Hello Mom? The End Is Here

And I am not so afraid anymore

It is my friend maddie’s birthday. Dearest maddie, please know so many moments of ours were placed in my heart before I stitched it up.

I was on the phone with my mother. 

A cyst on my ovary had burst. The pain was unbearable and anyone who has had one might be able to tell you so. A slow steady thrum of discomfort increasing to great crescendo lasting for who knows how long. This was the end, I had thought. Not death but I was at the edge of my body, chased that way. I was trying to say what was going on besides the things happening inside. Talking about the apartment and then saying how I was alone. How my sister was gone, my roommates were gone, the cats were some other end of the earth I suspected because they were not in the room with me. How I had turned off my show because the sound of people talking was overstimulating and made me sick, but before then had been pretty good but she wouldn’t like it. And yet the pain was still there. I was talking and talking and it still coiled and turned, tearing me open and unearthing with new things which I could not say yet because I was still telling my mother about my morning. 

“I don’t know if you ever…feel this way.” It was the kind of confession you might have begun with, can I tell you something? But she was my mom and thus the answer was yes. I was aware of how what I was about to say would sound and equally aware that it was what felt true in this moment, in many moments, regardless of if it were. “I know that everyone has their own pain, but the more I talk with people the more isolated I feel. Even people who share my experience. No one will ever be here, in this pain, with me. I’m really scared of how alone I am. Do you ever feel that?”

I did not mean pain as in the physical, I meant something else. I knew she understood what I was asking about. The deep sorrow I had thus found in being a woman. The loss of many things and the bitterness at not getting to keep them. The line did not go quiet for too long, not even a second as if this were a question mothers were always asked by their daughters and she had been waiting all this time for me to grow up. 

“Not in the same way, but like anyone else I’ve been afraid that no one in the world will ever truly understand me.”

This was what I thought the end would look like. A paralyzing fear, a last word of confession, a desire very deep to be talking with my parents, before being torn open. And yet once I could take Advil I was fine and though I felt different I was in the same moment as I had been when the day had begun. Maybe I was a little wiser, more trusting of what I had long suspected because my mom had said it, but ultimately no closer to anything or anyone. This still made me very afraid. 

Recently though I woke up. It was so early in the morning light had not broken. I went to work on a delayed and packed train. Each time I thought the car could not get any fuller another stop would come and people managed to find space where I had not seen it before. Then two men were on the train and I found them both handsome, but our commute together was brief. We overlapped two stops before I walked by them to get off and I didn’t look back for them. 

It was there, I can see it now, feel it, but at the time this did not stand out to me. Not even six months had passed since the call with my mom and still, I hadn’t noticed. The rest of the week was the same. I went to dinner with friends, took the train and four blocks alone. I brought kids to and from their apartments without issue. I had the apartment to myself. I wrote, I slept, I sang in the shower. It took me two weeks to realize that what I was feeling was the end. I was no longer so afraid.

In fact, I wasn’t scared at all. Not in the way I had been. Which had a way of making me feel the desperation of my confession to my mother. The personification of my loneliness by the fear that it existed. Or else the clear wound it seemed to be to me then, that I was removed from the world and could not be totally present with anyone. 

At no point did I really believe myself to be unwavering. My existence was circumstantial at best. I moved in and out of solidity. Under no circumstances was I allowed to ever be the proof of my own being here. I required always someone to make me believe it. Even then I could only sometimes stand up for myself and I could sometimes move through the world with a certain air of confidence, but I was also even in those moments aware of how fragile it felt to be there. There were moments when someone would fall asleep and it was like with their consciousness I had vanished. So afraid I was of those moments between. When I was not being looked at, when at dinner the side conversations would split down the middle and I would be left to my own devices. I was not totally sure I’d stop anyone from treating me the way I had grown used to. That I would not give myself agency in any real way that would matter. 

