Some Rooms are for Leaving

Choosing differently this time

Thumbnail art by Mart

The party was over and I think my hair knew it. The outside world had not lost its humidity and I had not been tipsy enough to forget it was waiting, even as we’d eaten dinner, as we’d poured more wine. Though we were three weeks into July summer had just begun. My beauty felt absolute and the weather was getting to me. I wanted always to be in water, wanted to be around friends, and found it difficult to be alone. So indeed, summer had finally arrived with all its wanting. A perfect stillness, a humid quiet waited for us. The kind where you can hear the heat. Our shoes clicked against the ground, all the sounds were that you’d found in childhood when you woke in the middle of the night. Where far away car doors closed and people spoke loudly because they were sure no one else was around to hear. We were all leaving. We who had sat at the table all night, eating good home-cooked food, who had laughed and shared stories, played our game, and enjoyed the feeling of meeting in many ways for the first time.

The air was so thick our voices couldn’t carry. The words about getting home and nice to meet you fell flat against the pavement. Nothing lingered. In our hands, we’d had folded pieces of paper which we were instructed not to read until we were alone. 

Even though it was hot outside and the air conditioning was on in the car I rolled the window down. The driver had his own open and I didn’t think he’d mind the waste. Sometimes you don’t need the cold to stay too long to feel its relief. 

This way home was familiar to me, though I’d only been to my friend's apartment one other time. I’d used to visit an apartment a few blocks over and had first come to know this neighborhood a different way. Where in a room looking over the street the white light off a courtyard bulb used to sink in and I’d lie in a bed that was not my own and wonder how much longer I had to be good before I was loved. I’d have done anything for it. The person beside me, to whom the bed belonged, slept sound knowing this too and often tested the limits of what I could endure which apparently was everything. But by now the sensation of visiting had entirely been replaced. It was a new world.

And yet the old one seemed just there, carved out, eroded by meaning and memory. Not scant enough to which I couldn’t find the pathway of thinking with such ease. Why was he so mean to me, even when I was good? What would it have taken? What will it take for love to be gentle?

I closed my eyes, the wind skating across the skin of my lids. It's a strange trick of memory, returning home. Or maybe more vertigo, where the inner ear is thrown from its equilibrium and somehow this return, even when it's joyous, conjures and tempts other returns. Ways of thinking, old, impossible modes of thought you’d abandoned. Whatever logic had abated reverts again to a forgotten intensity. I remembered, the way going home always makes me remember, what it meant to be sad. More than sad, something ancient and endless. Prophetic in nature, the feeling that your sadness was meant only for you and no matter what you’d done you’d have found it. And so, in a way, I was protective of it. I wanted not to give it up. Not because I wanted it but because it was mine. It seemed essential, how am I meant to be understood if I don’t recall at times and carry with me through the present my becoming?

I hovered there a moment at the threshold of feeling. Teetering in place, aware of the delicacy of a decision and the intoxicating stupor of memory where you’re in control of the intake of your pain. Where you remember everything, and know the way through because you’d already done it before, and so there would be no surprises, no pain you hadn’t already known how to survive. It seemed to me such a fair price if I thought about it. If I thought about what I’d get if I returned to the neighborhood that old way. Even in the fragility of what had been, in the agony of waiting, there was a relief in the proximity I had then believed myself to be, from everything I wanted. The hope that every solution was only one more day away. Thinking myself good, having a side of the bed, having a place to go home from. Thinking that the person who lay beside me would notice in the middle of the night I’d left, and would miss me so much he would turn over in the bed and find, from nothing, love. Then he’d no longer be so mean to me. 

There was a clear threshold with which I might walk through where I knew that once I began I would not be able to stop. I would ride the whole way home with the old feeling. How welcoming it was, how familiar, and all mine. I’d been sad a hundred times in this direction, on this street, in a car not unlike this one. Only before I could push through the world and plunge into muscle memory, I looked at the folded paper in my hand. 

Lovely as it was, why I had it. We were meant to write down our first impressions of everyone who’d come to dinner. Though I was not alone I opened the three times folded small piece of paper and read the words that were inside. 

An interesting prompt, one that makes you more aware of this thing you’re doing, of subjecting yourself to something new. And in such a setting it doesn’t feel so bad, it actually is nice for a change to be meeting people you had never met, to ask for names and occupations, and to actually not be known by the way in which the world has wounded you. That girl I was, a few blocks over and a few years away, a stranger to them. And too a stranger to me for a moment because now I’m in an apartment where love isn’t a day away, it's right there making dinner. And somehow, despite all miraculous odds, it seems it's possible we understand each other anyway. It seems really, I was a good person and people knew this, they could tell so clearly it made them want to write it down.

I finished reading and folded the paper up and tucked it back in my purse for later. 

I closed my eyes again, but for longer. The world seemed to have righted itself just enough that what appeared before me was a curiosity I had never had before, for a reality in which I denied myself the old pleasures. And it seems strange in hindsight that we should have to convince ourselves not to choose pain, but we do, and I did. Halfway home I decided to think of the dinner I had eaten, the stories we shared. I was surprised at its gentleness touched by its beauty, yet could not deny the disappointment where you’re aware that though it's better this way, it is different. I think I’d been hoping for a long time that if I returned enough to the memory I’d find an outcome where what had happened hadn’t. I’d find a word or a gesture where it became clear to me that I was loved. Then, even though he decided to be mean anyway, at least it wasn’t for nothing. 

Accepting my happiness felt like at last acknowledging I’d endured something rather than experienced it. Which made me sad but in a new way. Which seemed strangely older than the first wound. The experience of happiness in spite of and because you’d known sadness. Which made the world more precious than it had ever been. It revealed to me an effortless way to carry the ancient sadness I was born to possess. A way in which I did not have to feel the sadness so much as transform it, to let it bring a certain clarity of thinking. A lens over the eyes, a touchstone to experience, to feel the full depth of everything. Where in a pocket of understanding you find some neighborhoods though the same are two entirely different places. That some rooms are for loving and others are for leaving.

July 21st, 2023. Me and Edie By Dakota in a room for loving

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:

1. The Holdovers dir Alexander Payne: After I turned 20 I became obsessed with the idea of tragedy. The fatalistic Grecian version where it seemed unavoidable, that some things were decided without our say and yet with our participation. After watching the holdovers it was nice to be jolted from the old reality, given a little control.

   

   

   

2. The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan “Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.”

3. this meme duh!

   

4. Any art drawn by Mart but mostly this piece that I saw recently on twitter

   

5. This piece by Ryebreadgf on tumblr

   

6. Petite Maman dir Céline Sciamma: A mother saying this to her child is beyond the realm of anything forgettable to me. And I have not stopped thinking of it since I saw it.

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 all the rooms we find ourselves in

Chloé