This piece is a bit scattered because I just needed to write something and put it out. I apologize for the lull in posts as of late, I graduated (which felt wildly anti-climactic) and I was dealing with some family stuff and some insecurities about my writing and also insecurities about my life! I suppose that’s the case with post-grad blues. Anyways thanks for reading as always xo
When I am acting neurotic and all my thoughts start stacking on top of each other, I sit on the couch and watch the world from three stories up teem with life as much as the streets below. The birdwatching from my window has been sublime this year. There are impossibly fast and beautiful hummingbirds in the trees and pigeons that sit squat and round on the telephone wires outside of my living room, lined up one by one to commune and talk about bugs. Sometimes they caw over top of each other so that it sounds like they’re arguing, and it makes me wonder if birds do that too. Arguing feels very human. Big leafy trees hiss in the wind like they are talking to each other. I use the park beside my house as a backyard, I sit and read or journal or paint. I see people walking their dogs to play fetch. I get called “lady” by a child on the swings and it reminds me that I am old enough for kids to consider me an adult. Just down the street, there are rows and rows of blackberry bushes, an apple tree, hawthorn berries, and a free community herb garden tended to by the local Montessori school. Neighbours carry baskets for berry picking down to the riverside in flip-flops and big T-shirts. I’ve never really liked nature poetry, but after a day of scrounging in the bushes, it makes sense how easily we can equate berry picking to the act of love. Something about how getting the good stuff means you’ll have to deal with thorns; that the ones you have to pull on just need some more time; how doing it will make you feel a little more at peace with your thoughts if you let it; the production of something sweet for nothing but the energy that goes with manual labour.
Truth be told I don’t have much to say this time of year. I’ve been struggling to write because I have been struggling to think. I spend every summer raging back and forth between wonder and paralysis in a way that is exhausting, consistent, and apropos of the heat. This year has been no different. One of my friends once told me that heat stroke makes you feel the way it does because your internal temperature has raised enough to start boiling your organs, and how I’ve felt lately suggests no further fact-checking is required on the matter. The sun reminds you that living is a fickle balancing act between body and brain. I have spent a lot of time in absolute bliss, and an equal amount doing everything in my power to stop thinking about killing myself (I won’t, don’t worry—death is a big thing you only do once and I plan on going in a much more mysterious way after I am very, very famous). I am handling the summer much better than in previous years. I have a much thicker skin than I used to and a good group of friends. It doesn’t stop things from feeling like the end of the world, but it helps to know that there is so much going on, so much to live for and so much to look at without even having to cross the street. I only believe this half of the time, but writing it down helps. I made some jam and gave it away to my friends, I stuck my feet in the cool salty ocean water, I sat on the metal of a million play structures and watched the sunset. I made a massacre of my hair with craft scissors just because I could, because sometimes you are all electricity, and it helps to have something immediate and destructive to do. I have seen wonderful concerts. I have been drunk and I have chosen to be sober. I have had the luxury of— if even sometimes briefly— being known and being kissed because of it. I have been sad, and I have been mean to myself and I have been scared of the world around me, but every year the streets still blossom, I am still alive, the clock keeps ticking and the good things will keep happening as well as the bad without any regard for my pain. And at the end of it all, a friend will show up at my doorstep to fix my botched haircut and all there is to do is thank them with a coffee and a hug and sit again in front of the window as they walk down the street to the bus.
At one a.m. most nights, I go out to the curb with a cup of chamomile tea and two melatonin pills and listen to the apartment complexes as their tenants fall asleep. One or two people will be swishing porcelain in sink water after a late dinner, most others in bed. I think about how rare it is to find somewhere in the city that’s this quiet. I’ve lived on this street for three years now, but the magic isn’t lost on me. I am still constantly finding new things. Sometimes if you close your eyes, the warm wind feels like delicate hands resting lovingly on your shoulders, and it makes sense what Mary Oliver was talking about in pretty much any one of her poems. I head back up to my apartment, and my elderly next-door neighbour is up late too, smoking a cigarette out of the window on our floor’s stairway landing. She tells me that her doctors are making her quit before her hip replacement, and she compliments my singing because she hears it through our walls. When she was a bit older than me, she was a travelling violinist with a world-renowned orchestra. We all live here on top of each other, but we are all living separately. I don’t cry as much as I used to, but it’s thinking about things like these that get me close.