december

(I had a couple very nice subscribers email me about missing the subscription sale so I am making it available for one more day! If you sign up for an annual subscription it is $42 instead of $70.)

If this were a dream, how would you know? All the objects you collected would be for nothing. You would forget the heavy blue of the sky on the last day of November, afternoon right before it disappears into evening. How lately you’ve been ripping your pajama pants and donning mohair sweaters, getting up while the day is still dark and staring at the neon screen of your phone until your eyes remember how to focus. How in the car you punched his arm, then punched it again. How the road was windy. How someone asked why you loved California and you thought of the impossible green of Big Sur in spring and fall. How after doing mushrooms everything looked greener permanently, and after MDMA you believed the world was good again. How years ago he said it would be so fun to own sheep and pigs with you, and you never told anyone.

If this were a dream, you wouldn’t know. You’d pace around for hours and write poetry anyway. You’d still never have fallen out of love a single time in your life. You still wouldn’t like anyone looking at your face in pain or pleasure. You would still remember being a little girl reading the Bhagavad Gita, spending hours at Chapters with no one noticing you. Ghost girl. You would still think: that’s what freedom feels like.

You have a tangledness to you that can’t be dispelled. You have a way of showing up when people think they’re rid of you. Sometimes, love makes you scream.

*

I want to kiss your extremely beautiful face one more time. I want to tire you out. I want to roll my eyes while you complain about your sore back. I want to annoy you by crossing the road with eyes glued to my phone.

If this is a dream I would want to dream it all over again. I would want to go back to sleep right away. I wouldn’t believe real life could be any better than this is. I would say has this really been a dream? Because I wouldn’t believe I’d have the presence of mind to conjure all these conversations with my friends that go places that I don’t expect then double back on themselves, serpentine. I’m not so solipsistic to believe I could come up with the complexity of your mind.

Ramanujan had dreams of blood and math. I think you are like a thought of God and I do not deserve you.

*

Do you ever have a moment of realizing you’re way too deep to get out? I’ve spent the past six years jumping into projects and relationships that turned out to be tar pits—you can enter, but you can’t exit. At a certain point, if you’re embedded enough in something or someone, you feel this sense of: well, I’ve got to see it through. It’s a good feeling and also a somewhat terrifying one.

At the beginning of my 20s, the thing I was most afraid of was being non-committal. It was presented to me as the worst sin and also a sure path to doom: if I didn’t tie myself to the mast, I would die a lost soul. Commitment was what resulted in everything good: even if you were unsure, if you simply doubled down, you could be cleansed of your uncertainty.

I have quite a different perspective today. Now I believe that commitment is the best way to learn what you like. It is also the best way to learn what you don’t like. Commitment can, and will, deform you.

*

Next thing I’m going to try to run a lot more, and write around the same amount, and throw more parties.

If this were a dream, I wouldn’t know. I pinch myself all the time just to check.