uncertainty: part 1

four years of writing this substack

Cecily Brown, Teenage Wildlife, 2003

Bookbear Express matchmaking is open until Sunday. We currently have about 800 people participating. Join them!

For friends in Sydney: there will be a Bookbear Express meetup on Sunday. Please attend! I will be there in spirit.

For friends in New York: we are also doing a meetup on Sunday. I will be there!

Reminder that you can email me at avabearexpress@gmail.com if you want to host a meetup in your city. There was recently one in DC!!

You unfold like one of the long poems I bookmark, slow and languid, surprising turn of phrase like a slap to the face. You remind me of a river bend, the slowest love song on the album, a yellow leaf plastered against the sidewalk in mid-October. You like the way I smell when I’m on amphetamines. You didn’t know me when I was a kid dipping maple syrup into snow like a real Canadian. If you told your friends about me they might be suspicious. You don’t know that I’m good with parents, better with animals. You didn’t meet me when I was 17 making men fall in love with me in coffee shops. You often observe that I shed hair everywhere I sit like one of those snub-nosed lime-eyed cats.

I want to grab your skull and shake it until all your thoughts fall out. I want to cocoon you in my love and shield from you from every harsh word. I love your ears, which are like conch shells, so tender. I try to remember everything you tell me, even the stories that you’ve repeated multiple times because you don’t know I have a very good memory. I love you enough to let you repeat yourself one million times. I resent everyone who loved you before I got the chance to love you better.

You’ll be mad at me if I tell everyone how we met. Well, we know each other now, isn’t that the important thing? Every day I wake up and I have to try not to disappoint you. You’re so sensitive, you notice everything.

*

It would be wrong to say I only like the beginnings of things. Like any good masochist I love the long haul, the uphill trek, the corrosion of uncertainty. Corrosion, I write, as if uncertainty isn’t its own salvation. As if I’m not a Buddhist and I don’t say to myself a thousand times a day: love what is present, not what is planned, the fleeting moment, the flash of life in the darkness.

*

S isn’t sure which city he wants to live in. He wants to be close to me but he doesn’t trust that desire. I take a picture of him sitting on the hardwood floor of his new apartment with the dogs. He has a beautiful face. Six years and a half ago, I saw his face and wanted to kiss him. His top lip is shaped like a heart. When we started dating we lived in Cole Valley. It was spring in San Francisco. Go figure.

For our anniversary, we went to Cotogna. When I got my green card, we went to Benu. In the summer we went to Noma, vegetable season, and walked all the way back to our hotel after our meal. I probably should have let him bring another girl to Europe, someone who could have identified the ingredients in the foam, or at least the flower petals covering the foam.

I’m obsessed with his essential goodness. We’ve been traveling on one path for quite a long time. Now we’re starting on another. Who’s to say where it will lead?

*

I’ve heard this line that goes: getting into the relationship is like buying a car, being in the relationship is like driving the car. I think the point is something like, don’t spend so much effort trying to buy a car you won’t even like driving.

But it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes in the beginning you really like driving the car, but then it breaks down. Sometimes the car is hard to drive in the beginning, but you get used to it. Sometimes you need something you don’t even want.

He says: there’s a reason it’s called falling in love, you know.

As a kid, I loved sledding but not diving. I’m still scared of biking too fast downhill.

*

All my friends are falling in love. August, pheromones. It would be wrong to say I only like the beginnings of things. I’m okay with trying hard for a long time.

When we fall in love, we want to know what’s going to happen, how it will happen, how it will feel. All the things we can’t possibly know are the things we think will save us.

I’m trying to love what I can’t possibly know, to live in the opacity of it. To believe that not knowing is a feature instead of a bug. I’m thinking of how I spent four years writing a book and only in the past month or so started letting people read it. For so long, it was Schrodinger’s book: maybe dead, maybe still kicking. At times, it felt like the uncertainty would crush me. But I’m still alive.

*

We don’t know each other very well yet. We might come to know each other better.

We know each other too well. Perhaps we would benefit from seeing each other at a distance.

I’ve been writing this Substack for exactly four years. Am I in the middle yet, or am I still in the beginning?

It takes exceptional patience to do anything well for a sustained period of time. How much uncertainty can you tolerate? For how long?

What is that line… can I distill it to, weird people are required to produce weird outcomes?

Last year, when I lost faith, I asked God for a sign, and I received a sign.

You’re so patient with me. I’m still scared of what I can’t know.

I’m not going to ask you tell me what to do. You love it when I make decisions. I don’t mind uncertainty, even when it feels crushing. We might still be in the beginning, but I want to get to the middle.