Overgrowth
The Wide Width Of My World
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Not knowing when the Dawn
will come, I open every door
Emily Dickinson
In the garden, against the light, I have to squint. Even under the canopy of a large tree, which has shed all its flowers for leaves, the sun overhead is strong.
The volunteers, walking along the gravel perimeter, and, my co-workers on break nearby alone.
For the last few days, I’ve come to Elizabeth Street Garden on my break at work and even on some days off. Positioning myself in a chair facing a small tree, as I have come to learn, that sprouts behind one of the stone walls. Despite frequenting here for two years, I haven’t ever noticed it. The branches and the pink featherlike foliage, if that’s the word—neither a flower nor a leaf to me. I’ve not often sat facing this way, I suppose, with my back normally to Mott Street, watching the road. But on this day, I watch the branches—their innocuous intake of wind. The whole break languid.
Yesterday, when I had come on my day off, I watched the swaying tree a long time. The evening air, with its damp refreshment, I visited later than usual. The garden different at the end-of-day hours; apartment buildings on Mott blocked the late afternoon light. A shoal somewhere, gathering the pooling italic light. The warm whir of it with radiant, slow life. Leaving the garden in cool shadow, a humdrum replaced the chatter, where everything slowed. People waded toward chairs, of which now there were many, and guests in the cool, shady corners of ivy closed their eyes.
Over my shoulder, a wind chime bunched its metal tubing. There came a sound I had forgotten existed. Noise that belonged to the domain of childhood, I recalled in memories where it had been omitted—along the river and in a gazebo against the woods. Years forgotten, sealed, slightly widened. The flat past suddenly dimensional, with space for breath to slip in.
The feathering tree rose like a cowlick, or perhaps because it was so in my attention, I had not seen it as also being in place. Holding my book but really only staring at the garden, that evening, a curiosity crowded in me where before it had been ajar.
Going home again and pulling out the book I have on trees, my outside clothes tugged up to my thigh, I leaned against my bed, my knee resting on my mattress, and looked through the photos. I knew the tree might not be there, and I knew I could spend the next hour flipping through the pages just to miss it accidentally, but I wanted to know what the feathering thing was, and so spent 30 minutes skimming through.
I’m thinking now, of the way I used to feel about getting older—with anticipatory disappointment and a sense of loss. Each year would reveal less and less. Not just that parts of life would leave, but that the capacity and opportunity for something large would diminish. The possibility I found in youth, leaving the house knowing that anything may happen, that always everything could change. Though I never knew how.
The pleasure of that not knowing, I’m thinking about that pleasure.
Walking at evening, the light fallen or almost, and the glow of apartments I didn’t own, but might someday own. A new one on each block and a new life expanding inside them. Walls that were not real, that did not hold me to anything. This intoxicating quality of wanting, its malleability. A boundary yet to be pinned down by definitive choices, by the moments in which one thing became the next. When would it happen, I wondered, my life? And how? Who will live there with me, in these large rooms, who might fill that endless space? Standing in bars, or meeting new men, or taking on a job, or writing a good thing, and the culminating anticipation of a life that may suddenly and swiftly transform. Turning on the lights to the places these lives unfolded and looking around. The margins of my future, flexible and boundless, expanded in accordance with my desires.
Desires—or answers, as I saw them, to questions—that, I often reflected, changed all the time.
And I enjoyed considering each one. Decorating and redecorating my life with new things, things easily replaced with what I had just seen or discovered that before I had not known about. The joy of these ever-unfolding dimensions.
Returning home again those nights, to my small room, nothing changed, crawling into bed, where life could only get bigger. There was no end to it, what might be, that space of the time ahead, tomorrow as it were, where anything could go, where something would take shape.
And yet, things did come.
And yet.
Having what I desired curled the boundless space in again, edges drunk and creased into something firm, real, that could not so easily be broken or replaced. Disappointment was not the word, or fear, but more a kind of shame. Nothing was as big or filled the endless space I’d felt where anything might go or happen.
