Yearbook Vol. 4

The Year of Tomato Soup and Butter Croissant

This post is tooo long for email. If you don’t find thank you notes, an orange, and a love always chloe at the end you haven’t hit bottom. Click the banner to enjoy this year in all its glory.

“Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.” Anthony Bourdain

It was the way the door had been left open. The rain was never going to stop. This detail seemed to prove this, the not closing. It was the kind of thing you’d do only if it rained all day. 

I turned toward my friend and crossed my arms, “As you can imagine,” I said. “This wasn’t really how I thought my life was gonna go.”

Of the many stories that exist, that have been told and retold, this one is the oldest. I’d even say the first. Maybe even it is every story all the time. I thought this was going to happen, but then it didn’t, something else was in my expectations place. Anyone who writes or reads will know the words inciting action. Inciting, meaning starting, to bring into being. Godly, in a way, creation at its finest. This story is being told because something else was supposed to be here, but it isn’t. If it were, then we’d never have written it down. 

So, we’re four years in. 

And we’re only at the beginning. 

Which is funny to me, because all year I’ve been thinking it was the ominous end. To what exactly? To a lot of things. To a life I felt was growing increasingly obsolete for a 27-year-old woman. The one where I worked retail and didn’t have a book out, and my manuscript remained unfinished. The one where my newsletters were always late, and I had a manager, a boss, instead of just my editor who sees work the way I do. Who is frequently, even exclusively, on the same page as me about everything. 

But you’ve been here. You know that isn’t how it happened. Nothing ended. Nothing was obsolete. And that makes me want to use one word. I’ve been trying to avoid it. At times in my kitchen, while I cook dinner, I think about what didn’t happen, about the shift I have the following morning, about the weekend I will lose to customers who are mean to me and managers who talk to me like I’m 8 years old, and  I want to say something absolute and categorical about the year. 

But I've said it before, said it, I think last year, and I'm repeating it for my own sake. I don't want to use the word ‘good’ or ‘bad’ anymore. Words like that are flat, rectangular, sterile. They don’t ask any good questions, reveal no greater insight. They are the end of a thought, a classification, rather than an opening. So to say, they are too small, words with nowhere to go, containing in themselves a thing that has everywhere to go, with a border that gets smudged as time continues to pass. Good and bad, that's not what this thing is, living. Or, it is what it is, but it's only a portion, a fragment, of something much larger and more difficult to contain.

Yes, better words exist. Metaphors. Similies. All dynamic in nature. Life seems, incredibly, more like a dinner party to me as it goes on. The years finicky like a recipe. I’m sure there is a better simile, but that is for another time, another age, a different year where life no longer feels so edible and comes to me instead as something else. And this is already going out pretty late, and I’ve only just realized what I’ve been trying to say all along. 

This year broken down into its individual ingredients and memories are not what I wanted, but it was what I got. This is what I have to make with. Good and bad, arbitrary markers don’t change what is true. They are not necessarily ingredients themselves, either. The way texture is not an ingredient, or aroma. And it's true, some bitter flavors work well once placed beside something else. Some things, before mixing, don’t work well when they’re alone. That the entirety of it, each piece playing off of one another, can make a product that is enjoyable, even irreplaceable. And we can’t leave anything out we have to put it all in. 

We have to say, yes, it all happened. I’ve measured the experiences all out. Given the right weight to it all. I’ve put in the old friends, the pinhole heart, my photo obscura. The many dinner parties, the rooms I belonged in, and the rooms I should’ve left. I’ve got my brother’s 17th birthday and counted the cicadas that came from the ground. The heart clutter was sifted in, collections counted, and the lights were turned off as the last person went home. The many trips there and back again to the raft with my dad, with all the kids I grew up with and no longer know. I’ve got three children’s birthdays, who four years ago did not exist, but now make me laugh, who with me figure out this world for the first time. I’ve tossed in my gratitude, the missed deadline of my manuscript, the hours at my shitty job. There's been an eclipse, and crabs crawling across tiny hands. There's the months spent longing for companionship, aware of the empty space made for someone else, the care and desire made for someone I do not yet know. And people have moved farther away, farther than I wanted them to. They’ve quit jobs and cities, they’re gone and they’re not coming back. Not ever. No matter how much I wish they would. So I will take the time off work, I’m boarding the train, I promise I will see you very soon. 

And this, here, is a story only being told because the other one didn’t happen. 

