Deny All Shores

“Human beings, I thought, change so little, and are so much what they are, that there has been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing its terrible simplicity or its irremediable sorrow.”*

I did some things pretty poorly last year, and some sad shit was done to me in turn. I’m lucky though that I have some real stand-up women in my life. My mom, the doctor at the abortion clinic where I worked, and a handful of friends I can talk to about anything about from Marquez to masturbation. Either Nikki or Amanda came up with this idea of “making it nice around the tree” which we say a lot now but haven’t really explained so I’m going to do it now because it has a lot to do with the only resolution I really made. You know how when you sleep with someone (or mess around with someone or make out with them in the bathroom and then forget about it) and instead of falling madly in love you’re just met with a deadpan sort of silence? Then there’s that windfall of awkwardness and you and your sort of maybe partner avoid each other at the bar or make weird eye contact at a show and you sort of tap you’re foot impatiently and you say, alright, enough of this and you go up and say hello and some jokes are made and then you’re laughing and you’re friends again or maybe for the first time? THAT’s making it nice around the tree, and after that you can either keep being friends again or for the first time or maybe you end up sleeping together again. Either way it doesn’t fucking matter if you’re CONSENTING ADULTS (we are exclusively interested in OUR OWN TREES unlike the guy who cornered me at the Atlantic and asked me, specifically, which of his friends I wasn't sleeping with). And that’s nice, when you get to smooth out the awkwardness and keep being friends with people and even though it’s messy and sometimes complicated it’s mostly good. However sometimes, the tree is REAL fucked up. Like you really hurt the trees feelings and wrote them some letters and then you blew them off again and the tree is pretty much far away forever. When a small awkward moment (or just shitty, terrible moment) stretched on indefinetly and suddenly someone you used to talk to all the time not only doesn’t feel like your friend but maybe even someone who really, really despises you (or more than likely doesn’t think about you at all, ever). Well one of those other really smart women in my life told me around my birthday (late November) that making new years resolutions is really silly. Adding on more baggage and more stuff to feel bad about later doesn’t make any sense. Instead it’s better to spend the end of the year forgiving other people for the things you might still be holding against them, and also it’s a good time to forgive yourself for the things you weren’t able to get done (or in my case even started really). It might sound VERY trite to some people but it made me feel a lot better, especially about some real sad feelings I had about myself. I realized that the holidays, in this whole other sense, are about “making it nice around the tree.” I used some time to connect with old friends and let some other shit go, and also with the intention (this year) of not letting little awkward moments stretch out to the point where anyone I care about gets out of reach of communication. I know other people are often terrible. It’s all just like all the other stories sometimes, always so trite and easy to predict. But then after that, when the next chapter starts, it’s so wonderfully, tremendously good.

“The useless days will amount to something.”**

I always wanted to be on the Real World. I remember turning 24 and being deeply disappointed in myself for not ever trying to do it. What an easy way to just be showered in love and attention forever and ever? What an awful, awful idea; I realize now. I think I know now the cut off point in age is because people in their early 20s are so sure of everything. Myself included, of course, anyone who’s ever been 19 or 20 just knows that they’re the best writer or artist or football player or whatever it is that they like about themselves, and then that gets sort of hammered and chipped away at everyday until they eventually get to this point where they realize they’ve been totally wrong, for a long time. Even now the things I think I’m good at, that I really like myself, are the same things that embarrass me about myself when I meet people or think of people who are really, really good at them. Can you imagine a Real World set up with a bunch of creative, smart people in their late 20s? I only use that because it’s how I feel but maybe it stretched out a lot later than this (oh boy!). I can just imagine my testimonials, “well I really thought I was right about this intangible theory of feminism but now...I’m just not so sure...so-and-so really knows a lot more than me and they brought up this really important point about....” and cut the scene where I’m just staring at empty pages for hours, and then drinking, lots of drinking still. It would be a great show. Terribly, wonderfully funny and very depressing and often pathetic. The show might actually exist, and I may have been living it.

I’m finally not so terribly afraid at failing. I’ve done it. I’ve been failing. It just doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It's still ok if I take some mediocre photography, at least I'm doing stuff. I can even write some only "alright" poetry, but at least I'll be writing. I'm even going to apply to graduate schools again, because I've stopped memorizing that other rejection letter. MRR liked our 7"? Great, we're going to make another one! I feel much less distracted by all the terrible possible outcomes and much more excited about doing everything, more, and more fully. If you’ve been feeling really awful about yourself I really recommend reading Beautiful Tiny Things by Cheryl Strayed. I read the book right after the new year clocked in and it really reminded me to stop feeling sorry for myself and, I quote, “write like a motherfucker” among other things. It’s the perfect book for anyone who’s been wallowing, or just stuck, or anyone really. Thanks to all the wonderful women in my book club for recommending it to me.

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis
**Beautiful Tiny Things, Cheryl Strayed

The Sudden Feeling

"I'm really intrigued: these disasters, these decisions that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat, it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail. Who can understand it? We're about to reenter the green tunnel of the menacing, watchful jungle. The stink of wretchedness, of a miserable, indifferent grave, is already in my nostrils."*

             I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now. 

"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*

             I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.

            The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally. 

 

"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*

           The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter. 

        This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended. 

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis.