ghost pruning

How can I swim up so many stories?- from Orbit, Cynthia Zarin

I wrote once that good news comes in March. I can’t say what I meant, except that there are sentences you string up around the house until they are true and fact.

I wanted to write of something other than the wild sleepless nights that cooked together all of these past months. Or of the bitterness I have become so very afraid of inside of women, and of the way one attracts what they pour into and over. What do we do?

When I am not writing, I am throwing clothes around the rooms, deciding different versions of myself. I am cooking too many butter beans, forgetting that I am the only one who likes them in this house. I’m wandering the market aisles, listening to grocery store yacht rock, feeling anonymous and swimmy, taking time to read labels and notice how many neon-canned NA drink options there are now. I still buy a bottle of red wine because it is beautiful outside and I am glad for a night off. I cook and drink and open windows as the sky turns from hot blue to cantaloupe. We cleaned out our closets and everything feels a little less full. Maybe there is finally more room to make more stories together. My brother once told me that his favorite movie was Mr Nobody, with Jared Leto. Except he kept calling it “Nemo Nobody”, and we would laugh and now I can’t ever not say both when I think of it. That’s the thing about memories. Which closet do they fit in, and which season?

I watched the new NPR’s Tiny Desk of a band I heard first in Houston, that humid and seismic summer years ago. I would drive the sprawling highways that loop all around the city proper, listening to music with the windows down and my back pooling with sweat. I would drink so much cold brew, and palomas with BBQ and patio music at night in that sticky heat that I became an entirely new self. Is that how it happens? So languidly and then all at once. What is that quote from Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior?…“You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.”

I am remembering how to be a person in the springtime. I don’t mean a springtime person, that is different. I mean that I am becoming human again. When I am not writing, I am making lists, and adding things onto the calendar. I have been afraid of the way blind rage can overpower at 7pm, and how I must reckon with the steps and the habits that brought me there. Here is the place where there is no one to change a thing except the sheer will to be joyful inside, beyond fact or fear. Here is responsibility for the space I take up in my life, and for the hundred ways one moves through their days. My husband strings a sentence together and laughs at himself. “We are growing through it.” It is another sentence that looks bright strung up above the window. He prunes the rose bush that somehow lasted another season. There is such an obvious lesson in that. I am remembering the way Tweedy still sings right through the ribs, and how Irish music still makes me cry too much and too weird, and how I still love waking up together, in the early morning when there is no rush, to tell each other our dreams. And of how we both feel so happy watching comfort movies, and laugh at the same small things inside of them. We keep coming back.

“I was just thinking and talking to my therapist about this time in March when we all were in Naples - and with Nico - and the white flowers we had for his funeral. And carrying so many things at once.” - a text from my mother

I read a novel about grief, or maybe about a pickle jar with a ghost, in the shape of a fish, which is the strangest and best explanation for how it can feel. How there are some things that swirl into the present real time; how they do not promise to stay, and how that is right, and comforting. We keep coming back.

It seemed especially important
not to spill the coffee as I usually
do, as I turned up the stairs,
inside the whorl of the house as if
I were walking up inside the lilies.
I do not know how to hold all

the beauty and sorrow of my life.

-Cynthia Zarin

2021

a little green ghost fish;)