The movie was Broadcast News which I had never actually seen before and oh my god
we can get into it another time!!!
Mulatu Astatke - Tezeta (Nostalgia)
“Benignity rather than thoughtless invisible goodness. Shut your / brain up,”
Hello:
The idea that’s been gathering a bit is that all of this will end eventually. Have you noticed people saying this more? I don’t think it’s wishful thinking, not entirely. When we were waiting in the car outside the hospital last Sunday my mother said she’d heard this finance guy on the radio say now is a good time to think about what you might want your life to look like after this, let yourself plan, and she’s been turning that idea over ever since. A few days later, eating pizza on her front steps Doro told me about a podcast where they were saying that nothing like this lasts forever, never has. The next morning the new therapist told me she’s been thinking about how she’ll look back on this time, whether she’ll wish she spent less time working, more with her kids, or whether she’ll just be proud of herself for getting through it however she could. It’s not as simple or shiny as pure hope or straight optimism. Just that everything does end. It’s in the air.
I guess the thing you’re supposed to do is to try and let that idea sink in, soften the things that are really hard, lift you out of the places where you feel stuck, maybe even make you appreciate the parts that are happening now and couldn’t be at any other time. Sometimes I feel like this ability is maybe not so far away, nearly accessible to me if I really reach for it. But not often. I am in a bit of a stuck period. When I do kind of manage to work myself into a revelation, it’s always just the same lesson I’ve been relearning over and over for the past seven months, tediously if usefully consistent: that noticing the details is what gets you back inside the world. Spray of white and orange flowers against the curb, cat lurking in the space between the houses, leaves dropping steady off the trees.
I was watching some movie the other night and thinking about the very ‘80s/’90s romantic comedy trope of talking on the phone with someone who is not actually that far away from you – in the same hotel or the same city, just a different room, a different apartment. The specific type of intimacy that signifies. I have been on the phone a lot lately, almost always with my mother or my grandmother. I take them on walks with me, all over the neighbourhood and further afield. I can feel myself forming an idea of how I will see this season in my memory, supercut-style: Bedford Park in mid-September, hidden behind a tree that was just starting to turn, staring up at the red and yellow, looking down at the carpet of green. Or a couple of days ago, walking back and forth through the warren of laneways behind the thrift store, idly scouting out places to pee. Or late summer, crossing Ossington on my bike with the left headphone in. Or sitting with my legs crossed on a bench in Dufferin Grove, staring at the outside of someone’s tent, then turning to stare instead at the front door of the mall instead, watching the buses unload people and pull them back in. Or sitting on the couch in my grandmother’s living room, watching her worried face as I call my mother to see what she thinks, hearing the voice of one woman laid over the image of the other. Or on the couch in my apartment, Carlo on the other end playing chess on his phone, watching the sun hit that particularly unsweepable patch of dust under the cabinet, hearing both of their voices on the other end of the line, echoing and ricocheting off each other. Or walking across the schoolyard down the street, kicking the big piles of leaves, watching a dog chase a ball back and forth across the fraying grass, my mother’s voice comforting even when she is telling me about her fears.
Yesterday I went to the big park about twenty minutes away from our place. I’ve been trying to go there for a walk every day, or at least every other. Usually I just cut straight across and double back, but yesterday I circled the perimeter three or four times, watching the trees all jewel-toned and shifting, talking my grandmother awake from her afternoon nap. At one point I was trying to describe the layout of the park and she said there’s all these places in the West end I’ve never been to and I realized I always think of all three of us as being from here, because it’s where my mother and I have both lived for like twenty-five years, more or less, and I melt everyone’s lives together in my mind. She said I know, but I grew up in the East end and then we all lived in the centre.
I know these things and still sometimes I forget them. I have never felt more inside the lives of my mother and my grandmother than I do lately, but I am also thinking constantly about the things each of us knows and feels and remembers that the others never could. Each one of us experiencing a present that the other two can only stand outside, reach towards, glimpse into. When all of this is over I want to take the subway over to your neighbourhood, she said later, see the railpath. Not wistfully, just matter-of-fact. She did not specify which all this she meant. I was standing outside the fenced-off community garden, staring inside at the rows of kale, still growing, deep green, and for a second it made me want to cry. Then I breathed through it so I could be in the conversation again, and I’m glad I did. That was maybe the first time in a month or maybe more that I could actually feel it and be inside the feeling. Everything does end, even the hard parts. This one too.
Oh hey also:
I forgot in the last newsletter to thank you for your donations - I had felt really complicated and weird about including that paypal link in the letter but you were really generous and kind and it had such a concrete and measurable impact on my life and I appreciate it so so much. Writing these emails is one of the only things that has genuinely anchored me through this truly fucked up time and I love doing it and I love you for reading it and the whole thing just makes me feel very impossibly fortunate. I’m going to keep including the link at the bottom of the email and if you ever feel moved to send a little tip along I will be incredibly grateful for it - but like I keep saying and will continue to say as long as I do this, you being here and just hanging out with me for a bit is really really really the main thing.
&&&:
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