The Bluestems are Blowing
and you are in a very warm memory. Eveything is about to change but you do not know it yet
It is not always a very long moment—that’s the problem. To be touched by life, the immediate moment its slender fingers push you into a new understanding, is often a short gesture. Strange, really, how it is. The long shadows of a single rock along the blacktop stretch as the sun flattens against the horizon that is, to me, the way those things go. The tiny blemish and its long ripple against your world, its longevity is sometimes unfathomable. The way from nothing really the sound of the bluestems along the road blow in the new cold of spring just to strike you and an aura bleeds into the eyes until it fills the frame and then some.
I made a list of those kinds of things. I opened the window in the living room and I waded through the abstract memory into the palpable one. Where, sitting on the couch I could feel the aura fill the frame again, the heat of June the hush of winter. The outliers that changed the average of a year and I wrote them down in a list and I wanted to choose one. One that seemed greater than the others, more inspiring, but the problem revealed itself as I revealed it to you. You cannot really stretch such things across the page. They exist as they are and softly at that, sometimes revealing nothing but a feeling and it is not profound in the way people like but the way art likes. Where really a feeling you have already felt a hundred times layers over a section of memory and preserves that place for you to return to. So I am looking at this list and I cannot write one, so I will write a few, and maybe it will say nothing but I’m okay with that.
I want to touch life I said. I’m sitting at my desk. I can touch it from here only through memory.
I.
You are standing outside an apartment that you will never see again. No one was home when you got there and no one is home as you leave it. The halls are holding onto the cold dampness of winter though it is nearly mid-spring. That was the year the cold stayed into late April and the light outside was always yellow, and for a very short time, staring that day actually, you were happier than you’d been in a very long time. Outside the air is neither warm nor cold and it makes everything feel fresh and deeply unsure. Everyone is walking as if they are on their way home but it is not quite the time for it, in fact, it isn’t even yet 3:00.
You notice it then, the strangeness of everything. Suddenly you exist more real and more part of life than you had before you’d gone in and in consequence, everyone’s dimensions became flimsy once you got out. And it isn’t really that everyone is unreal, it is simply that at any given time someone in the world is the most present and for now it is you. You can see it then—those hazy edges of a beginning. There’s a singular sureness, that this feeling is real, and it isn’t because it’s spring or the birthday that has just passed. The only way you know how to comprehend it is to believe in the apartment you will never see again. You think you are leaving home to go to another, but really you cannot go back. Which doesn’t make what you think of beginnings any less true it is actually more true because of this. You do not turn back as you leave and you will not regret this.
II
You have been away a very long time. The windows were down in the car but you didn’t notice it until you got out, that the air was old air. It belongs to a year you already had and gave up which has now secluded itself into one night. For a moment you think to check for all the old things, it seems that they should be here, but you decide against it. Not because they won’t be there, but because you won’t.
III.
You are sitting under a tree while your friend Emily is taking your photo. June is nearly over and everyone will be sick of summer within a matter of hours. The park is full though, there is still time to spare, time to sit along the grass that hasn’t yet burned and feel the rich soft green beneath your hands. This is the youngest memory you have. That is, you are never younger than you were that day, not even as a child. The farther you get from that day the smarter you become in either direction. Emily is listening to you talk for a long time, longer than you ought to when you are hanging out just two people, but she is a good friend, the kind of friend you will keep even when she moves away and moves back and switches apartments and lives off a train that you do not know very well.
This is one of those times where friendship is important but something else must happen first for you to understand its depth. You have not quite broken the surface of your capacity to love another person. It is not the absence of any appreciation but the barrier of youth where, at any given time, you have had so little life and want for so much that it is impossible to truly have. The remedy is loss but it will be a long time before that happens. You are not aware that you know this, that the people you keep in company are to become the great loves of your life. There is a satisfied hum in their presence, like a good song from another room, and in a few years, you will open the door and hang the photos from that day in the park on the wall.
IV.
The world is louder than it should be at this hour. You left the window open. You could go back to sleep if you wanted to, closing your eyes will yield the dream you lost a moment ago, but you are also not as tired as you should be. In fact, your mind is clearer in a way that is often evading you during the day when there is too much context to the world. You do not know how many nights in a row you wish someone was there, but the rhythm is broken. It takes you a moment to realize this and you know that beside you is a space not taken up, but instead of turning its direction you lift your eyes toward the window and that big world. In the morning things can change, but that is okay. It is enough to know how to want it once.
V
Why is it so cold here even though it’s summer? Ah—yes, this is home. The sound is warm, the waves are small, and Long Island has disappeared behind a smogged oblivion that looked for now like clouds. Your parents are here too and this is the way you’ve learned to walk with them. Where, climbing the bluff you speak as if it is the first time of the houses settled over the hill. They are fine and unlike each other in the right way. People are always coming in to buy these places and making them unlike in the wrong way but here is preserved perfectly for you.
Beside you, your father is talking about the town he grew up. It is this town where you grew up too. And he has the voice he always has, the one that suggests that though you are there, and though these streets have the same names as the one he has seen they are not at all the same place. Where he lived is unreachable to you, accessed only through the memory of a man looking out at what is left.
So you turn your head.
It seems obvious now, though for you it just beginning. The town you grew up in is receding. The crabgrass is gone and the lifeguards are younger. They work shorter summers and in fact summer was never as long as it had been that first year going into high school. When did it get like this? You are not sure. The more you look the more changed it becomes and the most annoying part of it all is you knew it would and yet for some reason it still surprises you. It is hard to remember what it used to be, but you know that it was not like this. At the end of his story, he tells you of the snowy afternoon he went sledding off the roof of a neighbor’s house. No one can do this anymore, he reminds you, because no one ever leaves after Labor Day anymore. You understand that though it was not true before, tonight is the first night you will go to sleep having grown up in the same town as your father.
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:
Dreaming by Maxfield Parrish
Loss Protocol by Julien Baker
Contact by Carl Sagan: “She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
Frank O’Hara reading Having a Coke with You: The first time I slowmaxxed I included having a Coke with you in things I’d been mulling over. A friend, Maria, and I had been talking about it and now just a little while ago I saw this video circulating and I thought about a poem I saw about someone reciting this poem from memory and I thought about how strange it is to think of how far we’ve come from the first slowmax to the most recent and the that follow with us
This commentary by Joe Wright in Pride and Prejudice (2005): After speaking with
on Pride and Prejudice, I’ve been thinking a lot about the commentary I mentioned in the interview.
A Conversation with Richard Silken by Thomas Hobohm : “You have to fill the tank. You have to move your body and get out and look at things. You have to talk to people and eat strange food, travel if you can, watch movies with subtitles, listen to music outside of your habits, go to art galleries and concerts, do things you’re bad at. You have to challenge yourself, keep learning new things, participate. And all of these things fall under the umbrella of “Stay curious.” And you have to have fun. My housemate is being fussy with me today because I am talking to the dogs in Spanish about how my father fought in the clone wars. Sometimes I am ridiculous, but sometimes he is joyless.”
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 you being a beautiful memory
Chloé
my GOD
Contact by Carl Sagan.... this changed my life.