So it became an exceedingly valuable asset to me; what I saw as these questions of life, given at birth, of which there was a limited supply, and once answered, were gone forever. Like all good stories, there is no returning to it with the same curiosity, with the same satisfaction as that initial unfolding in which you knew nothing.
But this afternoon, I know it is not that way, and the wind chimes are trilling again with childhood.
Earlier, my co-worker was talking about a tedious task that no one wants to do. Which means it isn’t getting done, unless begrudgingly. Solutions uncertain, the problem persisting, it was suggested that we all do it. If it’s everyone’s job, it’s no one’s job, my co-worker said. And I went about my tasks until lunch.
Sitting in the garden, it’s interesting, I think, what she said.
A plume shakes as a bird lands amongst the trees’ feathers.
I did not find the name of this tree in my book, and for that afternoon on my day off, I cycled through some of the things I knew. I could take a photo of it, or describe it to a search engine, having stared at it so long, and it would give me an answer. But I didn’t want to do it that way. It strangely feels like cheating, as if I am robbing myself of something. Plus it is sometimes good, I think, to have something you are working out, but also good for that thing to be new, so that one is not always working the same thing too long.
Conceding this morning, three days after I had seen the tree and just one day after the curiosity became desperate, that the means at my disposal would not give me my answers. I had no books, no way of finding out on my own. Not at least, with a sense of accomplishment I wanted. How the weight of another person’s knowledge has real presence, bears real fruit. The unreal space of internet, anonymous and flat. I do not want to lose the preciousness of overlap where one person meets another.
A volunteer, one I see often, was sat at the table doing nothing, it seemed, as I passed by on my way to work. Overcoming a painful kind of shyness, because I think he is very handsome, I approached his table perched in front of this unknown thing.
“Excuse me,” I said, and he turned. My whole body at once shrank towards itself before, with a breath, I found my question.
“This…tree,” I said. “Or bush, I’m not sure.”
“This tree right here?” He asked, pointing to the rising feathery branches.
“Yes. Do you know the name of it, what it is?”
He answers my question. “Tamarisk.”
I turned; the name expands inside my chest—relief. Tamarisk
This is where words fall short. But it feels as though my world is fuller. And the memory, the narrow near past, widens to accommodate this new presence. This stretching leaves the familiar texture now, of knowing what I did not know before. The afternoons recall themselves, and the tall feathery branches rise against the flat past like brail. There it is, more real than it has ever been before. The margins of memory scored and fibrous with knowing.
Turning back to thank the volunteer, it seemed I had bothered him; perhaps I did, so early in the day, that immediate tone it sets of others’ neediness for you. But I admit I’m glad I asked, and I’m glad he knew, and I’m glad it happened this way as two people sharing something. The name rings out in my head, as I walk away, and I repeat it a few times so I do not lose it.
This immediate wonder does not cease. Even now, hours later, with my food eaten and the minutes of my break ticking by, I am enamored by it—the feeling it makes me aware of.
I probably learned it a long time ago. I know I have.
That I was wrong about the questions and answers thing.
Some things never run out. Even at the end, won’t it be a question, long asked: where am I going? One final breath and then an answer. And until then, I will be sitting in the garden or at our weekly dinner with friends or standing outside the bar on my birthday with another year past, that joyful reminiscence, so much changed, so much still yet to change, boundaries hardened into definitive choices and shape. But a new year waiting, soft with things to know, always more to ask. Laughing, wondering who will be here a year from now or gone, what we will talk about, where will we be, and what we will do with it—the time.
Still, sometimes, I sense the thing inside me shrinking.
But it’s like my coworker said. If it is everyone’s job, it is no one’s job. New words lull down my spine like pollen. If it is everything, then it is nothing. Do you see what I mean?
Wanting is wanting and having is having, and potential is the possibility of having what you want. Which is another way of saying wanting. Either something is there, or it is not. You cannot shrink something that was never there.
It’s all a trick of the light, but it feels real.
