waxenneat

It's cold but not snowing. I walked to Central Park earlier today and a few minutes in thought to take my headphones out and actually listen, to the bad Christmas covers and the families arguing but mostly the families getting along and the electric bikes and the boom boxes and the children running.

I am me so the horses pulling carriages made me sad because probably they wouldn't choose it. And Strawberry Fields was a lot of people squatting in front of John Lennon's famous word, and I kept thinking he wouldn't like that, but maybe he'd be fine with it.

It was more people and things than I've seen in months. It struck me how many days I can go at a time without seeing or hearing anyone and how much of a complete impossibility that is here. I don't even notice everything in the desert where noticing everything is actually almost possible. It's entirely not possible here. And it didn't use to be this way, but that oversaturation of things regulates my nervous system now. I kept taking full, deep breaths. It used to be the opposite.

I found myself walking back exactly the way I came with my hands behind my back the way I used to see old people walk when I was younger. I thought they seemed wise, like they could not and would not be disrupted. I never tempted it. I just watched them.

I was not disrupted. And I felt old. I really felt old.

I walked home and I took a long nap and later I thought about the last time I lived here, which was 2010, and how I only went to Central Park once and I was there and I remember it but I didn't have to think to pay attention and I wasn't worried about everything meaning something. I was careless with what was. A privilege of youth.

I made myself take a walk again, just around the neighborhood, and I stopped for cold skin noodles and ate them at a counter by myself. The whole day felt like a wrapping and an unwrapping. I suspect I'll understand better in a year or two.

Hi! If you’re reading here, you maybe read my tiny letters. I’m moving them over to substack now. The short story is that I’ve been writing them since 2014 for free (with kind donations from a group of folks throughout!) and so charging a monthly subscription fee of $10 feels pretty OK now.

The longer story is that I’m leaving an awful situation, a harmful relationship. I’m trying to make up his half of the rent so that I can stay in a comfortable living situation for a few more months until I can get my nervous system and world something closer to back together. I’m frayed. I’m fried. I’m hurting real bad. 

So: $10 a month (or $100/year, or $250 to be a “founding subscriber” [read: a living angel]) would really help me right now.

A few (maybe many?) years ago someone in there 30s wrote to me about being “too old” to start over or fix things and I, still in 20s, wrote to them about the absolute ability to start over any time and my goodness did younger me know so much more and so much better... But. If you’re at some point of starting over, at whatever age you are, please know that every version of me and every version of you, except the one being mean or sad in your brain right now, knows you can do this.

I borrowed one of the cars and ran some errands and then went down to Rodeo Beach and sat and looked at the waves and thought about whether I’ve ever loved anyone and came to the conclusion of two names. I felt pretty bad about it. Came back to the houses, sat down in the library and opened notebooks from quarantine and looked right at how bad February and March of 2021 were and how one entire page just said I want to kill myself, over and over, and then ten more pages talked about still wanting to do it but not doing it, and I felt better. Because I’m not anywhere near as down now as then. I’m actually probably just a pretty normal amount of down given the last year and also the world. But I’m not in the deepest, darkest parts anymore, which were terrible—I’d almost forgotten how terrible—so there’s that.

I thought about the paper route my brothers had growing up today. Sometimes I’d go around with them to collect peoples’ payments for the week. We learned the whole neighborhood— who had a clean house, who didn’t, who had pets, who had mean pets, who always had payment ready because they knew we were coming, who wouldn’t pay for weeks at a time, who smoked, who was lonely. We’d get these short glimpses into their lives when they opened the door. It was such a trip as a kid. Walking from one house to the next and having a whole different experience. I loved it. We knew the whole neighborhood.

It made me happy to think about it.

I’m sometimes amazed by how much the world has changed in the last 25 years, but I guess that’s what aging is. Evolving. Accepting. Feeling around for how things used to feel. Trying to make sense of when it was better and when it was worse and, at least for me, usually concluding that it all seems to have happened incredibly slowly and, now, incredibly fast. I don’t take time for granted anymore. That’s also aging.

My favorite house on the paper route was a small yellow ranch. The woman who lived there was older and had painted a tree on the entire front of the house. She’d somehow also arranged tree branches to come out from the paneling. She was sweet and the house was always very clean and smelled good and she asked us little questions about our little lives.

I’m not special—it’s all or at least most of us right now, I think. Some people are in it, some people are through it, and literally no one I know is doing well who is trying to ignore or blow past it. For as much as I’m slightly to completely mortified by what’s been coming up and out for me personally, I’m also trying to be wildly kind and understanding with myself. It’s a lot. Almost constantly lately. The whole world has changed, my old “coping” mechanisms stopped working, and I truly don’t have it in me to keep going, or support others going, the ways we’ve been taught to. Can’t do it. Won’t support it. We deserve a kinder, calmer, slower everything.