turning our paradise among the stars into a tomb
wet hair, girlhood and the pursuit of comfort
hello people in my computer,
i have been feeling very spongelike lately, emotionally speaking. i’ve always known july to be a mystifying month, but this year’s is - in my best endeavor at depiction - taking liberties.
july is the month when i return to my parents’ hometown in the seaside. every year this happens, and every year it makes me feel so heartbreakingly nostalgic. to see the people who raised me interact with their own childhood friends, speaking fondly about memories in which i play no part, in the same way i speak fondly of my - more recent, elsewhere molded - own — it gives me emotional whiplash. i think we eventually grow convinced that a parent’s job to be a parent is all there is to their life, in the same childish way we expect our best friend to only ever hang out with us. somehow, i keep forgetting that these two people, much like everyone else in the world, are only part-time adults.
it makes me think a lot about we were girls together as a concept, the motherly implications of it. being my mother’s girl in the making, i spent no time thinking of my mother as ever one herself. which also brings me to the opposite end, how big motherhood would look on myself, the ways in which it would take away from my own being a girl. there’s a specific line from clairo’s sling that i relate to this thought a lot: there’s a claw on my shoulder / and she’s saying the obvious / “you know, eventually, you’re gonna have to be a provider, too” — my days as a girl are already numbered anyway.
the thing is: throughout the past months, and particularly throughout these weeks of maudlin tranquility - that is, ever since i concluded my year as a sophomore, ever since i came here - i have come to find great comfort in simple acts of communication. i love to go deep about the mundane and quotidian, about a song, a book, a thought, a worry. conveniently enough, comfort is exactly what i need to keep me going during my slow, ponder-filled July evenings — so i’m trying to write more about what i love, make this a habit.
if you’re somewhat familiar with some of my younger work in custody, you’ll probably know by now how much i adore lorde. (i have loved lorde from her earlier melodrama days, and i have loved her in everything she has made ever since, musically or otherwise, which is more than a lot of you can say: i’ve seen the way you freaks speak about solar power.) lorde has her very own newsletter, in which she writes about whatever is on her mind in a style that is halfway between essay and diary entry. also on this line is rayne fisher-quann, who is brilliant at both. she’s also my favorite culture writer of the moment.
my point is i also want to be cool like these girls, so this is my attempt at making some space in my own newsletter, separate from the usual poetry posts, for simply writing about what’s going on. here’s what’s going on. in my life. in general.
the days are slow here in the seaside. i spend most of the time at the beach, reading, or rummaging through the handful of meaningless words that bestrew the first few entries of my notes app: adulthood, transience, the landscape. in the evenings, i sit in the balcony, hair wet, shore a few dozen feet ahead, and i gnaw on a peach so unripe it’s almost like an apple. i put on one of my oldest playlists, titled “love songs to sink your teeth into”, and somedays i write. on other days, i talk to my dad about common worries — yesterday, we spoke of the possibility of a lack of competence in newer generations, of the overexposure to digital stimulation, how we are continuously training ourselves only toward simplicity, toward intellectual comfort. in typical dad fashion - and because he works in tech -, he answered only in optimistic remarks.
when i was younger, i remember being terrified of getting older, of the passage of time as a notion. what i at first misconstrued for fear of my own death (i was nine) slowly dissolved into a deep understanding of the fact that what i really feared the most was a classic: loneliness. i would count down the years my parents hypothetically had left until they died, trying to predict how much time i had until i was ultimately lonely, until i ran out of happiness. i was going to a therapist back then, and when i returned a couple of years later, at thirteen, i believed i had the loneliness thing all sorted out. i was wrong.
almost four years later, i would say i have never felt lonelier. there’s a particular manifestation of grief i’ve fiddled with before in some of my writing — the feeling of mourning what still endures, of being consumed by transitoriness even before it makes itself apparent. it feels like trying to hold an enormous fistful of sand without having any of it slip away. when i think about loneliness now, i no longer feel fear as an imminent entity, a menace; but rather as an extension of grief, its first orchestrations. over concern, over fright, this often translates into despair.
charlotte wells did an interview for the guardian a while ago for the promotion of her film aftersun (about which i also wrote a poem) where she talked about something i can only interpret as perpendicular to this feeling, to this form of grief, but that strangely conveys a similar, though perhaps more legitimate, kind of nostalgia.
