Out of Bounds

Why I didn't write what I said I would

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

I just remember thinking at the time that I needed to lower the volume on my music because there were leaves. I was walking to work, but there were leaves. They’d grown back a few weeks before it wasn’t a surprise anymore that they were there, but there had been days previous where the wind had swept the streets silently, and I had hungered for the sound of one stem layering over the other. It’s the one thing I miss, the one thing I struggle to go without. Leaves. And that morning, as the sunlight filtered through them so brightly white, a casual breeze, like the kind of wind from dreams, was meandering, and so I could hear what I had missed. The trees, some of them, arched over the road while others blew in Elizabeth Street Garden.

Already, I knew my friend was leaving for another state, my roommate was moving out at the end of the next week, that I had lost someone, and that loss seemed to have surrounded my family in an atmosphere I only recognized from memories. The kind where, for some reason, I was looking out the screen of a window to a house that wasn’t mine. And I am young, too young to be told why we were going anywhere or to know when we are leaving, and my dad is working outside, where in the trees, cicadas sing. Every aspect of what is going on makes me uncomfortable for reasons I have no vocabulary for, because children are expected to go lengths of time being uncomfortable and do not yet have the means to stop it.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, just a quality of the memory and that time.

A few days later, I would no longer be seeing the person I was seeing, which would surprise me, devastate me for a couple days with the old stories it brings up in my head, but ultimately make sense. Work will get hard, and people will feel mean. I will be unsure that I can keep going with the dream. Struggle with the fact that I will have to keep going, even though I have no idea how, because the alternative is too painful. Then, on a walk home, the music low in my ears, someone will stop me to say I am writing exactly what needs to be in the world.

Is life a merciful force? Not simply a body of time containing in it, moments of mercy, but a sentient abstraction which can break from its focal point to, momentarily, suspend its ruthlessness. Not out of regret, or guilt, or even remorse, but a clinical kind of consciousness.

The days that followed felt like proof of this possibility.

There was a date idea I had to go to the park and use a book I had to identify the trees based on their leaves. I had suggested this when things, in hindsight, were already over. But I still wanted to do it, so the Sunday I had off, I got myself some breakfast, and began to walk toward branches that hung down low enough for me to see. I started with, what I believe, was an American Elm and held the leaves between my fingers.

I was there only a few minutes when an older man approached me. He wanted to know if I was part of a census, and I said no.

“My wife and I, we did this thing a few years back,” He said, as he told me what the census was, that maybe I would like it. It was fun; they were given a few blocks radius where they examined the soil, and the state of the tree, and where it was located, and there was just this certification process, but I would like it, he bet. Why, though, was I there now?

“What's the interest?” He asked.

I had yet to articulate the reason to even myself, so it came out rather disjointed: “I feel like I don’t know enough names of things.”

When left alone, I perused the park on my own. I took a leaf between my fingers and flipped it over, checking for a milky white underside. It did not have one. I was aware of the things I had to do, writing and work that I had promised to do, and crossing into the shade, I was aware also that I would not be doing them. A pigeon from the dirt landed on the fence next to me. I was unaccompanied by the guilt I was used to. I didn’t have the energy. I seemed already to be in the middle of this action of cleaning the slate, of starting over. I had accepted that some goals would not be met, that this game of catch-up would never be won. I had failed to do what I had wanted and was resigned to having accomplished at least what I had. I needed space which could only be achieved by this acceptance, by letting go of the spectre of the limitless life which had, in fact, all that time, been limited.

There was too much to do, and I did not have the time, and I never would. But there was, in my hands, something I didn’t know the name of. And so I flipped through my book.

I left a few hours later, having looked at four trees, attempted to identify three of them, but feeling confident in just the one, the first one. Walking home it was early in the day, and there was a feeling I attributed to all the time still left to do as I pleased, but now see more as the general feeling. A feeling which permeated for a short time, maybe just three days, that those days were existing the minimal amount. Life seemed, like a dress or a coat, to have lost its lining.

This, too, had started before my notice. That morning, if I thought about it. There was the structural trueness of it, of that day being a Sunday, of it being 12:30 in the afternoon, but behind it, nothing else. That day and the two that followed seemed to have lifted out of bounds. Even now, their texture and weight, the lack of porousness to their surroundings, make them impossible to place or put back with continuity on my own.

