Apartment Poem is free, but you can support it (and me) here.
“You are words. When you go outside it’s different. No one / is smarter”
Sun Ra - “Tapestry From an Asteroid”
Hey so:
Does this newsletter even still exist? I think it does, in the same way that right now is still "the pandemic," even though things feel different than they did before. I am still staring down the barrel of a changed self, an unfamiliar winter, but unlike last fall I can go to a basketball game, to the thrift store again. We have had friends over for dinner, been to other people’s homes. Carlo got a booster shot. I am working out in the world again, full retail, the whole thing. It would be disingenuous to pretend things are the same.
Even the meaning of the title has shifted since the summer: we moved out of our old place and into a house. The core is still there - "Apartment Poem" meant something to me before I started writing this, and then it meant something else, and now it will mean something new again - but some part of what it used to be has dissolved a little. I think that's part of what's kept me from writing. I hate the tediousness of giving context, but sometimes you have to, and the longer you wait the more it piles up.
All that said, I don't think it’s done. Just different. I always tell myself I am not going to write one of these emails until I need to. The feeling comes in flashes, and then if I get enough I just kind of know it's time. I have had a few of them since the last time we spoke, but nothing strong enough to push me all the way, until today, for some reason, when I had to tell you about two scenes I keep thinking about.
One was from this past August. I spent like half of my summer in the outdoor pool is right down the street from our new place, which is normally very crowded in the summer but this year they had a system where you'd book a date ahead of time so they could control the numbers. I started booking dates for myself in advance, just so I'd be forced to leave the house and go be by myself for a while, a thing I never want to do but am always glad I did. The pool is beautiful in an unphotographable way - every time I took my phone out and tried to capture the way it felt to be there I'd come away with pictures that just looked like wet cement and chlorine and blue-gray smog-choked city sky. But being in there, floating and floating and floating in the bright blue empty deep end while all the kids crowded and splashed in the shallow, with the occasional senior citizen doing laps around me, looking up at the afternoon sky or at my toes pointing out of the water or at the green weeds growing through the chain link fence, bright yellow plastic waterslide on the periphery of my vision, hearing the noise of the world and sensing the water below me and the traffic vibrating everything, feeling connected in some elemental ground-up way to the city - I kept having the same thought, which was Things are still good.
As in: The heat was scaring the shit out of me. In the evenings the sun would set blood red and the news was all forest fire. Most of the time on the hottest days I would travel from indoors to indoors and do my best to block it out, but occasionally I would find myself vulnerable and in those moments the truth of the changing world would overwhelm and terrify me. I have had enough moments like this the past few years of my life that now when I think of them it's in sequence. A few years ago, when I went to the Islands with Layne and we were sitting on the beach and I saw the lake lapping around the ankles of a lifeguard tower that was once far away from the water / The time in a yoga class in early March of 2020 when I was lying down in silence on my back and in that moment of silence and relaxation felt waves of terror moving through me, like a force of nature / This past summer, sitting on a bus on my way back from a faraway Value Village, surrounded by people, masked, sweating, tired, blood sugar low, carrying two enormous plastic planters that I had been so excited to find and now felt stupid for forcing myself to schlep home because to even hold them both I had to kind of hug my arms around them like a true fucking idiot, scrolling through my phone in an attempt to numb my brain and landing on an article about some natural disaster and the cold numb panic feeling just washing over me, from the top of my head all the way down. Those moments when you come up against the certainty of change and the feeling that you may be, at least in some ways, powerless to alter or escape it. Those moments teach you something.
So anyway this I was lying in the pool on my back and I was thinking of those moments, all of them strung together like that in their little sequence, and I was thinking of how so much of the time you do not know you are in a good period, a fortunate time or a beautiful one, until you have some present disaster or deficiency to contrast it with. And even though I could not stop coming to the conclusion that the world was absolutely terrifying and that encountering that terror was necessary for me to turn into a more useful person, I also could not stop knowing that I was still fortunate enough to live in a time that is, against all odds, still rich and lush with joy. The possibility and the presence of it. The luxury of existing, when I could feel it. That I could still go to the pool and float on my back outdoors, my body among all those bodies in this bright-blue liquid gem inside the heart of the enormous city, and then after go back to my life. That I had survived and come out still able to float.