Yes, despite all circumstances, I think that my world continues to get a little better all the time. There was a time not so long ago when it seemed impossible that I might know more people. There didn’t seem to be any space. But life goes in another direction, you meet people and find there was a space waiting. That, really, it had been there all along. And sitting in a cafe across from the person who used to work that shitty job with you, it seems worth it in the end, to not have the thing you’d wanted. That this is much sweeter, with all the right ingredients mixed in. The idea of it not happening makes you feel sad in a way that is difficult to talk about because you know and have known the desire in you to know this person for a very long time. 

The year is done then. The newsletter late, and the ladle sitting in the pot. I’m hungry for everything and holding the past year in my mouth. Not as bitter as I expected, rich, hearty, too much might make you sick, but I’ve always had a keen sense when to stop. This messy flaky year, dodging all predictions. Not a good year or a bad one, but the year of tomato soup and buttered croissant. Not very catchy, but how much of life really is? 

Anyway, am I making any sense? I don’t like to cook. Everything is a bit crazy lately. Maybe you can tell. I’m only a chef when I have to be. 

There’s only one other thing I have left to say, which is this. 

I think I know what we’re doing now. 

Took a few years. Took, really, the unexpected life change to reveal just how often I was wrong about everything. Before I took the summer off I thought that I was meant to do this newsletter one way. I thought that it had to happen the way I said it would, because four years ago, that's how I said I would do it. And I thought always that I was failing you in some great big way when life proved not to be the same thing it was when I was 23 and in college and living in a world that increasingly does not resemble the one I have here now. It seemed painfully obvious to me, all my shortcomings. That you, the readers, were aware of my shortcomings. That you saw me in this specific light of all I couldn’t do. 

But you are also never what I expected. I don’t know why I thought that, why it had been so hard to get until I had to step away. Until I had to look at this thing as a whole, to see you seeing me. Which is to say you are increasingly and outstandingly generous. Your sympathies never seem too thin, your patience never stretched. The year has been, by all accounts, strange and unconventional. You read two failed drafts of a newsletter that didn’t happen. You went all summer with just a list and a couple of passing words. You met me where I was and read words by a person who didn’t know what to say, who had run out of things to say. You all see the truth, that I'm doing the best I can with the life I was given. And always, you’ve had something kind and nice to say. 

This has always been something we do together. Which is to say, it’s a family recipe, a mixing of minds, a sharing of experience, a mincing and peeling, savoring every bite. I could not have made this meal without you. Yes, August, I was away, August was the buffet, but with you, life has always been one long endurable feast. 

Each year I like to make a personality quiz, both because I love them and also because its a nice beginning walk down memory lane as I start to reminisce on the year past. It makes me more intimately close with each theme and what was said there. Figure out which one resonates the most with your spirit!! Or with the person you are today that you won’t be tomorrow. Share your results, or tuck them away in your pocket. The world is your oyster!

Here’s what I got:

Try it out!

*Denotes paid content. However, just like last year, anything that makes this list that was under paywall has been liberated from said paywall forever! Enjoy at your leisure as a gift of gratitude, from me to you.

1. The Fan Favorite:

   Resulting in a whopping 109 new subscribers, 217 likes, 13 comments, 13,000 views, and 88 restacks, Laundry Day is by and large the most popular post of the year. And it is also one of my favorites on account it came very naturally, the truth not hard to parse out, which apparently everyone noticed. Struck gold and cashed out so to speak.

   1. What I know is that I know how. I know how to love life, how to hold onto it, how to let it hold onto me. I remember buying good fruit, how to clean my counters, tuck in my shirt, change my sheets and I remember how to let my sadness pass through me. A mourning dove has begun to sing outside our window and I remember how it feels to let that stand for the hope that winter will end and the good season will come with all its tiny worships. I remember how to hold two contradicting ideas, that I’m not good but that this is good, and to let those separate channels blend together to diminish and exalt each other.

2. Cutest couple: A Wrist Held in Place + Some Rooms are for Leaving*

   These two seemed to work together in such a way, the theme so perfect, that it came together in some seamless way. I don’t know, I was really proud of both and how they turned out. I liked how they worked together, liked what they said. A pair through and through so no longer separated for free subscribers. I’m a romantic at heart.

   1. Life gets in the way I suppose, or really we are such creatures of habit. Limited by our experiences and trying not to waste time or money on things we cannot be totally sure of. Timid like fawns, wobbly feet in an unknown. Only going so far before we’re back again at our mother’s side. It’s all to be a bit delicate like an ego.

   2. “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.”

3. Editors Choice: Wherever You are I Love You and Take Your Time*

   Who am I to deny that my favorite thing I ever get to write is a love letter. And in the second person? Yes, this one is my favorite. The others didn’t stand a chance.