But then I am again aware of it. The width of my world. Points of expansion. The innocuous moment where your life fills like lungs, fills with breath. What comes only with age. My life is big because I have made it so. The passage of time, the gathering of experience. Children born, marriages, new people taking the place that for a long time held only what might be. So much better, I think. Much, much better.
All I ever did with my possibility was consider it. What else can you do with it?
The sun shifts lower in the sky. The longest day of the year closing in, but not yet here, leaving, at evening, some wanting. There is time still to name the world. Looking at that proud, tall piece, I am ever amazed at the simple and small ways our lives continue to get bigger.
Anyway. My world seems to have broken its cage, as summer tends to allow. The overgrowth. Let me make something of this, and call you what you are.
I tip my head back. The leaves part for the final gathering of sun. The warmth falls against my closed lids. Life, like the iris of an eye, I think, shrinking and expanding with stimulation, with light.
“I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter
which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every
road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth.”
Culpable by Joy Sullivan
I’ve seemingly lost the bug of sorts that makes me wish to share, without restraint, online. For the last two years I’ve tried to remember the social aspect of online forums but no matter what I do, the haze of algorithms and analytics blurs the casualness that I long to return to where it wasn’t a business but a pleasure. I feel at times the itch, and yet, cannot find the right channel anymore, though I am trying. I know it’s silly to sit and think a lot about social media, but I cannot help myself. Nor can I explain it, but there is something nice, something I am searching for in myself. Those small little videos of nothing and carousels of empty wine glasses, which I always like. Do you know what I mean? Just the little noticings and getting to share that as a small creative outlet.
AH!
I’m getting away from the point. I’ve gathered some things from my time away in which I spent my days languishing over this newsletter. I’m currently kinda blaming everything on burnout. It took a long time, and I’ve forgotten everything because I burned myself out so completely, but! I learned over and over again during these months, despite how painful I find it, of how restorative it is creatively to rest. It took a long time because I needed a lot of it. Here’s a glimpse of sorts!
Spent some time in Italy, for my best friend’s wedding, mulling over the feeling of my life getting bigger. I ate so much foccacia bread with Ava that we eventually had to lie and about what we had for our meals because that was all we wanted to eat. I tried espresso for the first time BLEH! Not for me. I don’t like coffee. We walked around the city of Verona, mornings, evenings, and afternoons. It was basically all we did. By the time we left, we didn’t need a map, but at night we looked in beautiful open windows, and European Blackbirds trilled all about, and it was lovely.
Liked every single photo on British Actor Richard E Grant’s instagram. HIGHLY RECOMMEND A FOLLOW! A lot of joy in those posts.
Did some tarot readings for myself. The tower came out. yikes! I shuffled again. 9 of swords. IYKYK
I pressed flowers and leaves for a journal I bought to write down the name of everything I am learning about. Tamarisk included! In the back pocket I’ve put my laminated pressed flowers. (Lamenation being just two pieces of tape)
Finished digitally gardening my copy of East of Eden, which took longer than it took me to read it. (Achievement!) Finished reading in September, finished gardening in May. All my quotes, notes, definitions, and the threads of connection to other books are there. It looks glorious.
Watched a movie about a tree with Nessie, Buzzy, and Ava. Long time coming and the Silent Friend was eerie in the soundtrack, almost horror-like, but a beautiful watch in a city without the abundance of trees I grew up having.
Read nearly ALL of the Emma M Lion books. I have to say I think this added a few weeks on to how long this newsletter took because my brain got a little melted reading them back to back. (complimentary)
I worked A LOT on my anxiety about wearing shorts. I bought a few and wore some of my older pairs, which could be a bit dated, but made me feel accomplished. Since I was in elementary school I’ve pretty much always prefered to wear jeans/pants in the summer which became kinda debilitating in adulthood and NYC heat. But I’m feeling brave this summer. Microdosing showing leg!
(invisible ink) Watched off campus and fell in love with John Logan. Okay sue me.
Ran out of storage on my phone over and over again.