There is a second time I want to tell you about. It is from way, way back last winter. There was this one night in February when I was feeling very very very depressed. Nothing special - just the usual February shit, plus all the rest of it. Dark all day, global pandemic, working on my stupid fucking book that just made me feel sad and unsure of myself and freaked out, boyfriend sad, grocery store sad, friends all sad, frigid walks in the park, frigid fires in the backyard, house empty and cold, menacing landlord, no money, etc. At that point one of the only things you could do was go skating. Everything was closed but the city had the rinks open. I had gotten my old skates out of my mom's basement and sometimes Carlo and I would go over to the one near our place, which was on the edge of a small weird park we never otherwise visited, and just go around and around and around the periphery until we felt like we'd breathed enough air to go home and watch Law & Order with a clean conscience. Those moments were the only times that winter when I felt like I was collaborating with the dark instead of pushing back against it. The park was surrounded on all sides by houses, and no one ever closed their curtains, so you could see everyone’s plants and their furniture and their TVs and their pets in the window, that warm orange glow of a lit home in the night. The seeing made me feel un-alone, like it always does.
So anyway, this one night when I was feeling very bad I had thought I would go skating to maybe give myself a little restart, and Carlo was making dinner but also we were bickering about something I can no longer remember but that absolutely did not matter, because I was sad and he was sad too and we were both tired and it was dark and things were hard, and I was lacing up my boots and putting my skates in my bag and all of a sudden out of nowhere I was crying and just could not stop, and then he was holding on to me and being like Hey hey hey what's the matter and without my even realizing it the crying had become very very bad and kind of humiliating, I was really going for it, you know like when you're talking and just fully sobbing at the same time, gulping air, and the words were just coming out of me and I could not stop them either. It was like listening to someone else speak. I heard her go I'm sorry I'm being such an asshole I'm just so scared about the future, everything just feels so uncertain and fucked up and hard and I know life has to change at some point but I just can't imagine how it possibly could, or how that change could be anything but a descent into some weird new layer of badness that I can't even fathom right now, and I’m scared. I'm just scared of the future and how I can't see it at all. And finally when I stopped he was thinking about everything I had said for a second and his arms were still around me and then all of a sudden he went Do you want to get married and I was like What? Wait. Yes. Of course.
When we were done talking about it he still had to finish making dinner, and I still went out to the skating rink. I took off my boots and put my skates on. There was no one else there except for me. There was snow coming down and I had Jazmine Sullivan in the headphones and the glow of everyone's interior lives all around me and that empty feeling you have after a cry like that and this secret I was carrying with me. Tiny promise of the future, anchor of certainty in the sea of dark. It was possible. It is. I went home and we ate the dinner he'd made which was tacos and then we told everyone and then somehow months passed; we got evicted and moved and we both got vaccines and I went back to work and my book became real and a lot of other things happened in the world and in our tiny lives and some of them were good and some of them were bad but also we did get married, in our backyard in front of people we love, just the way we had planned and it felt not like anything I could have possibly imagined. It was tiny and enormous and things changed. Into the future.
&&&:
Would you hate it if I sent you an email about basketball sometimes? Wait, don’t unsubscribe! I was just thinking out loud. Not like all the time and not “basketball newsletter” per se. I just need somewhere to talk about e.g. this every once in a while. Just a thought!
Also I uhhhhh have a book coming out in March. The cover (by the amazing Lisa Jager) is a picture of my hair which they did not tell me they were planning but I love it very very much. You can pre-order it here if you’d like, but no pressure. Just between you and me I do not really know what the word “soulful” means but the rest of the description is true.
Carlo’s basketball corner
Jimmy Butler's Face After Grayson Allen Tried To Guard Him 🤣