If Nothing is Making Sense, Then I Suppose We’ve Made it to the Right Place.

For this there are no words

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away. The Denial of Death by Louise Glück

What do you want me to say?

That I was afraid? No. I was not afraid to do this. And if I ever was, I don’t remember.

People have thought it was brave that I pursued the arts. I always felt it obvious. I think I’m good at it, and alternatively, I was never good at anything else. I have ambition and self-discipline, and I want it, and I’m not afraid of wanting it. And I’ve felt it, been aware of it, of a greatness in me, one I possessed and one I would come to possess with time. I was never worried about success, I had very little, if any, doubts that I would do what I said I would. There's been only a sense of surprise or possibility of how the smaller details, the hows and whens, would turn out. Maybe a little agony at how long I felt it was taking, but I always know it's coming. I saw it similarly to the way they say sometimes that time is simultaneous, that everything that has and will happen, is occurring at once. (And I’ll admit that also I’ve looked this concept up and have not found precisely the definition as I understand it, so this is possibly just nonsense, but I think you kinda need these kinds of things to get anywhere.) It seemed fair to assume that to be this kind of sure of what one day I would have, then in some ways I must have it now.

I don’t know when it happened, but I know for a year or more I woke up and found that place of knowing, stunningly, gone.

But this isn’t about that. This is about the fact that it's back.

Everyone seems to have noticed this about me before I noticed it myself.

Any good thing which has gone away unannounced comes sheepish in return, slipping in the way it went—undetected. There wouldn’t be a name for it even had I noticed. In a bar, I said it was interesting to go to people’s jobs to see where they worked. “I think you just like seeing people’s houses,” They said back.

Which was a stunning observation given everything, one I had been told once before by someone who had read a good deal of my work. You have an affinity, they said, for other people’s houses. My inner world has long been a series of rooms. I’ve always been passing through them, bare or otherwise decorated depending on the day, and I could often hear and feel through the walls what the next one contained, sometimes even see it. A light through a keyhole or under the crack of a door. So even what was closed off to me seemed to reach me all the same.

The light is now off, if there is a room, I cannot find it.

I don’t know how to say any of this.

The logic has seemingly slipped from grasp. Put simply, the future was a room, and that room is no longer there, even if that feeling has come back.

In therapy, talking about hard things, the clock turned away from me, I can tell the trickled time is running out, and one afternoon I wanted to convey something—something good. Something that said, despite what we are doing here, I know that doing this is opening, like a door, my life in new and good ways. I wanted to say I can feel what this is, that for as heavy as this is now, I know that there is something waiting. But I lacked any definable shape, any clear structure, could only say there was a “moreness.”

The opening less like a door and more like a fracture. The structure of thought no longer existed; there were no longer any walls, just a space with nothing there. Nothing not as an end, but as a beginning. A feeling of a place lacking boundaries or margins, a darkness that was not impenetrable. To be given a gift of abstractness, to break a mold. No longer, I thought, a life of singular confined shape. Because the truth is, for as big as a room can get, you will eventually hit a wall. There will always be a place beyond your reach. Which is not what you want a future to have.

I thought about this for a while. I could feel it, this moreness, it wasn’t going away. And it’s still here, when I check, it’s still around. Most of the time, I feel it in my therapist's office, just before I go. But there are moments where, after the store has cleared of customers at work, or walking home, I feel the bloat. As if my life has become waterlogged with something, and it is bowed outward now.

After a morning in writers group, a few days after the moreness, Dakota told me I seemed more awake, and I thought that was exactly right. To have a life that is awake is more abstract than a room. To be awake, the quality of it, definable and yet, unclear parameters. Because people fall asleep with their eyes open, and sometimes being awake means bright eyes and a bright face, and it’s hard to say what precisely it means, what the quality of air around me had taken, but awake was a word too, I could use.

I’m being careful now. If nothing is making sense, then I suppose we’ve made it to the right place. To have a precise dimension would be counteractive to the gift. Would close a box around an enormity. I’m saying this is a feeling only I can know. And I know it. My life will have more because, in some ways, I already have it. Everything is happening at once. I’m not gonna hit a ceiling. The greatness has returned, and it's good to be awake, with this bright face, because there’s a darkness out ahead. I don’t know what I can do with it yet, but at least it’s up to me. Sometimes this feels terrible, but today, it is an encouraging thought.

The attempt to describe the feelings of moreness to Ava

“Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love.” Witness to my life : the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

I wanted to pick one quote from this page but alas the whole thing has circled my brain like a goldfish occasionally bumping the glass, drawing my mind to phrases. Such as, “Time runs only one way,” and “She would like to unspool it, render it all back,” and “He will never come again.”

I do not have any purgatory lines, so instead I am going to suggest a few spring reads.

1. Sorrow is Not My Name by

   Ross Gay

2. Like a Small Café, That’s Love by Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Mohammad Shaheen)

3. The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

4. What the Living Do by Marie Howe

5. Poet of an Ordinary Heartbreak by Chris Abani

6. Tea by Leila Chatti

I’m sure there are more I will think of later but I think this is a good start.

It was my birthday in March. When women talk about turning 30, about the sudden pressure they felt to have children and to be married, I imagined, foolishly, this was a problem I wouldn’t have. I knew that I was young. I had never had a family or life that asked that of me, to have these things, or even inquired if it was something I wanted. Which I have always appreciated because, yes, I want it, but the when is always ever changing. As I continue this approach of a new decade, however, as I sit now at 28, there are times where life seems so slim and small, so easily missed. That if I were not careful, the possibility would dwindle too fast. When this happens, I’ll do this trick:

I’ll start by doubling my age, say, if I lived all these 28 years over again, I’d only be 56. Most of my grandparents and family have lived, or are, in their 90s, so it's nice. If I’m anything like my predecessors, I could add an additional 28 years to that 56 and still have time to live and do what I wish. And there's even more than I remember, those first years of life lost, totally unconscious I was to the passage of time at all. Then, I’ll usually think of being 20 and all the things that have happened since that age. How different I am, how long ago it feels, and I’ll do some smaller arithmetic. If I were to live just these 8 years over again, I’d be 36. Which is, if I think on it, right on time to begin. Begin what? I’m not sure, but thats comforting too. And it goes on that way, the numbers dwindling. I think about being 25 which was 3 years ago and yet I am different, and life is different, the I think about who I was a year ago, who I was 6 months ago, and regardless of how big or small the numbers get, there is to me a comfort, that no matter the math, there is always more than I think. More and more and more and more and more and more.

Photo by Taylor, March 21st, 2025

Despite it being nearly MAY this is actually the March newsletter, so here is a March mood board in case you wanted to look back with nostalgic eyes.

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 coffee Fridays, to the things we can’t explain, to what is out ahead

Love always,

Chloé