A Year of Gratitude

For 26 year old me

(I’ve used this song before, but it feels like the right one for July 2024 too.)

July is always a troublesome month for me. A year ago I took a break and it radically changed the way I produced writing and how much I made and shared. Sometimes I struggle with this change, but as I sit here this July and it feels so light, so easy still, I think that maybe I’ve learned an important lesson. Maybe this is a good yearly practice, a break in the flow, a welcome disruption. You tell me. Anyway, here is this year’s gratitude list.

1. I’m grateful for summer. There is animosity in our relationship, I find your hands harsh, but sometimes you can be so gentle. Like at home in Connecticut, when both windows are open and a cross breeze is coming through the windows. I’m grateful for the things only you give, the buzz outside that sequesters itself indoors all other seasons. Even for the inconvenience, minor as it is, beautiful, of not being able to find a spot in a full park. How hot you are, and yet how close you bring us all together.

2. I’m grateful for the book I wrote two times already.

3. I’m grateful for this third iteration, the right one, the best one. I’ve waited 7 years for you and you’re right on time.

4. I’m grateful for the dreamlands, those imaginary places which I linger in often. I like that they hold everything I love about this world, that they are not so farfetched, just happening elsewhere, to a different me, that is in another room, in another time. I will greet you warmly when you arrive.

5. I’m grateful for the Libby app which I use at work while the light passes by above. 8 hours away from this world in exchange for another.

6. I’m grateful for linen anything.

7. I’m grateful for my friends with such intensity that I think I might just have to leave it at that.

8. I’m grateful for The Mirror Visitor series, Cannery Row, Giovanni’s room, Everything I Never Told you, In the Dream House, Blue Nights, and The Lord of the Rings for showing me what books could be.

9. I’m grateful for Daneshevskaya for writing “Please, be nice to me. Okay now be mean as long as there’s something to talk about.”

10. I’m grateful for purple teeth, frizzy hair, red blemishes, faded lipstick, stains, bruised legs, dingy white shirts, oily foreheads, baby hairs unknowingly glued to the temple, scar tissue, nub bitten nails, eyebags, blackheads, poppyseeds in the teeth, bad breath, sweat, and all those mortifying things that prove to each other we are human, that make us want to get closer, that make us say god I love you.

11. I’m grateful for the art I see that creates a visual world that so often I wish to plunge into. It is nice to know that there are other worlds beyond my own, that their color palettesI’m grateful for the good things that are coming. I feel you more surely than I can feel tomorrow and yet I will wake up and tomorrow will be here. So I can only guess at what this means for you are so inviting, that someone out there loved them so much they had to share it with us.

    

    Lovers print by Markiwiz

12. I’m grateful for the subway. I’m sorry I berated you for my bad timing. Who gets me to work in 30 minutes like you?

13. I’m grateful for ice cold coca cola on a hot hot day

14. I’m grateful for the fan propped up in my room, that minor solace, the movement of air well into the stagnant night as I lay there asleep, dreaming of another place, another time, waiting for the day I will pack you thanklessly away. It is not thankless anymore.

15. I’m grateful for pomegranates, tangerines, watermelons, grapes, raspberries, and granny smith apples.

16. I’m grateful for every slip dress I ever bought and everyone I didn’t buy for which I most certainly wanted but thought that I have too many back at home.

17. I’m grateful for my writer’s group, all that love we have and now with somewhere to go. Thank you for reading, for being those first readers, those always readers, those women on the verge of good, grand, beautiful things. I’m grateful for Ellis, Frankie, Katie, and Margo too.

    

18. I’m grateful for all my weird group chats, My Brilliant Fanfic, Ebba’s Crop Top, Book $luts, Lady’s Fan Club, Marcy’s Barrel Roll, Give us the Goose, Why are you Running?, RivepicsHQ, ORIGINAL GHOULS, Hotdog Hookers, Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Paul’s Spa Water, Twilight bitches Zone Only, and What’s Not Clicking. Oh the laughs!! Oh the typos!! Oh the love love love

19. I’m grateful for Ada Limón

20. I’m grateful for Victoria Bar and all its emotional rescues.

21. I’m grateful for Lestat De Lioncourt

22. I’m grateful for reverse word look up

23. I’m grateful for California Poppies, Lily of the Valley, Cornflower, Buttercup, Butterfly weed, Clover, Bluebell, Iris, Sunflower, Black-eyed Susan, Primrose, Daffodil, Crocus, and New England Aster

24. I’m grateful for hunks, hotties, DILFs, handsomes, himbos, dreamboats, eye candies, etc etc etc.

25. I’m grateful for marshland, for the summers before this one wading through mud and water, frog searching, pollywog hunting, those hidden universes that I have always wanted to dive into if I were ever brave. Nestling below the leaves, hiding from the mosquitos, and born again of another world entirely.

