“It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.” John Steinbeck
The last time I remember it being cold on New Year's Eve I took a car three blocks because my hands hurt just from walking out of the subway. I had reservations at a restaurant in the West Village that night. The streets were full despite the weather, people in all black scurrying in and out of buildings trying to go where they needed to as I watched from the safety of the car. My roommates gone with their families, my friends too tucked away in their hometowns, a general melancholy drew me to the city where no one could notice the mood I was in, myself included.
I rushed the short trek from the car door to the restaurant. Greeted by a young woman who brought me to my table on the bottom floor of the two-tiered dining room. Overhead, a show of lights and pine still hung from Christmas and set the restaurant a glow with ambient light. I used it to read my menu. Three months to my twenty-first birthday I asked the waiter, who was short with a french accent, what wine would go well with the chicken I was getting. I answered some of his questions and he got a face like he knew just what to bring me. I thought I had duped him into not carding me but it is likely he duped me, I would later learn, into getting a 15 dollar glass of wine.
There were many things I wasn’t certain of then, sitting in that large room listening to people talk with their friends. An exhaustion had overcome me which I had been in the process of fixing. I had decided to become a part-time student, in the hopes that taking one class could offer me rest. I had been in therapy and at my new job for two months. Having been single for the first time in my adult life for almost a year my sadness was just retreating. I was in the throes of a new kind of relationship which was illuminating to me the troubles of my past one. And even though we were not together I had a growing attachment forming which felt hard to understand and different from anything I had ever felt. So to say the new year, which had been approaching fast, was up in the air. I was moving forward through the world with my eyes closed.
I was aware of my particular between and only now am capable of giving it a stolen name. The hour of pearl. To Steinbeck, this was a time of examination but to me, it also includes the contained beauty of something natural and the inherent caution of knowing how easily it could be broken. This was a place to arrive at, to take your time with. The usual rush, urgency, to ground life in something real was absent. Trying to leave would shatter this strange gift, however difficult it was to have, which asks time to be uncertain almost as a reminder that the way we make in our world is not forever. Fear, always right there, an hour, a minute, a thought away. Voracious and raging ready to take sorrow alight. There is a desire here exclusively to look directly at this momentous alarm and deny it access to you.
My dinner arrived as I expected. I watched them set it down before me, the displacement of the air as the plate passed over the candle on the table causing the flame to flicker under the weight of it. Revealing to me the path the air took around my spot in the dining room as people moved through it and away. The waiter would come back, sometime, to ask me how it was or if I needed anything else but before I could take a bite I felt the claws of this moment reaching for something certain to replace what had passed. To live in this place of uncertainty is perhaps only survivable by latching to obligations of living we once overlooked. All I knew for certain then was there was food to be eaten. So I ate.
When the world is at a loss for you the best thing you can be is well fed. I took comfort in the beauty of ordinary things. What a privilege to be able to care for oneself, to listen to need, and with the utmost attention, provide it. How easy this act sits in our day like parenthesis, tossed into schedules denoting or surrounding more socially important things. Routines, everything, outlining everywhere. The consequence is our own forgetfulness of what it means to take care, to notice only when it is the one thing we can do. I had many dinners alone before in New York. There was some restaurant always waiting for me and my somber. Just 6 months before I’d been in the West Village on a July night reeling from my heartbreak. It was a shorter hour of pearl. Only some of my everyday life had disappeared, slipped through my fingers. When that tether of anticipation to please someone I loved was broken an examination ensued of these new coordinates, these crossroads. What could my life become should I nourish myself today as I need? Who was I when I was alone? I wasn’t sure. Not nearly. So I ate dinner. So I waited for the new days to arrive and my life to go on in its new founded way unware in 6 months time this too would disappear.
In the restaurant on the brink of a new year, I denied my fear access to me in exchange for the joy of not knowing what my life would become in the coming weeks. I knew this pearl was a moment meant to show how quickly loss is replaced by something new emerging. How life will throw you out only to take you back under its other wing. It was a rare time of hindsight before distance from the occurrence. Where you know your life is falling together in an important and particular way. January sprawling out before me and so with it my new life, not so different from before but different enough. Who would I be when I had more rest? What would it mean if I healed myself within? I didn’t know. All I knew is I wanted dessert. So I bought dessert.
