Horizon Line
The Hourglass change
It was unassuming, coming along the horizon like the sun or moon and lifting into the cloudless atmosphere where the light drifted down and turned everything its color. Voices, singing out into the open air. At a subway stop far from home I got off on a whim. I didn’t want to go home. Fall, which had arrived that morning, had slunk off in the heat of afternoon, but had returned half-heartedly again. It was a night where the wind felt like nothing, it was neither hot nor cold. The kind of night where it pulls you along, pushing you into certain directions, and you listen because sooner or later it won’t feel the way it does. Sooner or later it will burn.
But it did not burn yet and everyone knew our time together was limited. Soon we’d linger nowhere, huddle inside coffee shops, doorways, escaping the cold and consequentially escaping each other. Everyone outside was talking with a general murmur. The city hummed with it, with the feelings and acknowledgments that it was over. Whatever it was had yet to reveal itself, but just as you can be older in October, we were, and we knew things we should not know, and nothing was really different, and yet neither was anything the same as it had been when we woke up one hot morning to summer steaming in our apartments.
I walked in a straight line toward Washington Square Park. This was before so many people wanted to sell you something there, before the small-time stars and interviewers flocked to its ambiance, which had a steady flow of jazz music, chess players, and drifters. The first part of New York to change and the first thing I lost which I had thought I would never lose. How it came suddenly, one day the park was too much and I avoided it like you avoid other places in New York that seem obnoxious. The original calamity of the park missing, which of course replaced the thing before it had been what I knew, which others mourned, which I know nothing about and cannot say.
I did not want to go home because, despite the sudden and predicted abandonment of someone I loved, the change it had produced had a fine unexpected quality to it. It was like I had to make sure it existed everywhere, I had to be sure that everyone saw me within it. I had once said that if they left my life would be the same because they weren’t really in it to begin with, but that was not true at all. In fact, it was the opposite. I could so easily parse out the before and the after, and what I had once imagined as a cataclysmic event, had really been as straightforward and simple as the turning of an hourglass. The acceptance that one time had ceased and another began.
So I walked and walked and walked toward the old park, looking into street-side seating and patioed corners. I’m sure at the time there was a kind of pain, but in looking back it's hard to remember with the same clarity, because my life was born anew. It was not hard to be sad, but hard to mourn what had been lost because what it had brought to me was this new world where without music or friends, without anyone looking at me or consuming me, I sought to watch others enjoy the life I had once imagined for myself. I listened to conversations and clinking dishes, I felt that the importance of everything had shifted in the right direction, recalibrated.
Again there was a knowledge I shouldn’t have had. It itched under my skin, left me feeling ready to experience this new life where the worst thing had already happened. Where the things that mattered too much before had somehow leveled out. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about anything, it was that now I cared about everything, but in the way that you’re supposed to. With dedication, with care, with the appropriate weight and periodical urgency. Yet it always fell back to that equilibrium.
The predicted cataclysmic event passed over the sun like a single cloud on a sunny day. Yet the damage it might have done unearthed a new livelihood buried beneath what had been there before. I found a kind of pleasure in the abandonment because I always knew it would happen and there’s something nice about being right, something nice about no longer worrying. But also there was a happiness in looking back at your old terrible quality of life and understanding it had to happen this way, you’d never leave it on your own and now even if you could you’d never go back.
Even then, as I walked and thought about the life that was so close, just days or weeks away. Yet its logic eluded me, its pleasantries and hierarchies seemed too far removed. I’d look back at the life I had before and see it through glass the way you see wild animals. There was a certain distinction between us in which I was allowed to view and the other allowed to be observed, but also there was a similarity between us which we were living things. And I was sorry for that life on the other side, which at times faded out of quality in a way I knew and they felt without name. I was sure they sensed they were trapped and yet could not process the cage they’d settled because I remembered. I had knowledge given in universe from a place they had yet to exist.
