Someday I'll Love Chloé Williams

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves / After Ocean Vuong

But lately, I feel like I’m shining a flashlight into a black hole, my life feels large and my future seems small. When I try to think ahead, to imagine even a good future I hit a wall. What did it feel like before, when I thought of my life coming? If I try to remember I’m not sure what I’m remembering. When I try to write it down there are no words. This is a new story and I don’t know how to tell it, but I can tell the old story again. I know you’ve heard this one before, but it's the most I can remember, just that much ahead— a paragraph, a word. I want to use it as a map, to get myself out, even if what had been true no longer is.

In the home I grew up I think I’m the most precious and beautiful. Seven years ago I went home as spring became summer and my father told me I should walk barefoot in our yard. He said it was good for you, to connect directly to the earth. He was not usually like that, suggesting something that seemed at the time like a pseudoscience. Now it feels less unusual, that someone who’d loved nature my whole life would recommend to me after I moved to the city that I should connect to it again and again.

Within the house, the feeling of beauty grows around me, like an aura. Outside, in the yard walking barefoot, nature seems to have this transformative quality wherein life makes us terribly aware of itself. The sunlight filters in from overhead illuminating the fine mist of my understanding of myself. Strangely, however, to be so aware of its presence dilutes its existence almost entirely. It changes, thins, detaches itself from my body so I can see it better. And when the world is given movement, the wind passing through the woods or the shadows creeping up across the lawn I feel existence move through this new thing that has come from me. 

I wonder if I’m God or a poet, or only a spectator of animation. Regardless, what had once been my chest now has its own chest, what had once shared my breath now has its own breath. There is life outside where it had once only been within, the beauty that had been around me is now independent and living. Which is to say it’s alive and allowed the same flawed existence as the rest of us. We lay down, I close my eyes, but I still see it. And I don’t see how I want it to be but how it really is. There's a clarity in accepting this fact, that what we produce will ultimately be made of the same. 

I like this beauty, I do. I like the way they brush their teeth, and the shadows beneath their eyes. I like the way their legs feel like grass and their momentum looks like wind, because I love life and living in all its many forms. As something sentient and as something natural, to which this beauty has come from. I feel their humanity, the shifting weight of searching for comfort, and the way they will age. I see the blooming and the dying, the spring and the fall.

That is the old story, here is the new. I know it now. 

I have stopped having words and I don’t know how to get them back. I’ve wanted to solve the burden that came in August, of realizing that I’d broken a momentum I could never get back. I’d stopped writing and I thought I could go back, I thought I could stop and start again very easily, but when I returned I found something vacant. I’m sitting in my living room and I have so much to do and nothing to say. I don’t feel very alive and I can’t remember when I last did. It scares me. It wakes me up in the night. 

This is the wall I hit. I don’t remember how to feel alive. Not just in the present, but in the future too. 

The most beautiful part of your body/ is where it’s headed. 

Recently I’ve begun to wonder if I only change because I hope I’ll be rewarded by a divinity. I’m always sure I’m only one new idea away from having everything I want. Like on late tiring nights like tonight I wish I could go to sleep with the steady life I desire and answers to questions I think I’ve been asking too long. Or how over the weekend when I was at the third wedding I’d been to this year for the first time, I really wished I could meet someone new.  But last year I ruined my credit score and everyone I meet is a reverberated less charming version of the very first problem I ever kissed. 

When I go home in November for Thanksgiving I don’t know what will happen when I arrive. I feel like I lost the ability I used to have in making things. I don’t want the beauty to be made of the same things as me anymore. I’m not sure what those are. I feel I’ve become, just like everything else, a repetition or an echo, and I want again to be the voice. 

For a long time, I thought I understood what people meant when they said you think you’re life will be one way but really it's another. I thought it was a moment of hindsight and reflection, but it happens in the present too. Two emotions emerge and one of them is the sense that a foreign place is up ahead and the other is the understanding that it is not what you expected. I’m taking the beauty I used to have, the living thing, and trying to apply it over the dying. It isn’t working. I have to do something else and I don’t think I have to know what that is. 

It's interesting though, from that old story I remember. The periods with which I love life so much are equally full of mourning. Fall is the relief of the heat, the returning of my body to my body, but it's the reminder too that everything I love I’ll also lose. That's the condition, the green of the trees and the sound of the leaves on a windy day are going. Spring is a reminder that what is of my body will leave my body. What leaves returns to us year after year, but the heat waits on the other side. Leaving and going, that's all it is. 

So I can’t be ahead, can’t move past the present moment which is a leaving then so be it. Fall is my favorite season. And I know there will be a return even if I can’t remember. I’m not an echo, but a cycle. 

For this is love. To press/ one frame against another/ and when something like a finger is found between this pressing,/ to press nevertheless.

This all makes more sense in my head, let me know if you understand. I’ll say one more thing. Last night I was going home alone and it was nearly two in the morning and the street lights illuminated the leaves on the trees. I was walking in the middle of the street because there were no cars and I was watching the way the light revealed the veins of the still-green but dying things. I wanted the wind to blow so I could hear it, it’s my favorite sound. I guess we aren’t allowed what we want all the time because no breeze came. We also don’t get to know all the time what our life will be. Two days ago I couldn’t imagine myself in yesterday, but there I was. 

So to say, not knowing how it will be doesn’t mean it won’t exist in the small beauties and little miracles I’ve always loved. 

I’m remembering again.

I love life. 

I am life, it's in me. I have to believe that will be worth something to me again eventually.

October 31st, 2023 1:01 PM

Writers and Lovers by Lily King

“I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.” The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky,

I’m watching the starlings in the park and I’m trying to find the answer as to why I’m so alone. Or why that book that no one liked still makes me sick with grief. October 11th, 2023 10:26 AM

Like on late tiring nights like tonight I wish I could go to sleep with the steady thrum of answers to questions. Or this weekend when I was at the third wedding I’d been to this year and for the first time I really wished I could meet someone new. But last year I ruined my credit score and everyone I meet is a reverberated less charming version of the first problem I ever kissed. November 2nd, 2023 12:40 AM

Here is November’s mood board!

If you wanna hear more about this theme, my paid newsletter comes out in two weeks. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. If you’ve had enough, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy 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 remembering, to loving.

Love always,

Chloé