Then I woke up that morning and I could feel the end of something. For so long my heart had been a felt project I left open. I had been stuffing into it experiences. Throwing anything that came my way because it meant I was not alone. Only recently have I learned what really belongs. All those afternoons of fullness where the light hit the buildings just right. When I was alone in a room and I was not afraid. When I forgot to remember the men who had been mean to me. Nights on the train where I did not revert to sad music because I had outgrown that unhappiness long ago and to return to it would only serve a story I had once believed and no longer did. And it was not that bad things hadn’t happened, I could feel the space in my heart where those things settled, but it was that I did not care so much that they had. One day I woke up and it was over. In my hand I had the making of my grown-up heart. Healing is not the word, but it is close to it. I have been trying to grasp the name of this ending, but the tighter I grab the less there seems to be to hold onto.

I suppose, what it is, is I have always been a girl. I feel I am a girl no longer. I don’t mean the girlhood I had when I ran in and out of sprinklers and waves at the beach when you could do so only in bathing suit bottoms. I mean the makeshift girlhood I made in my early twenties when I discovered I would never be a kid again. When, in trying to be older and bigger, I actually made myself younger and smaller. The girlhood of not telling your friends what you mean. Of holding onto things long past the sell-by date because you’re so terrified of loss you can’t stand to be alone. The want for men to tell you what to do. And even the hatred I felt that I would never again be home for too long. 

On the phone, with my mother, I had been less afraid of the pain I carried and more so what it meant in relationship to someone else. My mother had voiced that very fear, that no one would ever understand me. I don’t so much feel I have overcome this fear as I believe it does not really matter. I have no desire to be sure that out there someone exists for such a purpose. And I believe that some pain we carry all on our own but I do not mind what it means that I am here only with myself. If I came to the end with only the steadfast belief that I existed in the real world I would still admit that I did not exist on my own. I understand my pain. I remember what it meant to be so small. That is enough. I have outgrown the fear that I only exist when someone is looking at me. It is over, this is the end. 

Until recently I thought this would be an opening, but it is not. It arrived without alarm. With no tearing, no pain, not so much as a scorch or a burn. It was a careful mending. A conscious decision of putting in of things, friends, family. To nurture, to sew, until that last sweet stitch. I hold it in my hand now. People have long speculated, but it is neither a fizzle, or a bang, the end always comes out handmade. 

I know the inside of my heart pretty well now. I know too it will change just as everything does, but for now this is what it looks like.

Things I have put in

1. The day that Kelly, Jake, and I went to two parties right before summer really began.

2. The song Boyfriends by Harry Styles

3. Every walk my parents and I have taken since 2020

4. My weekly movie nights with my friends

5. The afternoon it was deathly cold and Maddie and Ava and I went to get coffee before stopping in five stores because our toes were cold inside our boots

6. The weekend I had entirely to myself because all my friends had gone on vacation and my sister was upstate

7. The three recipes I know by heart

8. Every cat I have ever met

9. This poem

10. The beach day we spent jumping in and out of waves that somehow was so perfect I knew that even though we looked at our calendars it would never be this perfect again

11. Many other things which are all equally as good as what I have just said but if I went on would only make this newsletter too long to read and only I would really appreciate them.

via

“This was a disappointment. I had hoped that my attraction to him was something private, born out of a subsurface communication, an invisible thumping current specific to him and me.” Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

This life is mine. I’m going to hold onto it with my bare hands. Until each age is mine. Until they hit like a closed fist. October 20th, 2022 7:58 am

You check his phone for the time. He has a message from a girl. You are in your apartment but you want to go home. October 19th, 2022 12:43 AM

If you’re reading this, it means the sacred time (august-october) is over. I find there is a sweet joy to these next two months. I am looking forward to walking in this world in the new way I have begun to. The other day I passed a restaurant that had hardly anyone inside and the lights were dim a perfect yellow golden glow. It was hard to miss even though the lights weren’t bright. It reminded me that this season, though not sacred, holds something in it for me too. That it is cold enough that people may convene inside with those they love for a warm dinner. And too that it is not so cold that I won’t find myself walking by to peer in. Though I do not prefer winter, I cannot say I mind that it will soon begin its arrival. This is annoying to some people, but alas it is true. I find something to enjoy of all months. So to say, I am an optimist.

Check out november’s moodboard here xoxo

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Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, the end, and our handmade hearts

Love always,

Chloé