. I wish they had asked me, Any new favorite places? Seen any especially stunning trees lately or felt the magic allure of the ocean? Haha. That made me laugh. But if my brother and his partner should have a daughter, you better believe I’ll be the aunt asking her those questions instead.

It took me years to scrub out the stains that my early 2000s upbringing spilled all over my developing consciousness. I’m still scrubbing. But being with New York, reading and writing and sitting on the water, has made it more clear to me than ever that love comes to us in so, so many ways. I was taught that the state of being alone was also the state of being without love. I thought my mom was so lucky to have met my dad at fourteen, for she got to know love so early.

But then I grew up and love became multifaceted. It became a thing I could spin around and see all different sides of. Somewhere around then, I realized that I also got lucky. Lucky to find so much love within the world itself every time I step out into it. Lucky to have a stupidly good family. Lucky to have found my passion for writing so young. I’ve gone on enough terrible dates with floundering, passionless-about-life 20-something year old guys to know that not everyone has these things.

You don’t get to choose the forms in which love comes to you in. At fifteen, I thought love looked like the senior track star with washboard abs and an indifference to authority. I mean, I was pretty sure of it. But now love looks more the gaps between the trees where the light gets in and the sight of Brooklyn under my feet. It looks like Toni Morrison’s prose and the feeling of writing for hours. It looks like so much.

Anyway. Happy Sunday.

All the love, m.

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