I Heard You Laugh from the Other Room

and I realized you're not waiting up for me ahead

People had been saying winter was over but for the first time, this felt true. I could feel it as you do, that immediate naivety, that it will never be so bad again. Before it's too hot, before the curtains must be closed and the sun strikes me like a very good idea. The warmth on the back of my eyelids, the whispers saying come home, rest, and coming home is not just a bed but the whole world. It was spring and the bloom was inevitable, arriving overnight, the trees a tunneled umbrella over each block and now at midweek I already couldn’t imagine them not being there. I was holding flowers given to me by my friend Caroline. I’d just left her apartment. I was going home again. 

Restaurants were doing the thing I like about this time, they opened those wide swinging windows into doors, so the whole world seemed caught in the mindless chatter and I remembered that people were there. Suddenly there was an in-between again, a place midway in the space from which you are coming and the one you are going and if you wanted to you could stop a while and see what was there. The season of slacking off, lingering in the light, taking your time. I stopped at a lively corner and stared straight ahead paying attention really to none of it, but aware it was happening as these things do, as each year turns itself over like the curl at the end of a receipt. So few blocks between me and home, and Third Ave buzzing, and the people across the street staring at me and I at them, separated by a red light. I waited for it to change from the sudden enormity of my despair. 

It was quick but hard to miss. Happening in the moment when the traffic light at the crosswalk flicked from red to green and the cars idle sped forward. There and gone again. A correction to the spine. So close to living and yet not entirely there, I thought, this was my life. It did not need to happen that way. But it was and I couldn’t get out of it now because I’d decided already. I was in the momentum of my choice. I was standing in midafternoon and everything was over. Another day would pass. I’d gone out and done what I was supposed to, participating enough to qualify as having been there. The day would end as it usually did, from the closing of the window in my apartment when it got too cold.

I shifted the weight of my leg. Bending one knee and the other then moving back again, I 

pushed my thoughts around my head in slow circles the way you comb through your hair with your fingers searching for a lump after hitting your head. I’d become distantly aware of this happening. That I’d stopped a lot of things. The sudden passiveness I had taken to experience, where all I was ever doing was going back to my apartment. That chasm between me and those days I’d once waited all winter for, they’d passed last week, last month, and even those fine cold afternoons where the storefronts had been inviting, and I couldn’t remember how I enjoyed them. I was sure really, I hadn’t attempted to at all. 

Perhaps if it weren’t spring I’d have cried. But the people were just across the way and I had these flowers that needed water and I was on the edge of something, some understanding, some change I knew even if my regret felt enormous. I thought:

I can hear my life happening in another room. The door closed, but there’s a light coming from the keyhole and we share a wall so that when something good happens, when someone laughs too loud, or the music crescendos, or a window is open, I can hear it from where I am. I can press my hand to the wall and feel the hum of it against my bones. And I know I could go in if I wanted to, there’s nothing that says I can’t, no lock on the door, no indication that I’m not wanted. It’s a room that, for all the world, is available to me, decorated how I like and to my taste, with the things I want, but I have stopped going in. Why? Maybe I had to fetch something, maybe I had to do a chore I didn’t want to do, and it seems now a habit was made of not going in.

When? I was going straight home and I couldn’t name the last time I hadn’t done so. 

The chasm between the day I was having and the more present one, the one from that other room stretched its tired maw until I understood the distance. All my favorite things, what filled the margins of my day, I couldn’t name one that had happened in the year I’d just been in.

Strange what can happen in the sun, on the street corner, in some lull between places. The way it strikes you, how easy it was to think you were listening to something instead of overhearing it. To be standing next to life, in its shadow, instead of inside of it. The light changed back and the cars went idle again and the people were walking toward me. Me with my stomach at my ankles. Me with a ghost trailing behind me of a year that had clung to my skin like mist, curling my hair, to which I had washed clean away without noticing. And the trouble was that I could never get it back. That year was gone. The trouble was another year was coming, another one was there, bright, tender, pooling along the sidewalks, gathering in the streets, not chasing my coattails, not begging for me, but there all the same.

I wish that the anatomy of a bad year did not sometimes reflect the shape of a body and the decisions it made. But this time it did. And that body now was holding flowers descending into the subway just because that morning it decided it would, and the concrete was holding the dampness the way it liked so for once it was nice that the street above was warmer than the cool tunnel below. And I swiped in, and I went home. 

I found solace in the idea, however, that the body I saw was my body, that the decisions it made were mine, that as much as that year was gone it had been there and a new one taking its place meant the opportunity for solution was immediate. That it was spring and the days were good and I wasn’t crying because I knew this already. Yes, I regretted everything, I missed what I couldn’t have, but the room was still there and I could see the light was still on and everyone seemed happy regardless of when I showed up. I could push the door open even if I decided that it would not happen today, but tomorrow.

It is always shocking to me this fact, that happiness is not a year away. That all of it is up to me and this thing we are doing is living even if I say it is not. How the time passes, how the seasons recede, how if I wanted to I could. I like it as much as I don’t like it. I probably actually like it a little more than I don’t. And I know it seems simple, but it is comforting to remember that so much of what we don’t like is capable of ceasing if we decide no longer to do it. I didn’t like the year past, well I wouldn’t do it again. So when I got home I told my sister of this realization, that I had stopped everything, stopped getting dressed, really dressed, stopped going out, stopped doing anything I wasn’t supposed to, and even though I had work to do we decided tomorrow we’d slack off in the sun. 

We took the train all the way uptown, all the way out of the way, where Central Park kisses the MET and Brooklyn we think will take forever to get to. Off the Q and up the avenues we walked and I could see the trees from my place on the other side of the street. I saw, also, the light on the curb, and it looked familiar. I stared at it, the slant of afternoon, that italicized warmth. Approaching on legs, my legs, no one else's, I found the edge of the sidewalk as if it were the threshold to another room, and stepped inside. 

May 2nd, 2024 Central Park

The Light That Shines When Things End by Iain Thomas

“You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.” Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Here is a list of ways I wish to emerge into the light.

1. Go uptown more

2. Spend a few afternoons after work somewhere outside

3. Read in the park

4. Take more walks on my day off

5. Write a little less experience a little more

6. Get better at making plans with people

7. Unfortunately, I must wear jeans again and try and get ready instead of opting for the world’s most comfortable and bland sweatpants.

8. Finish the books I want to finish despite all desires not to read and instead sit on my phone or in a dream

9. Take a few risks and be a bit of a bad writer, but more intentionally than I currently am doing so

10. visit my friends more spontaneously even if I’m just bringing them coffee

11. Say yes more

12. Go to bed late and wake up tired. You’ll live.

But absence is like having once you know the shape. I didn’t ask for it, I thought, so I could have it in a different way. April 18th, 2024 1:07 AM

The woman wrapped in thorns. April 9th, 2024 10:57 AM (kinda obsessed with this. I have no idea the context of what I wanted to do with this but I may just have to pull it out of purgatory for SOMETHING)

Here’s May’s mood board, full of earthy shots, city shots, and light!

My Paid newsletter comes out in two weeks! We’ll talk more about light and look at some of the media I’ve been mulling over. Free free to join if not don’t worry I’m emerging so I’m sure I’ll see you again real 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 coffee Fridays, to the light of a street corner, to the life that isn’t waiting for you

Love always,

Chloé