THAT SIDE OF PARADISE

Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti. There’s a homesickness on me for you. Or, if we’re mincing words, I miss you. That’s fair, too. But the deeper, national hiraeth is something you don’t have to go away to experience. You can feel it at home in Wales. In fact, that’s where you feel it most.

This guidance has led me astray time and again.

Don’t start in the middle. Fuck that. Start at the beginning.

The beginning of any story should have movement. If your beginning is stagnant, you haven’t found the beginning; you're still priming the pump.

This sounds like semantics, but it's not.

In medias res encourages writers to open on the most action-packed part of their story before jumping back to the boring details. But details are only boring when they don't matter.

That's not to say that you don't need backstory. Of course you do. You need to weave in just enough detail to explain why the action of the story matters. The key is knowing what just enough detail is.

Done right, detail doesn't need to be relegated to later pages; it should be light enough for the reader to float over it without slowing down.

This is when we are prone to spend hour upon hour trying on accents, attitudes, gestures, hats. Colors and moods. Props. We might practice holding wineglasses by the stem; beer bottles by the neck; cigarettes betwixt our fingers; a book in one hand, a hank of our own hair in the other. We try on scowls and sneers, we purse and pout, we analyze our smiles for traces of the beatific. We experiment with unwashed hair, unshaven legs, unmended rips, ungrammatical and ungracious pronouncements. We experiment with posture, with kindness, with the limits of humor and of despair. We do none of it to deceive; rather, we are researching in deadly earnest. We are taking astounded stock of our enormous range. And we are on the lookout all the while for what rings true, for the moments of recognition, for the rare and precious moments we sense home.

they don’t tell you

about smoking. the psas don’t prepare you for

it, the way the smoke curves

backward into your throat. the way

it starts to burn as you near the filter & you can

feel the heat nip

at your fingers, the

earth’s molten core.

gross doesn’t set in until the end

of your second. maybe your

third if you’re really gone, with drink

or sadness. three is when

you’ll hate yourself

the next day, when your taste buds will

soot over and everything will taste

of ash.

between meals you’ll

forget, and then you’ll go

to scratch your nose & catch

the smell of tobacco tarred onto your

fingers, as if to say: remember,

you were broken not so long

ago. daylight isn’t enough

I have never felt more like myself than in the summers. When I think about my own growth, the school years were so blurry with activity that the growth couldn’t happen until after, in the slowing down. Muscles are built on rest days, not while you’re hefting the weight over your shoulders.

So this idea: present. Summers are built on it. Or they were, in a time before work. And they are again now, for me and my privileged work-from-home life, for the first time in five years.