This was the first and only time I have had crème brûlée. Cracking the top of it with my spoon I ate it with great fervor. Something about it being french, something about the luxurious feeling of spending my Christmas money on something which to enjoy it is also to lose it. I was certain after this I would leave. My table was needed for a larger party coming in after me. I still had a little time. My wine at the bottom of my glass, one last sip I took and denied the offer for a second glass. The check prepared, paperclipped to a postcard with the restaurant’s photo which I would keep and hang on my wall. I had duped and been duped. I had taken the subway and a car, the air was getting colder and my stomach fuller, my cheeks warmer. I could move my hands again and no one sat with me or spoke to me that wasn’t asking me to spend more money, but glad I was to talk. I ate alone for an hour and my world was not fixed or revealed to me. The year was falling away fast. I felt ready for it now even so. The only way to leave this kind of moment, I supposed, was to relinquish yourself to it. Clinging only to the knowledge that life was making something new for you. Standing vigil in the hour of pearl isn’t a long or tedious task. When classes began the routine would return, even if it was different. Let’s enjoy the feeling of potential, of not knowing what would be for the sake of imagining anything happening.
I left and went home where at midnight on January 1st, 2018 I watched the Manhattan skyline erupt with fireworks alone with the lights off. Grateful I was that I was underage and therefore had no obligation or remorse for not being out there to celebrate with a kiss of a stranger or a flute of champagne. The year had arrived and it would be one of the greatest of my life, though I had no way of knowing. I pulled my blankets from my room and slept on the couch clinging to the certainty I was very tired and I wanted to sleep.
At the tail end of this past January this night came to mind often. Two weeks before February would arrive I was let go from my job which I’d kept for four years. No hard feelings, just hard circumstances. I have a new job now and I don’t know how to feel about it. I searched my mind for a theme but one didn’t reveal itself to me. Whenever I thought about February I wasn’t sure what to say. The fear, licking at my fingertips, when the thought of writing anything came to mind. Forgive me if I don’t have much to say. I didn’t want to break my own hope and focus as I retreated daily to my examination denying my anxiety access to this new place. I’ve felt every tender certain moment, fleeting as they were, and the only thing I seemed sure of was that February would arrive to me. Perhaps, there is no theme but February itself. The getting to it, the trying to enjoy it, the shortest month of all. My moment of uncertainty, my hour of pearl.
Whenever things are difficult or uncertain I like to make the context of it all as wonderful as possible. Here are my ingredients for making this February less dreadful, a little softer, and lovely.
2 good books read
14 days (give or take) outside in the sunshine, even if it is cold
7 movies to help you forget where you are for a while
1 enormous meal midway through the month you’ll never finish but fills you up
28 days of trying your best
10 extra minutes in the shower with the water way too warm
6 hours with a ribbon accessory
at least 1 purchase that is a little bit expensive but is a treat you sometimes like to get. ie: take out, a new shirt, an enchanted amulet
34 really strong and authentic laughs
2 nights (at least) where the sheets on your bed are changed and fresh.
Like many people on Twitter and elsewhere I have been thinking an awful lot about this:
“Even at the extremity of experience, life is always busy being many things at once — exhausting and restorative, tedious and exciting, solemn and comic, devastating and fulfilling. The trick lies not in sorting out the “real” or “relevant” feelings from the alleged distractions and obfuscations, but in accepting that this constant flux of feeling is not only inevitable, but essential: It is what prevents our happiness from becoming complacent, our anguish from entirely undoing us.”
How to Make Sense of Our Covid Losses, Big and Small By Kathryn Schulz
Searching for the likeness I find the bank of my memory empty to this feeling I have which is neither fear nor comfort. I have a strange sense all I have is this given moment. January 27th, 2022 2:33 PM
High ceilings and windows facing east and north letting the light in and the couch we sat close on was new but flimsy. January 20th, 2022 9:58 PM
I have a deep love of personality quizzes. Not the BuzzFeed ones but the Uquiz ones which are an entirely different thing from anything I’ve ever experienced. They are tender and honest and leave a thin thread of vulnerabiltiy in me when I take one. I find them comforting not because I don’t know myself or am searching for some confirmation but because the inherent connection of knowing the world is recycled emotions and feelings. How someone somewhere had a collection of words they cherished and when given the option to mull them over I choose the one that meant the most and found myself looking back.
If you wanted a theme for February to mull over the way you might think about which quote or photograph speaks directly to you then now is your chance. I couldn’t find a theme but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get to.
WHERE IN THE WORLD IS FEBRURARY’S THEME?
This month’s mood board is one of my favorites. I know Valentine can be an annoying aspect of this short yet endless month but if there is one thing I love, it’s love. You can find it all right here.
Next Friday my Paid newsletter comes out where we will be starting our book group book Before the Coffee Gets Cold, looking at some poetry, and answering this question from Kaliyah S.E:
When you graduated high school were you scared of what was coming next? Or were you so determined to go live your life that you didn’t really have any fears?
Just to name a few things.
If not, 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
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 Starbucks Fridays, uncertainty, and the arrival of February as expected.
Love always,
Chloé
What could be, in the wrong hands, an incredibly mundane story about someone eating a meal alone feels like poetry and, somehow, the way I imagine France to feel, though I’ve never been there. A beautiful meditation on love, loss, transition, etc. And you said it had no theme!