7.4.20
If you were here I just know you would have spun gold out of this mess of a pandemic. In the past three months while we’ve been consuming too many empty carbs and watching stupid shit on television, you would have planted a new bed of tulips, spun and fired many kilns full of pottery, knitted a purple sweater vest for yourself, read eleven mysteries, and listened to all your favorite shows and podcasts on NPR while baking cookies or loaves of bread for your neighbor’s doorsteps. You would have re-tiled your bathroom and and re-wallpapered your kitchen with dancing teapots. I on the other hand, have accomplished very little. While peeing this morning I noticed dog hair starting to pile up behind the bathroom door and dust on the baseboards. She never would have had dusty baseboards, I thought, and then flushed and left.
I’ve spent a lot of my time since March working and the rest of it dodging morning sprinklers at the park with the dogs and wandering the house in the afternoons trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing with myself while totally ignoring the dog hair behind the doors and soap scum in the the bathtub. We’re all a little depressed at this point, aren’t we? Sometimes on my day off I bake and this has been the only thing for months in which I’ve been able to lose myself. I take lots of vitamins everyday and a sleeping pill most nights. I wake up with the sun no matter what time I fall asleep. I’m grieving a career I thought I was really good at and a community I worked so hard to create but can’t seem to make work for myself or others lately. White people are finally starting to wake up to the humanity of Black lives and the inhumanity of white supremacy. That reality show scumbag Donald Trump is our president.
You’ve missed so much.
Today I filled three pages in a sketchbook with some drawings I copied off of instagram of pen and ink still lifes. Is it sad that felt like progress, like at least I could say, other than doing the dishes, I accomplished something today? After that I ironed nine shirts that have been sitting in a wrinkly pile for weeks and watched the movie Lady Bird on Netflix while folding laundry, forgetting until the end it’s really a mom and daughter love story. It left me sad, and consciously missing you. In the end when Christine wandered into the church during mass and the children were singing I cried. I miss singing. I miss writing yet nothing is coming to my fingertips. My sentences are choppy, ineloquent, and shorter than they’ve ever been. I don’t miss much else because I was kind of a homebody anyway because as you know, hanging out with other humans feels sort of overwhelming to me most of the time even though I secretly adore almost all of them. I think if I could call you and talk through my anxiety you could coach me to let go of my worry and remember life is for finding beauty and joy and then sharing it, maybe I would have reached thirty nine and have figured out by now how to be a good and present friend, rather than a deeply caring but mostly absent one.
A few weeks ago we we went to the nursery and there was a wooden cobalt bench there that reminded me of you. We bought dark purple lavender and planted it in the front yard and its tips are already springing small purple flowers. I like to water the plants at dusk and examine the garden for any signs of growth each morning. It’s a tiny thing to look forward to right now. I’ll be turning forty soon, mom. It’s looming over me in ways I hadn’t expected, similar to the wedding this time last year. Both things I should be grateful for but which in their approaching also feel so bittersweet in your absence. It never occurred to me at ten or fifteen or twenty that you wouldn’t be around to usher me through life’s rites of passage, through its tragedies and accomplishments an unexpected pandemics.
I’m currently curled up on the couch with two dogs you’ve never known, and I’m wondering if maybe you can see what comes next? Will I somehow find peace with all this white hair? Will I learn to believe in my professional talents again someday? Will I ever write a book? Will America stop being racist? Will we ever have kids? Will the world feel that there’s more certainty in it again someday? Will I somehow discover a more creative and fulfilling normal? Will capitalism die? Will I get to live longer than you did? Will you be watching?
Please cheer loudly.
