Sweet Friend,
These past weeks I’ve been trying to master time, or at least to know it better, not to fight it so hard.
I am growing tired of how it’s been, all this time, soaring for a day or two, almost flying- then - crash!
It was as though life was a video game and I could not surpass the first or second floor, and then, death, tragedy, back to the beginning.
Pick yourself off the floor.
Start over.
This time, more caution.
This time, look out for trapdoors, look out for voids.
Each moment of birth was a challenge. This time I was going to evade death until the very end, 24 years of false starts, but now, now I was going to stride flawlessly through the decades without so much as a stumble.
I died last week when my body broke down and my hard fought momentum was interrupted: game over: level one.
Start.
This week I watched Russian Doll for the first time.
A show about a woman who keeps dying on the night of her 36th birthday and reliving it, each time dying in a different way. No matter how hard she tries to avoid death, it happens and she resets, never getting forward, never reaching Monday.
Is that what I’ve been doing? Trying again and again to avoid staircases and cars in the hopes that I could avoid ending up right back where I started- when really the trick was not to try to hide from life’s small deaths but to look bigger, look broader, examine the psychic damage pulling you ever down?
I was dazzled by Natasha Leonne, her timeless charm, that accent! That hair!
A millennial grande dame, a force to be reckoned with.
What if to be a Grande Dame of life, to live it artfully, with witchcraft, with power- is not to avoid deaths, but to love them? To go along for the journey?
4am in my parents house, I couldn’t sleep. My second virus of the month, my mouth tastes of metal, sharp pains in the abdomen?
I do not run, I ask myself: what is my body trying to tell me?
What if our bodies are a sort of god, and the practice of faith is believing them when they tell you you are in danger, you are lying, you are astray, even if none of it makes sense to you yet?
I am listening to her, nurturing her, but rather than repose, it feels active, like scholarship- in this pain I have an audience with the divine.
I am in a cycle of death and I am alive to it.
I think of Elliot who said:
“I should be glad of another death”
It’s Thursday evening, and I have been in bed for days.
I put a jacket over my nightdress and a pair of cowboy boots- for I am late.
I do not have energy of my own so I borrow it from the great Alice Coltrane, she propels me down the street.
Evening summer rain.
Girl- cowboy boots- nightdress- running.
I feel alive and I savour it, I drop into it, I giggle aloud. I ache and I giggle aloud.
I find my dad at the bar- “I got myself a glass of white wine and I got you a gin and tonic,” he says, looking rather pleased with himself, “but then I finished my wine and drank half of your gin”.
We see Cabaret- sumptuous, dazzling, eerie. Cinema on a grande scale.
Afterwards I walk home and my eyes are filled with stars.
There was a Covid 19 spike in March, in April.
She’s pushing downwards now. Time to come to dinner. Time for a film. The window is short.
I thought for so long that I would hide until the virus was gone from the world, that we all would.
As it turns out, the advice now is to ride the waves. Do a little more when numbers are low, do a little less when they’re high.
How we manage what is endless is very different from how we act when we’re waiting for an ending. What I mean is-
back when I first got sick, I thought the best thing to do was rest until one day I didn’t have to rest anymore.
I watched a lot of tv and I avoided a lot of days.
Last month, when you were observing Ramadan, it made me think about how it’s okay to break with continuity from time to time, to have a period when you expect a little less from yourself, when you do less but listen more.
But in life, when you did not choose to deprive yourself, when deprivation comes in without warning, without consent, it can be harder to listen.
You panic, you wish to escape.
I covered my ears and my eyes, you see, that was the problem.
Last week during three particularly cloudly days I watched Russian Doll.
Epihanies fell over me like waves crashing over rocks-
So forceful and fast I almost couldn’t quite decipher their meaning or significance:
Yet I felt them change me nonetheless, get into my bones.
The fact that we fall down, lose ourselves, get sick, break our habits, start over: this is a ocndition of life. It is not just inevitable, it is a distinguishing feature of being alive, which means if we want to be grande dames of life, we must be grande dames of death.
How we manage what is endless is very different from how we act when we’re waiting for an ending-
If I am to live this sick day again and again- for maybe another month, before I rach another good patch- and then, again, when the good patch inevitably circles back here:
It is a different question.
I must not be a lady in waiting.
Each day this week I have said: this day again. I am getting creative. And when for an instant it was possible, I ran through the rain.
And the day after, as I lay in bed, I listened to your voice notes, and then I lay still and tried to breathe calm into my body. I listened to Alice Coltrane one more time and rmemebred the rain on my skin and I imagined the melodies bouncing through me, felt the vibrations and the life in those melodies.
And for a moment- i thought i had mastered death.