There existed no through line. No sinew. Though, some things remained easily traced. The possibility of mercy, that in life one might lose too much, too fast, no matter the fact that it was meant to happen, was always going to happen. And in such cases, one is granted a place beyond this boundary of reason. What I had learned in the weeks preceding were, I knew, important and needed. And yet, for the hours I was awake and in the world, the application of these things, the onward flow, had ceased.

I had gotten precisely what people want in times of loss. A pause in the momentum. It was a relief, the space. But the presence of this relief was an obvious demarcation. A different loss was also at play; the absence within days was not from what had been taken, for many of those things I’d have given plenty to have back. Rather, the relief belonged to days that had been stripped of their meaning.

This lining which had escaped, the muscle, that which had once surrounded the day and filled it with padding, days of writing, days of working, days of socializing, things we were going to do, things left to deliver, was cleared entirely away. There was space now, for one day to mean only the thing that it was. To be only a Sunday, for it to be only noon, for there to be so much time. Starting over had left me with nothing to do. Only in this interim life did I feel, once at home, capable of giving myself nothing to do.

The night before my friend left to move to another state, I went to visit her to say goodbye. I rose from underground to transfer, and from the stairs, I saw trees. The sun was setting on the final day of mercy. I watched them in the wind, sun painted gold, before I told my friend Even though everything in the world possibly happened between April and this moment, the tree across the way is blowing it’s breeze soooo beautifully, that I feel particularly like good things are happening even if it doesn’t feel that way or the scope of them is hidden. Staring up again once it was said, I watched for another minute, and then walked toward them.

After getting dinner together, we said the last goodbye outside her apartment. Turning away, somber and yet assured of that feeling I had before I’d arrived, the trees shaking overhead, I yelled to her, “If things feel bad, watch the leaves!” before walking back the way I’d come.

It took a long time to get home.

I had to walk a while to the subway, and the wind was the kind of wind that could unbutton your clothes. Crossing quiet intersections, in a part of the city that was office buildings, so it seemed ghostly at the hour, there was a feeling of rare phenomenon to the wind that I had always liked. How sometimes the movement of air did not possess a single degree out of place with the world. That it was neither hot nor cold, that it could not really be felt, as if someone had pushed their lips into the shape of an O and begun to blow. But it was felt, it did exist, and it was blowing over the city, and the leaves were making the noise I liked. The night was, for all the world, very beautiful, and I walked in the middle of the street down my block before wading a little on my stoop, where I looked at the tree outside my own apartment.

I thought about what I said to her. That last thing.

What did I mean? I was unsure. And staring up at the leaves yielded no answer, so I went inside.

I remain reluctant to make a point of this. To say that the leaves mean anything. I wrote purposefully so they would not. I have felt the burden of having a thing happen and then also having to carry what it might mean. And there is no greater thing, I think, in that moment than understanding that it is possible just to love a thing for what it is. Not because it means anything else, but because it was there.

“Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void.” Audition by Katie Kitamura

“It was not so much that getting older was the issue, but that life seemed to narrow, certain things began to seem no longer possible. That an aspect I had once attributed to getting older had receded into the past, became a quality of an age I was no longer in.” June 13th, 2025 11:06 PM

“And for years I struggled after that summer ended to find the words to describe the landscape of this intimacy, the scope which had become too large to see the end of, which happened in the small gaps, these moments, where I was aware of the preciousness between us. That what had happened was something irrevocable.” June 10th, 2025 6:30 PM

Every year we celebrate the big and small things for the summer solstice. This year this is what I celebrated

1. My best friend getting married

   

   From left to right: Me, Jenny, Kelly, Ava, and Maddie taken by T(REDACTED) (REDACTED)k

2. Kyla and my hard work on the manuscript

3. That I dated again after 8 years

4. Our approval to adopt a cat, and then finding and adopting Confetti

5. The rabbit hole that led me to discover the name of my favorite marsh grass, aka, saltmeadow cordgrass, which led me to the MET and the painter Martin Johnson Heade.

6. My friends. All of them. There is no friend I have that the circumstances of our meeting, no matter how difficult or joyous, how long ago, how unlikely, that does not fill me with such immense gratitude and pure elation that I am alive. To be so lucky, to have, from the beginning, already won.

7. That I have found both the perfect white and black linen pants

The June mood board is here. Lets hope the next one is on time enough to appreciate. Xoxo

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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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 leaves which remain leaves all this time

Love always,

Chloé