The Past is an Unclenched Fist

I chose wrong this time

“At some point in my life, I had attributed change to be a concrete form we take on instead of the sometimes conscious conversations we have with our past selves. Or even so, change I believed was something that happened to us more often than it was something we decided to do.” We’re Changing

I remember thinking the city would be different, but not that I would be. I think there was a ceiling to what my imagination could do, I think I thought that my misery was a circumstance that would never change. 

It was a thought I had from the point I turned twenty-two. 

I imagined the city, very calmly, as a place that would not mean the same things it used to. It never could hold on to everything. We’d eaten at restaurants too many times, staggered home the same route, resigned our lease more than usual. I’d find, with each summer, a different sureness of the memories that held on. The streets would recycle the old, immediate recollections, and replace them with the new ones. I knew there was a future imminent where I was glad for how this life changed, how new friends got invited to old parties, the new subways and streets home we could take.

Moving through the layers of memory was easy, all of it seemed readily available. On a particularly potent evening, I could walk home and find with me several other similarly situated nights, ones with different laughs, yet always the same sadness. When I did make it home, before bed or while making my tea the following morning I could possess a certain desperation to rid myself of the sadness. Please tell me what I need to learn, I would say to myself, I promise I will do it. 

But I’d wake the next morning and find the old reality, the new memories, the same pain finding its way into them. As if the tapestry of my life was sewn with a terribly sad thread.

Always new laughs, never new tears. 

I don’t know. I suppose I had suffered so long, held onto the pains of the past so readily, that I was sure I was born for it. It did not seem to me a matter of what we deserve or don’t deserve, it was a fixed idea or a skill you have or don’t. The longer I lived here, with all the memories good or bad in the places I’d revisited, the more sure I felt the pain would forever remain. Not in the way that to live was to suffer, but in the sense that I had tried to let go of things you could not let go of. 

The trouble was, however, that sometimes reality would dissolve just a little. After maybe one glass of wine or a breeze brushing the hair of my arms, behind the gesture or glass was a certain gentleness, ideas that made me a little scared. I was content in a different way when I passed through those moments. I understood things I could not yet describe. Objects faded from my perspective where once they’d been so close. I’d feel the relief of this reality, the way you feel the heat break in August. Suddenly what had been, was no longer. Then the pain would return and I’d realized what I’d lost. 

 I could not discern if these feelings were true or fabled. There was no new pain behind the other where a miracle in and of itself had already arrived. It seemed to me I was not the type of person to get two strokes of luck. I would putz around my heart, tapping it as if looking for a wallet in a pair of pants, trying to find the pocket of sadness that had come with me everywhere. It seemed an impossible feat, I had tried many times to leave it behind and suddenly it was nowhere to be found. 

So on and so forth I’d walk down through old neighborhoods and know looming, these faces lining the street, old buildings, dusty cars, would get older and park somewhere new. The definitive lines of endings and beginnings would recede to our eyes and foreheads and everything would someday mean something else. Even pain. Yet after going there, feeling what could be, I could not picture the life promised, where what had stood for everything, had suddenly meant nothing. That was the cap of my ability. I couldn’t imagine my sadness away even if I felt it vanish from time to time. 

I’d pretend to believe what I remembered from their arrival. I’d try to find the flaws in my logic that had resolved themselves in the other impermanent reality. I had meant what I said, I would learn what needed to be learned even though in part I was afraid of the answer that would be given. Even if it meant I would choose the wrong answer one hundred more times.

It seemed that I did. It went on this way for many years. Four, to be exact. Which is a small number of years to have, but perhaps a little too many with which you are meant to hold your hope and suffering in the same hand. 

 I did not, in that time, ever see myself as deluded or deceitful. The fact was I wanted to change and the other fact was I did not know how. And I think it was true in a way. There are things we hold onto with which we cannot let go of. It is not our call to make. As if there were a fist wound tightly by circumstance, by tie. The past was a very warm blanket it had clung itself to, wrapped between its knuckles. 

Anyway,  one afternoon I passed a cafe and began to feel the naturalness of a behavior I once had tried so hard to have. I do not know what I gave to acquire it. I just know I tried for a long time to persuade the clenched fist of the past. Perhaps it just had to get tired, letting go only when it was spent. I realized what I had once cared about no longer mattered. The life I wanted and was simultaneously afraid of what it required had arrived. It was warmer than I thought, and as ordinary as ever. I almost didn’t notice it. 

Three years ago I said change was something we decided to do. Now, do I feel any differently? Not particularly. 

It happens to you sometimes the way it can. You don’t get a say, one day folds over itself and you arrive at tomorrow and what it brings with no warning. Though more change happens by your own hand. You decide to think differently about the things that once bothered you. Not all the time, maybe only once in a while. And there is something like a reality superimposed onto your own, which you are aware of the certainty it offers, understand its logic, yet cannot yourself abide by its laws. Until one afternoon you walk down the street and a cafe is mumbling, you look at your reflection in the great windows of an apartment lobby, and with much preamble and little announcement, you’re suddenly not the person you were. All the laws of that reality check out, you’ve done the math.

And that's the joke, isn’t it? It was never meant to be monstrous. In fact, its almost easy. This reality arrives just as effortlessly as it did those years back. There is something gentle, ordinary, even inviting about the new life as it appears to you. To be there is to want it, to have it is to not feel the need to go back. I will not resurrect my suffering. Summer is over. Perhaps change was never meant to be a punishment and happiness is not its sacrificial object. Maybe the only thing we ever truly must give is time. 

Tonight I go to bed without a single prayer.

The answer is here in an unclenched fist.

It will be there when I wake up.

August 17th, 2023 Knitting a gift for a friend

“There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems, will be in the background forever—an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence—collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us.” The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Born to Run Bruce Springsteen

But it was clear to me that, unlike all other softness, this was happening in our world, not the other one close by. August 29th, 2023 9:48 PM

But it is September now and the train stations are warm when the air in morning is cool. I think summer is gone now forever, this one at least. If it comes back it will not be as we knew it this year. September 1st, 2023 9:20 AM

If you are looking to change, perhaps now is the time. It is September and the world is growing richer. The greens are getting deeper and the reds crisper. The weather is different between morning and afternoon. Maybe September is a month in which two things exist at once. The thing that is and what it will become. I think it’s worth taking your time around, noticing what there is to notice. Perhaps you cannot integrate into such realities just yet, but it’s nice to recognize them when they show up. I say it every year, perhaps spring is the oldest blessing, but August to October is the sacred time. Take a very long walk, find the sadness that used to be there is momentarily gone, believe that what has vanished one day won’t return. The year is not yet over. You can become what you have wanted to become. Unclench your fist, turn it over, and hold your own hand. Let yourself be the gentle thing you feel.

The September mood board is waiting for you! Enjoy!

My paid newsletter comes out next week. It is a more narrative exploration of each month’s theme. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. If that’s not your thing, 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 Starbucks Fridays, those hands, and the answer in the end

Love always,

Chloé