A Wrist Held in Place
The sturdying legs of a fawn
A snowstorm had blown through on my 21st birthday. I’ve probably told this story before.
The storm had wiped the world clean and I’d gone a few weeks before to the dollar store where I bought men's underwear to wear to bed. Which I had just changed into as a boy who I was already writing about, who knew I was writing about him and didn’t care, sat idle in my bed below my drafty window waiting for me so we could sleep. He was staring at the ceiling and though his silence didn’t bother me, I wanted him to know me so I started talking. Telling him how I wanted to see an opera or an orchestra, because though I loved learning music I was terrible at it. In fact, I mentioned, I had taken piano lessons for ten years and had never learned how to read sheet music. I hopped over a mess of dirty clothes on the ground and a cup of water we were sharing before I was close enough where he lifted my duvet and with total sincerity said to the ceiling,
“Chloe you could wear anything and it would be beautiful.”
At the time I wanted him to ask me a question. I wanted to talk about what I didn’t know and I wanted someone, preferably him, to confirm to me what I suspected. That music was hard, that the orchestra was beautiful, that an opera might be interesting even if you didn’t know what was going on. But the truth was this answer felt far better, to have something say to you that you hadn’t even expected, something you didn’t even realize you wanted to know until someone said it to you. I forgot about what I wanted to know, forgot that curiosity, thinking of the orchestra and always first thinking about the way a boy had been in my room and found me beautiful to the point of absoluteness.
This is, in a way, historically what my curiosity has been. Movement through the dark, a warm place somewhere familiar, a forgetting. Missing something genuine, missing something intentional with the wonder I have for the world. Where, walking after work and trying to take the long way home, I stop all music and listen to the noise of the world because I want to know what this place sounds like. Passing by restaurants that look good, small shops I’d never seen before, texting friends, taking photos and then of course always forgetting. Never going back, never remembering the questions I wanted to ask about what those places were like, if they were really good, and instead letting my mind confirm what I already knew. That there are a lot of good places in New York I will never go.
Life gets in the way I suppose, or really we are such creatures of habit. Limited by our experiences and trying not to waste time or money on things we cannot be totally sure of. Timid like fawns, wobbly feet in an unknown. Only going so far before we’re back again at our mother’s side. It’s all to be a bit delicate like an ego. So much so that we rarely ever want to explore what we truly do not understand. In fact, we more often than not want to impose an idea we’d already decided.
As girls, my dad used to take us down to the beach by our house to go crabbing. We’d point to rocks, big ones, the kind we couldn’t lift and tell him to turn them over so we could see how many crabs had found their way underneath. He’d say ready, and we’d stand to the side as he turned the heavy load over. The creatures would scurry, burying themselves under other rocks and skating my tidepools. My father would catch one in his hand and holding our wrist we’d writhe in his grip, desperate to hold the animal but terrified it would pinch us. We’d feel those sharp feet, watch those tiny claws, and we’d watch and wait to see what it does. My dad knew, knew that the claws were too small to do any damage even to our tiny delicate hands. So he’d hold us there in our fear and the thing would walk to the edge of our hands and fall the short distance to the sand.
As a nanny sometimes I try to remember what it felt like to be figuring out the world for the first time. Which happened continuously over the course of many years as children before new experiences seemed to dwindle until you’d thought there weren’t many at all. The grown-up world becomes far more bearable when you remember who you used to be, when you remember you’re still figuring this out for the very first time. By applying the not-so-naive logic of a child the kind that asks a question which leads to another question which opens a door to many other questions that, even if there isn’t time now, you’ll explore later but at home. Maybe with parents or a book from the library or a tv show seen while flipping through the channels because they remember, because they want to know the answer.
I do not understand at what age my curiosity became rather a desire to confirm what I suspected to be true but I can feel the thread of earnestness in me still. I remember and I’m not a child anymore even when I’m scared. I must hold my own wrist in place, let the question crawl across a hand, see what it does, remember that it didn’t bite. Someone once said that getting older wasn’t like getting further from your younger self but getting closer. I know that wild heart, beating furious, I have to agree.
I made the resolution in the new year to practice sincere curiosity. The kind of living that hopes to engage with the world I know by succumbing, without fear or inferiority, to the even more vast world that I don’t. That these two things really inform one another, and by interacting with one you’re far more capable of being fully present with the other. To say I don’t know this, to say I want to know this, to feel that small space you occupy grow larger by inviting someone into it who might answer a question, who was hoping you would ask.
Recently I mentioned a sudden obsession with death that left me paralyzed with fear. I’d sit down at my desk or lay in bed and nothing was there, no images, no ideas, just worry for the things I couldn’t know and express. There was a very real void in my head that felt like what I imagined death would be. I tried to find comforting stories, personifications through mythology, that might offer me a better picture, something to hope and believe in which could comfort me through these times.
After, in a writing exercise, I made my own. I asked myself, now that I’d spent some time exploring, what did I think death looked like? In answer, I wrote a story, fictional, where a woman realizes she’s about to die and prays for those dark long hands not to reach through her room and pull her through the cloak. She imagines their owner a wretched and sinister thing finding joy in her fear when, across her room, the edges of that endless darkness waiting for her flicker like they were wounded. She realizes that she’d hurt death’s feelings. I’d been writing it in the hopes that I would overcome the sudden imposing fear of my eventual passing. It comforted me so greatly that I wondered how many fears of mine, how much suffering might have been saved, had I asked just a single sincere question.
“For still there are so many things/ that I have never seen:/ in every wood in every spring/ there is a different green./ I sit beside the fire and think/ of people long ago/ and people who will see a world/ that I shall never know./ But all the while I sit and think/ of times there were before,/ I listen for returning feet/ and voices at the door.” I Sit Beside the Fire and think from J R R Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring
Not the weight found in the realness of a body, but the heaviness of knowledge. Knowledge that finds you through the dark. January 2nd, 2024 1:34 AM
Goodbye, forever, we can’t take it back but I have never wanted to. You knew that of course. December 23rd, 2023 2:42 PM
Here is the mood board for this month! Enjoy
If you wanna hear more about this theme, my paid newsletter comes out in two weeks. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. If you’ve had enough, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy soon.
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters
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My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me
My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to coffee Fridays, to the questions asked, to the questions that follow
Love always,
Chloé
I’m probably not your typical demographic of readers, but I absolutely love the way you convey your feelings and paint such vivid imagery with words.
this made me want to be your friend