Do you think the ubiquity of video today changes how people will remember their parents?
Yes. I don’t have any video of my dad at all. I have a torso on an hour’s worth of digital video playing chess. All of our heads are framed out of screen because the chess board is more interesting. I think that’s kind of perfect in its own horribly sad way. My generation has more than the generation before, and this current generation record more than ever. And yet sometimes I still forget to point the camera at things that you might wish you had later on. I don’t think that feeling necessarily would ever change, of always reaching for something you don’t quite have. The feeling of chasing somebody lost.
this brought me an immense feeling of relief when i first read it. in suffering, i sometimes get the impression that it’s very easy to fall in the preconception of illicitness, in needing a certain sense of permission or validation to keep on grieving. especially when what you’re grieving is still actively a part of your life, when what you’re grieving is the present moment, it kind of feels wrong to not savor it, to sacrifice contentment in the name of fearful anticipation, in the name of pain. in a way i can’t quite explain, this movie and this particular piece of the interview feel like that nod of approval to me.
also a nod of approval: anthony bourdain in his book No Reservations. as i’ve come to find out, travel is often a good metaphor for grief.
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
in the balcony, i feel a yearning so deep and foreign it could startle the ground. during these evenings, i play music that makes me think of my childhood. i love to let strong feelings marinate with sorrowful folky songs. Blue by joni mitchell ranks among my favorite albums of all time.
i also play Famous Blue Raincoat by leonard cohen all the time. it’s one of those songs i can’t listen to without impulsively thinking “this is going to make me cry a lot when i listen to it at my dad’s funeral”. with some songs, you just know.
besides grief, a thing that is certain in my life these days is i have entirely too much time on my hands. i’ve never particularly made any friends here either because i have a propensity for solitude. so for a month of the year it’s just me at the beach with my humongous mustard tote bag and a stack of books.
over the last few days i’ve read annie ernaux’s The Young Man, emily henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, and three quarters of Pure Colour by sheila heti, which i’m hoping to finish today. i have yet to read from my stack two other emily henries and Small Pleasures by clare chambers. next up are The Blazing World and Other Writings by margaret cavendish (rayne fisher-quann’s recommendation, which i’m dying to get to) and hopefully joan didion’s Blue Nights. i read Play It As It Lays back in february and i would say it’s one of the most brilliant works of prose i have ever encountered.
also, the other day i rewatched lady bird for maybe the ninth or tenth time in my life. lady bird is a little like jesus in my mind, like a literal hierogram. it’s the closest thing i know to universal representation for women. if i could realistically vote lady bird for congress, i would be the first person at the polling place.
this movie and “we were girls together” have an intrinsic connection that shapeshifts into both motherhood and friendship, but also into a girl’s own sense of self. perhaps above every other dynamic, and not just ontologically, lady bird and christine are girls together the most. in this sense, individuality is inherent to girlhood as much as community can be, and as much as grief is.
beyond an angsty teen holding on to the back gates of adolescence, lady bird is fundamentally someone in mourning. she experiences the exact type of grief i am trying to describe — the grief of everything that is not quite lost, which is also the grief of girlhood. we feel compassion for lady bird in the same way we often can’t feel compassion for ourselves, but compassion deflects itself onto us through her, because she is us after all, and when we love her stumbles, we love our own.
july feels like one particular Smiths line: “mother, i can feel the soil falling over my head”. honestly the sea does want to take me. the knife does want to slit me.
thankfully, i’ll endure.