An Argument for Deep Water Swimming

The good burden of living and collecting

As it happens, having your lovely editor plus your best friend in town and a workshop to teach can take up more time and brain power than you thought. A week late, but in your inbox to collect just the same. Thank you for being so patient.

The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs. Laura Lamb Brown-Lavolie

My prediction for April is that it’s going to be okay. Because that is what it always is. It is the month where I am always going home, keys tossed in the bowl, relief and rain pelting the window. And I am always turning the pages of a book or eating food I will remember for the rest of my life before watching the scenes of a movie that I will draw over my eyes and memories like a veil to believe in any way they happened to me even if in most ways they have not. April is the time I find myself carrying rocks home in my pocket. Sand along the scalp just because the wind blew it that way and everything is a bit gray, but I want to take it all home with me. I don’t brush anything off. I can leave nothing behind, it all becomes part of me. I’m collecting.

The weight of spring, I guess there is more sentimentality.

No— I suppose I’m saying, it's a different life and we remember the meaning that is there and try to find a place for it, carrying things close to our person intentionally even if they weigh us down. The thinning of winter, where some threads are so easily lost, moves to the bulking of spring. 

Is it a burden to live another year, to carry what we’ve collected with us? 

At home, on my desk, I use a cake stand to hold the rocks I’ve found over many springs and the cabinets to hold cups I stole from restaurants when the air got warm and my fingers sticky. Before real heat returned to the world—before we couldn’t hide anything. We have a bowl made of depression glass that holds our keys and there's a box under my bed that the cats in the middle of the night drag from its place pulling scrap papers I have decided to keep. Everything is at my fingertips for the taking if I want to but even when it's not on me I sense its weight.

Is it hoarding if you know how to carry it? 

I’m always surprised at the level of interest in self-preservation. The desire to be nothing, to carry and have no weight at all. Knowing that when, at times, the ration of my collecting from April begins to run out I remember the book I read the spring before. Strange how it works out that way, but it's true, I read it the spring previous and right after watched a movie and was struck by their shared tenderness and sincerity. I did not know what I would need those things for, but I knew that one day I’d need them, that they were sitting somewhere the way all the most important things you’ll ever need sit. In junk drawers by the stove where soy sauce packets have exploded or under your bed punctured by claw marks from something that needed it first. 

The time came, that sad moment, and the world was all at once lighter and heavier in the same instant. My feelings not gone, but rooted more completely to living. The burden of knowing your experience and feelings is yours to carry. The relief of knowing that somehow other people's burdens lighten your load. It’s, to me, like how they say shark attacks happen in shallow water. Perhaps it’s safer to go deep and be surrounded. There’s just no way around it. Yes. It is a burden to live. But you’ll collect something all the same. You do not have to be the person pretending that all that nothing isn’t so difficult to carry.

If I think about it, really, it's a good weight if you collect deliberately.

All the beauty we get from a little pressure, the right spot on the spine, the air from between your bones released, relief as two hands. I will not say diamonds. It’s good to let the sponge get sopping, to use what it soaks, only to take it in your palms and squeeze its contents until the water drips between your fingers and down onto your forearm and shirt. What I mean is sometimes the water is dirty and it stains your clothes. I’m saying, it’s almost as if the heart can have a dimple, like our cumulative experiences are standing on two feet on the chest, and you remember what you’d been storing for winter. You should let some things be heavy, build some muscle. I think it’s good for us, that most anything leaves a mark. 

And yes it's hoarding, by the way, but sometimes I want to look back at the festive cards I’ve been given and remember that I have a lot of people who have made room to carry me. That, in fact, I know what a burden I am to know. I know at times I can be a little bit too much. But we manage. So when March becomes April I hide beneath my bed the cards from people who knew the weight and took it anyway. It’s the nicer gesture.

This inevitably reminds me also that I’m not good a writing birthday cards myself, but I can manage. Especially recently when my friend had begun to feel like a burden to which I did not quite correct her. Thanks, I wrote, for adding a little weight to my universe, it’s nice to know the gravity is working. This is everything, you know I collected you on purpose, don’t you?

April 1st, 2024: collecting beginning!

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

“Yet keeping calm the knight just quipped, "Why should I shy away? If fate is kind or cruel, man still must try." Gawain and the Green Knight Translated by Simon Armitage

I must be remembered.

Is it not enough to be known? March 22nd, 2024 4:23 PM

I left not knowing I was leaving. I left thinking I am going to get a drink on my way home and a bagel for my hangover and it was June. March 7th, 2024 9:15 AM

This month, originally, I was going to write about risk. It came up often enough, I could feel it circling my brain so clearly, but just before the final days of March were up I realized it was not time yet. I’d been collecting things, April is situated right on the crease of the year that allows me to do so. Where, with March and May leveraged, it becomes a kind of gutter and everything washes its way down. So I made a collection—a playlist, of songs I’d acquired over the last few weeks that I’m taking through this month with me. This is them for this old blessing that is spring.

Art by @HaleyTippman

Here is the mood board for this month! Some earthy tones for the return of meaning to the soil and for all your collecting!

That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters

Here is My Twitter and my Instagram is @chloeinletters  where the DMs are checked, cared, and loved for.

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, being a burden, carrying burdens, the deep water

Love always,

Chloé