26. I’m grateful for my friends, again. I want to name you all but I know that just won’t work. Sometimes late at night I’m walking home or even in the middle of the day and I am, without warning, overcome with the intensity by which I love you. It is a deepness I have no measure of, a width I have no end sight, a height beyond all things. I want to hold it in my hand and express to you the shape it takes up in my life but it is too big to manage, to perceive. But every day I wish I knew ten years ago what I know now, that people like you existed, that they will love you so terribly, so unearthly, that you will walk into the sun and find yourself blinded by this other massive life-giving thing.

27. I’m grateful for IWIYNLN

28. I’m grateful for every song I’ve recently discovered that seems to feel what I feel. Will You Remember me by The Milk Carton Kids, Out the Sun by Frida Touray, Bury me by Duendita, The Archer by Alexandra Savior, In The Long Run by The Staves.

29. I’m grateful for that which pulls my sister from the city on weekends. I like how this thing is looking on her.

30. I’m grateful for The Patience of Ordinary Things and Great Things Have Happened and Sorrow is not my Name

31. I’m grateful for my roommates, again. For Morgan, Rebecca, Lady, and Marcy, who make this apartment a home and fill it with such lovely laughter. What a good thing, each night, to return to.

32. I’m grateful for the sea, its gentle erosion, its archaic memory. One day you will take everything, but I believe you will remember it all the same.

33. I’m grateful for the soft lawn at my parent’s house that cradles me. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but I hope it’s soon, in a shady spot under those big trees just before dinner when fewer cars are passing us by.

34. I’m grateful for those color combinations that occur naturally. The orange and green of a tangerine and its stem, the burning pink and humming red of a sky before night, the green and beige of sea sand, the yellow and white of flame, the green and brown of the natural world.

35. I’m grateful for all the children. Goose, Ebba, Cooper, Daphne, and Camryn.

36. I’m grateful for the little kid that still lives in me. I’m sorry and I love you. I didn’t want to be so mean, but I know better now.

37. I’m grateful for California, Colorado, New York, Connecticut, Kansas, Illinois, and New Jersey.

38. I’m grateful for, “Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.” James Baldwin

39. I’m grateful for you all who read every good and mediocre thing I put out, who find the goodness in everything with me. I longed for a long time for people like you. I did not know if you were real, but of course each day you meet me where I am and say thank you and say this is real, this is all very very real.

    

    

40. I’m grateful for the good things that are coming. I feel you more surely than I can feel tomorrow and yet I will wake up and tomorrow will be here. So I can only guess at what this means for you.

41. I’m grateful for the bad things that have happened. I remember how it all felt for this world and the things in it I loved so dearly to be so cruel and it is because of you that I am deciding I won’t be.

42. I’m grateful for music, for laughter, for the way the door shuts when someone has just left to go home. I’m grateful for the cheers of a glass, the snore of a nose, the beep of a car that tells you its outside, the lull of an agreement, the clunk of a disagreement. I’m grateful for the meow of a cat, the sigh of a mouth, the turning of a page, the shuffle of cards, the crinkle of sheets, the pop of a cork. All noise, a reminder that two hands, another person, had made something, that this something was shared.

43. I’m grateful for my family, extended and immediate. There was a time we were all in the same place. That time has passed. But it happened.

44. I’m grateful for my 26-year-old self, one year ago, who was tired and relentless. Who sat on the couch and cried often on phone calls and between them to her parents. Who did not know what to do, did not know how to get better, to fix the things she wanted fixed. I’m grateful that she was grateful all the same, that she felt me a year away, knowing her life would be good and yet not sure how it would be. I am now in on the secret, I’ll tell you when you get here.

    

    July 15th, 2023 by Ava Williams

    That’s a lot to think about, a lot to be grateful for. But I never said I was unlucky.

    Thanks for everything I’ve got a lot to think about this month. But I’ll see you on the other side of it, palm outward, reaching, smile cutting like a horizon on a day that is only just beginning.

PS. Here’s a mood board because you know I can’t go without