I spent the two days this past week on the Oregon Coast, in familiar yet missed salty air, hair whipped to and fro by the rambunctious wind. It has been years since last visiting those dunes, since witnessing the crush of the tide and feeling the emptiness and fullness of the Pacific.
After singing lullabies to my niece as she drifted into sleep, after I set her tiny onesie-clad body down into the crib, after I waited for her cries to turn into whimpers into sniffles into silence- I wept. With happiness and wonder and fear and anger and disbelief. Today my visions may have been filled with pink, but I am seeing red.
Brushing it off and saying “it’s just one of those days” is a disservice to yourself. It’s a cheat out of giving yourself permission to experience real pain, real emotions, real sadness. Whether or not you understand where it’s coming from doesn’t necessarily matter- and it doesn’t make it any less.
Sometimes in a moment alone after a thread of days spent around people for extended periods of time I’ll feel a very distinct feeling of hollowness. For sanity, I require time to just be quiet and still- maybe scrolling through websites, paging through a book, or staring out the window. Although necessary and mostly tenderly enjoyable, there’s a barrenness to the space around me when instead of clattering around in the kitchen or chatter from across the room I hear only the mechanic purr of the heater and cruel tick of the clock.
In my favourite book The Virgin Suicides, after a first attempt at death, young Cecilia is asked post-slitting-of-the-wrists “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”
Her response, “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.”
Layers of ugliness and masterpiece.
The rain has ceased momentarily in Phnom Penh, the outside heathered, fogged as an Autumn evening in Washington- a sliver of verdant trees visible through the window.
I sit on an oversized bed, crisp white sheets with the methodic swirl of the fan above me. Shrill cries of children playing outside, putter of motos skittering across the wet ground, a sporadic mewl of the cat somewhere on the premises of the villa next door. It has been a fatigued yet sanguine past six days in the city reconnecting with the place I once called home.
Throughout the thirteen hour plane ride to Taipei, I could not stop watching the woman in front of me. Between bouts of sleep and finding myself staring at the ceiling, I would notice faintly but strongly her presence in a plane full of people. Forty years old or sixty, it was difficult to gauge. Her high, gaunt cheekbones battled against full, tanned cheeks and her hair flecked with dove grey stranded elegantly through inky black. I never quite got a strong, clear look at her eyes or mouth, only glimpses through the space between the seat and the window as I sat behind.
Watching someone you love and respect work on something passionately with focus, drive, and serious intent makes you want them to achieve the success they’re reaching for that much more. In this case it’s been one of my best friends, partner in crime, and influencer Nick Casanova.
What was it that made my brief walk home from my neighbourhood bar so unapologetically lavishly feminine and dauntless? An anomaly of exposure and tenacious durability.