Not far off I could hear a song in the Park rising from its place in the mouths of others. The whole world was turning from blue to black too quickly for my eyes. There was a discomfort in the adjustment and I only realized it once it was over, once I could see again. That was what life felt like then. Even big change is so frustratingly ordinary. What had I lamented over? Why had I cried all that time for this life which would arrive regardless? I had raged against this fate as much as I knew it would come. I was in a tragedy and the tragedy was over. This life which was good and real, held me very carefully in its arms. It made me want to be alive more than ever, let me be sad about the things I had not been allowed before. And it even let me enjoy that which I had never had the focus to enjoy.
So to say, I liked my life. I liked that it did not happen as I wanted it to, and watching other people get what I had long speculated as possibly mine caused me no pain at all. I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted this, here, this walk alone, and the mundanity of my being alone. I wanted the abandonment of people and summer, wanted to get off the train because there was something unbearable about the day ending because I was in this place now and I wanted it to last. I wanted to hold onto the unnatural feeling of knowing what I should not know.
I entered the park and my feet grew tired but I had still some distance to go. The song came into clearer view and the change too settled along my skin. The day could end, and would end without my participation or my approval. I had learned that already. I don’t know how to describe it and I have never found the words, to describe the life after which approached as ordinary as seasons changing, which was as unassuming as a horizon line despite the newness born from it each morning. Nothing really matters the chant went. But of course, at this point this was not quite true everything mattered just not in the way it used to.
List of things that changed me this year:
Elena Ferrante writing, “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”
Watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time
Sorrow Is Not My Name by Ross Gay
When the mother I nanny for said “One thing we pay for in this house is good butter.” which prompted me to discover the importance of pricy yet delicious butter that feels nurturing and full.
The practice of knitting and learning how to make something by hand
Unreal Unearth by Hozier
The invitation I got to the Women in Lit party thrown by my friend Dakota where I met some of the greatest women I know.
This NYT hamburger Helper recipe (one pan, cheap, filling, comfort food. What more can a girl ask for?)
The birth of my best friend’s son.
The continuous lesson of learning to rest.
My therapist’s maternity leave.
The Mirror Visitor Series by Christabelle Dabos
Julian Solomita’s YouTube videogame streams, for the days that I miss living with my brother.
Time
Slowmaxxing: a term popularized by @robyns_quill is about taking your time and the way we can enjoy and appreciate life when we really look at it. My version of living slowly has involved mulling over the things I consume for longer. Here’s what has been circling my brain:
On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoi: “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.” I think about this concept often. It’s scary, but it’s worth it, to give someone power over you and find they won’t use it. It’s either you risk it, to live with the pain of having loved and been known, or take the pain of being forgotten. (It might not appear that way yet, but there's only one option where you lose.)
The ending scene of Darjeeling Limited dir. Wes Anderson: After watching Asteroid City, there’s something kind of refreshing to me about how on the nose these films can be in regards to grief. The alienation of it as well as the baggage. I’ve been watching this scene a lot.
This Tumblr Post by Anddreadful:
Cowboys Lament sung by Burl Ives: “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy/ These words he did say as I boldly walked by/ Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story/ I'm shot in the breast and I know I must die.” I’m a bit obsessed with cowboys and the universe they live in within art. The crooning words and the cadence with which they speak is quite magical and its simplicity and straightforwardness often moves me.
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak by Albert Bierstadt: After going to Colorado, having never left this timezone, I’ve been thinking often of the sunlight in paintings I’d seen often at the MET. I always enjoyed looking at the landscape but struggled to imagine such sights existing.
Pretend it’s a City (episode unknown):
Ann Patchett, Tom Lake: A Novel: “It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and soon-to-be-more suffering in the world...it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true... (I need to) see it all and hold it for as long as I can.” I don’t think the goal of this thing we’re doing is not to suffer. I think it’s to see what exists beside it.
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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Here’s to the horizon line, change, and singing very loudly
See you soon,
Chloé