i still don't know if they saw me and frankly i do not think i want to know!!! okay maybe a little
Irma Thomas - Ruler of My Heart
"You can sometimes open such doors by opening both doors at once, / with long & widespread arms."
Hello:
I was talking to Yanyi the other day and he said I think you could write it. All you have to do is think about the things you wish someone had told you then, the things you know now from going through it. Work from there.
I kept thinking about that. A few hours later I biked down to the water. Our friends are out of town and they have a rotating cast of people housesitting for them, with appropriate built-in breaks for distance. There's no formal calendar for it or anything, everyone just kinda knows when their time is. "Your lake house," they called it, laughing, when they gave me the keys. "Your residency."
They are a couple, the people who own this apartment, true friends and kind ones, and also the type of people who seem only to own beautiful things. Handmade quilts, beautiful glassware, lush leafy plants, real carpets. No one had been inside their apartment in two weeks and yet somehow it smelled like sandalwood when I opened the door. I have not been inside another person's house since March, which is not something I had really thought about until I was inside. Other people's fixtures! Other people's cutlery, their sagging pressed-tin ceilings, their shitty plumbing! Their bookshelves!
It was one of those smothering days and for most of it I didn't realize they had an air conditioner. I spent the bulk of the afternoon reading shirtless and stoned in bike shorts on the couch, pleasurably immobilized. It was also the first time in four months - maybe more? - that I have been truly alone. I ate snap peas and olive oil cake I had brought from home and I felt like a literal millionaire, sweating into the cushions.
In the evening I biked down to the water, rolled along the section of the highway they close down on the weekends so that people can move without crowding each other. Families were gathered on the steps of Sunnyside Pool and at the beach in little clusters, most of them maskless. It could have been almost anytime. After a while I found an uncrowded patch of beach and laid my bike down near a couple playing cards on an enormous blanket - not close enough to be weird, but close enough that a lazy thief might have thought it was theirs - and I waded into the lake just a little. The water was shockingly warm. There was algae floating on the surface and I wondered if that meant it was not great for swimming. As I was thinking this a kid zoomed past me belly-first on a paddle board and I thought well if he thinks it's okay, as though he were some kind of lake scientist. The sand under my feet was coarse and rocky, almost more like gravel, and suddenly I was in up to my calves. I had put a bathing suit on under my dress before I left but hadn't really thought about what to do with my backpack so I couldn't just fully dive in. It felt good enough just to have the cool water against the backs of my knees.
I stood there for a while, probably looking pretty goofy, hem of my dress gathered in my fist, just staring at the boats gently drifting on their tethers in the marina down the way. When I got out of the water I had a layer of rock-sand pressed into the bottoms of my feet. It hurt a little, brightly, when I pedalled, and I loved it. There was sand in my gears. On the way back I crossed the pedestrian bridge and looked down onto the highway and saw that someone had spray-painted, very high up in very tall letters, "CONFRONT RACISM." I stood there for a minute thinking about how of all the things that might be spray-painted very high up in very tall letters on a big concrete wall near the highway during the simmering summer of a terrifying global pandemic, you could do worse.
When I got back to the apartment I stripped off all my clothes and sat at the kitchen table in the luxurious silence of this beautiful empty place, eating cherries absolutely naked, relishing again the lush fortune of being alone, thinking about the way this time has changed my relationship with my body, thinking about how different silence feels around you when it's absolute, thinking about myself only, so absorbed in the subject of me that I did not at first hear the key turning in the lock as one of the other housesitters came through the front door.
Hey so what do you think about this:
I'm going to try something different for a little while. I will still be taking your dreams and housemate complaints if you want to send them, and I will still maintain the instagram and keep it open for pet photos, but submissions for all of these things has slowed because I think everyone's needs and desires are shifting a little bit and I'd like to shift with them. We will bring these things back if you want them, and I will keep including links to longer things to watch or listen to if I have something really good to share. But until then, now seems like a good time to maybe make some space for new things to grow.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Best NBA cursing moments (uncensored)