circling
I wrote today’s piece while listening to Ben Seretan’s sandhills music. I encourage you to press play and enjoy as you read.
In drear nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity— The north cannot undo them With a sleety whistle through them Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy— But were there ever any Writh'd not of passed joy? The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme.
It was my birthday this week and as with any panic of passing time, comes the inevitable reflections and everything everyone has already said and thought before.
This time last year my future looked entirely different, the roll out of the expected. I spent most of the day alone, as I had the year before also, convinced by someone I trusted that this was the way birthdays went. I remember quick, dry-throated breaths in the car on my way to a solo hike, feeling so far away from the rainbow that had appeared above I-87. I remember a lost wallet leading me to a free birth chart reading, and a Long Island accent declaring “Oh huuuney, twenny-twenny-tooh is gointabe sow tough for you,” over a scratchy telephone line in a town I had only visited twice before. “A biiiig change.”
Big changes abound in my life here. It has been a comically-tragic year that felt like I was constantly sucker punched in some sadistic simulation. This (un)reality coloured by perceptions, constructed a grey-gauze of disappointment, mocked my trust in others. But in this (un)reality of the digital spaces we subject ourselves to every day, I’m here to tell you, whoever you are today, that there are still pockets of joy and connection even in the deepest, darkest depths of disaster. In this (un)reality where the only certainty is an (un)certain future, sometimes the only thing to do is to let expectation dissolve, and embrace the gift of the (un)knowing.
“Is this cringe?” I wonder but then I remember something a friend said:
“Cringe is just earnesty leaving the body.”
This year I have been flirted with by State Troopers as they cuffed my ankles to a bench in a room with no windows. I have scream-stopped a man from biting me on the neck while his pet rats dashed across my toes. I have taken still-life nudes while on the phone to my deeply-religious granny in South Georgia, contorting my body into unrecognisable shapes for an acquaintance 4000 miles away. “Is that fucked up?” I asked a friend. “It’s kind of fucked up,” she wrote back. I have given a pep talk to a stranger, holding a face in my hands as we stand by an overflowing dumpster in Brooklyn. “You’re hot and you’re doing great,” I say in a five-tequila-deep voice. The next morning he texts: “Words I really needed to hear even if you don’t remember it.” Wait, did I give him my number?
I have sob-cried at my kitchen island as a friend reached her hand across and saved my life. I have sob-cried with this same friend at this same kitchen island but this time in joy, as we find our inability to paint each other’s nails unmanageably hilarious. The kind of laughter, that almost silent laughter, that only surfaces when you’ve been holding your breath for too long.
I have looked in the bathroom mirror and pulled back the skin on my face, trying to erase the lines of immeasurable grief. I have tried to hold the immeasurable grief of my friends, my neighbours, strangers who hold my gaze as we pass on the street. I have facetimed with a friend so I didn’t have to cook for one, alone. I have swam in creeks at sunset, I have had trouble sleeping, I have worried about my mother in hospital. I have turned away from anger to the childhood comfort of apathy. I have been picked up by teenagers in the pit of a Bikini Kill show, pink fishnet arms raising me to safety. I have been laid off. I have seen the alien rocks of Colorado. I have wondered if any of it makes sense at all. I have already forgotten so many things.
Last week I walked around with my dear friend B and as we strolled through part of a college campus, a small golden leaf stretched to the ground. “Did that leaf just fall right in front of us?” he said, exasperated, reaching for the last slashes of summer. He jokingly cried out in horror but through our laughs I could hear the discomfort of passing time. We never got that ice cream together.
B and I often talk about where we’re at in life, our hopes and wishes, but disappointments mostly. Funnily enough, he is someone who I think of as one of the most positive and nourishing prescenes in my life. He is always ready to embrace and giggle and yet, when it’s just the two of us, the vulnerability of egoless love and kindness toward each other allows a portal to announce that everything is, in fact, terrible. A jaw unclenched.
The disappointments mainly meander around measured time, the endless uncertainty of the gig economy, the people who take their wealth and time for granted. We’re both in our thirties now, things were supposed to be different. Then, a small park, surrounded by a black metal fence. There is a beautiful big tree posing in the middle of it. An oak, maybe. I chastise myself, once again, for not being able to identify the trees I share this world with. Each side of the fence has a gate, almost hidden, and B gently pushes against each one, still listening attentively to my reflections, barely pausing in his attempts to access the greenery. It’s not until the fourth one that he shrugs, “Sometimes they leave one open.”
Now, I know I could lament about some cliche metaphor here: the gates we want open, closing themselves to us. And maybe I’ll go back to that but right now I’m not drawn to the gates at all. Instead I’m drawn to B and I leaving the path, the circling of the fence, the place we can see but cannot reach, and we head to a van across town––a makeshift farm stand selling cucumbers and spinach and sweet carrots grown by uncertain teenage hands for a community project––and B chopping these vegetables at his kitchen counter, while our other friend C listens to a voice memo of some spoken word piece I want the three of us to work on. We eat cucumber toast and tiny oranges and play the same three chords over and over again, urging the idea to flourish.
The piece was written in the first week of 2022 and it bends with a dolorous ache. I am nervous, undeniably embarrassed to be this exposed but B and C hold my words with such a benevolent ease, I melt into a version of myself I thought had long disappeared. The open-chested, optimistic self, unburdened by the judgement of others. The session lasts only a couple of hours––work to get to and appointments to keep––and suddenly I find myself on the sidewalk outside B’s apartment, stretching to embrace easily-one-foot-taller-than-me-C, who graciously curves to receive it.
I started this piece with Keats’ poem In drear nighted December. For me, it’s a poem about not missing the flowering of the past (or grieving some imagined future), because trees don’t have any capacity for regret. Instead, they stand firmly in the present, stretching to even the greyest of skies in the deepest depths of winter. They welcome the new greenery of each approaching spring, bursting with shape and colour come the summer. They perform a golden lament before ridding themselves of their beautiful past. A blank canvas to prepare for their next flourishing.
This year I have felt cordoned off from the greenery, peering at a future that was promised. Just last month I attended a birthday party for one of my best friends, N. As I sat around a fire, the first chills of autumn licking at my bare ankles, I found myself surrounded by couples excited about their new homes, their wedding plans, their latest predicament at their well-paid salaried jobs. Affirmation by mirroring, by repetition. Their present, my almost-future, suffocated me so much that it propelled me across town to my local bar, where I danced with a complete stranger who’s face I can barely remember.
It’s not that these friends and their plans are unimportant or unoriginal, it’s rather that witnessing my almost-future in real time, the mirage of it, burdens me to some demolished past self. A previous greenery, locked behind a gate.
The morning after the music session, the circling around the park, I lay in bed and scroll through digital squares to distract myself from the beginning of another day, more expectations. I pause at the smiling face of B. He beams down at the screen, the imprisoned tree peering over like a proud parent.
Public Service Announcement: the east-side gate is open, he writes across the photograph.
And here we are back at the gates.
The gates we wish to open, the greenery we wish to reach, may soon unlock themselves. But even when we find ourselves circling, trying to gain access past some impenetrable barrier, we might find ourselves veering off the path entirely, and making something beautiful just for the sake of it; eating cucumber toast with B and C and silent-laughing at the yelps of a beloved synth. We might find ourselves surrounded by so many friends, friends we didn’t even know this time last year, handing over freshly-picked flowers and homemade cupcakes and long, nourishing cuddles to celebrate another year around the sun.
We might find ourselves overwhelmed by the greenery of the life we created outside the fence, despite it all.