Spent an evening in The West Village watching, on the side of a building, the Knicks win because, after going to a bar and them losing, I felt if I went inside it would make them lose. When they won me and a stranger kissed like that one Life Magazine photo of the soldier and the nurse.
Met Emily Wilson and word vomited all over her. THANK YOU CLARA!
Had a good old-fashioned solstice party with Kelly and Ava, and for the first time in a long time, I felt normal and good. We got dinner along the water then walked the West Side Highway, ending in FiDi and taking the ferry over to Williamsburg. I had felt like that era was over, though I don’t know why, and was glad to find it easily returned to and even, simply, in place.
Bought so much linen it’s crazy. Three pairs of pants, two shirts, I mean it’s wrinkle city in my closet.
Watched way too much TV. The Vampire Lestat, A knight of the seven kingdoms, House of the Dragon, Rivals, Off Campus, Widows Bay, Summer house, Below Deck, Real Housewives of Rhode Island. If it aired this spring I watched it.
And most recently, ran through a fire hydrant, which I’ve always wanted to do.
I’ve been feeling very iris-like. I feel my world shrinking and expanding, so I wrote some of those moments down to prove both that shrinking is not necessarily bad, and that expansion happens in lots of unexpected ways.
My friend had a baby.
This is probably the best example I can give in terms of expansion. For a long time, because we didn’t know their name, the baby I did not yet know could be anything, and I thought about them often. When they were born, I felt the boundary of my heart open, expand, even as the possibilities narrowed. There were things, I realized, this baby could not be that I had thought before I knew. And yet nothing was so good as what really came.
Wrote quite a few birthday texts these last months. The gratitude of another person’s presence in your life stretches the space inside you, and suddenly everything in you and about you is bigger.
Rested. A shrinking, a coming close to myself.
Read. Other people’s words press against the walls of my world and push outward, need space and so make it, and suddenly I see life differently, at new heights or angles.
Saw many sexy men. The capacity for which I could imagine sexy men increased tenfold recently.
My friend got married.
This in particular is interesting because her husband has been here for a long time, but at her wedding I felt a profound realness to his existence, and her existence, and this answer to a question of a kind. Here was the man she was to spend her life with, and so I would know him for all my life as well. The sense that my circle of people had solidified in some way that I had become acustomed to and yet was noticing also for the first time.
Tried new foods. Now there’s an answer to a question and sometimes the answer is no thank you! But sometimes, too, the answer is yes, YES!
Had a crush.
It is kind of devastating too. But in a good way. Everything gets bigger when you have a crush. Even sleep. The back of your eyelids, the expanse of your arms.
Here is this Newsletter’s mood board! I hope you feel a wide world inside of it.
Before we part, two things.
It feels somewhat insincere to add that song at the top because the reality is I wrote this entire thing listening to the wind and to the initial 48 seconds of End of August By Noah Kahan. Not unusual to insist one song from the lived experience over the written one, I admit. Writing songs, as in songs to listen to while writing, in my practice, is often just a way of finding consistent noise that the mind can gloss over with more pleasant ease. I cannot speak to the entire song, but the tranquility and the din of evening and endings and a sense of the present day were very integral to writing this, and so I add this as a footnote to you all. It was what it felt like sitting in that park looking at that great big tree. If you were curious.
I know this took a long time, and I feel a sense of anxiety and guilt looking at this year’s newsletters. I wish there was more to show, but I also know that the time is good time. Not wasted or forgotten or taken for granted. I wanted to say that I believe in a time when I have more to give, I’m filling the tank, resting, and I know there will be a learning curve to it all. It’s good to have something to think about for a long stretch, no doubt, but I also look forward to recovering and to the consistency that will come with taking care of myself. Thank you for sticking around to read even through the long silences. I hope it was worth the wait!
That’s all for now! 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, Elizabeth Street Garden, our questions, our answers
Love always,
Chloé
Worth the wait for this one!!!
you are never too late to wait for. loved this so much xx