   1. “I’ve always felt a sense of right and wrong when it comes to love. A uniquely nuanceless morality, the kind that doesn’t wish to open or yield. I don’t ever want to need you. I don’t know why, feels wrong, feels rude to admit to something like that. As if I’m saying to the people already here it isn’t enough. I sorta feel at times that if I admit this needing it will make me one of those people who think love, romantic love specifically, will cure all things. But I don’t think that, not remotely. I just know that, despite all my best efforts, some things won't feel better until you arrive. Until I know how to need you, to let myself need you, to let there be something good where once there was something bad. Like salve over a burn.” 

4. Best Title: An Argument for Deep Water Swimming

   Need I say more?

   1. “All the beauty we get from a little pressure, the right spot on the spine, the air from between your bones released, relief as two hands. I will not say diamonds. It’s good to let the sponge get sopping, to use what it soaks, only to take it in your palms and squeeze its contents until the water drips between your fingers and down onto your forearm and shirt. What I mean is sometimes the water is dirty and it stains your clothes. I’m saying, it’s almost as if the heart can have a dimple…”

5. Best Theme: Light (I Heard You Laugh From The Other Room +That One Room With the Long Table*)

   I loved this theme for the fact that its abstractness conjured two wildly different ideas in me. One about not living and one about remembering which seem still intertwined together to make life.

   1. “It is always shocking to me this fact, that happiness is not a year away.”

   2. “And the party will end, someone will leave first, but I’ll remember the food you like, the color of your lipstick. I’ll know it was you who laughed. This is something not explained with any ease, ineffable in quality, the feeling that comes from this particular communion. This room will never happen again, which is actually a good thing. Which makes it so important that we are in it together instead of thinking about the other places with their lights on.”

6. Best Opening Line:

   1. “The summer my brother was 17 bugs bloomed from the ground.”

7. The Hidden Gem:

   Naturally, the Bluestems are Blowing* is a hidden gem on account it was under paywall (until now). Perhaps it’s the years I studied poetry but as you might have noticed, I’ve got a real fondness for the second person. I use it whenever I can which is probably too much but I decided on March 15th this was my newsletter and I got to do it if I felt so inclined which gives you this newsletter.

   1. “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.” 

8. The Underdog:

   It came out like a month ago or at least that’s what I’m telling myself but our underperformer of the year (undeserved as all unrecognized talent of mine is) is The Companionship Equation. I wrote this about the day that I saw Joe Jonas and I’m not saying it’s his aura that did it but I will say I don’t think it helped. So don’t punish me for his behavior. I don’t deserve it. Nor do I think this newsletter does.

   1. “This endless present and long past where no one was there, where no one ever anymore seemed to be there. Such a feeling that prompts you to shift in your seat, to roll your neck, close your eyes, anything that might put space between you and your circumstance. Excruciating isn’t it, I thought. To face your own life.” 

9. Prettiest Moodboard:

   Once again, need I say more!

   1. 

I had an idea in my head when it came to this section of the yearbook that I’d be disappointed or ashamed, that I’d find that what I wanted last year for myself had not at all come true. But that isn’t the case. There’s only one thing that I would say hasn’t happened. And I feel okay with that. Because a year ago I didn’t know now what my life would be. A year ago what I wanted was five things:

1. To love the act of creating even if it renders the product imperfect

2. To share this beautiful difficult life with you all

3. To connect with the world in an authentic and genuine way

4. to get back on track for 10 AM newsletters!!!!!!!!

5. To be proud of what we make.

And the only thing I haven’t done is the 10 am newsletter. Which isn’t so bad. It’s not even because I’ve been sleeping it, it’s just because I clock into work at 10:30, or sometimes 9 or 8. But I am proud and I think this life has been shared and I think the act of creating has been more fun than usual because, like I said, I understand now what we’re doing. So, all in all, a good year. And for the year ahead, well, I hope you don’t mind if I make no plans at all. I’ve seen how strangely and sharply your life will turn. I think, just this once, I’m gonna see what happens.

In order of events, the music of this year. You can go month to month and revisit the different tempos of each month, see what we were feeling, find the drastic moods and shifts in atmosphere. Or you can hit shuffle and close your eyes, see what month you land on, see what it makes you remember, and how it makes you feel. It’s up to you though. I’ve done the writing, the only thing left to do is hit send.

Here is at long last the October Mood board which is itself always a feast of colors and flavors and textures. October is my favorite month. I know plenty of people say that but I’m an Aries and anyone who knows anything about astrology can tell you why it means a little more. Enjoy xoxo

Mom+Dad: This is the first year in a long time I think I haven’t called you both after a series of blues to tell you I can’t do it. Or maybe I did, once, but who hasn’t? No, this year was a lot better. I know at the start of summer I said it’s never going to be like this again. I mean that. Thanks for making a life for me where that is actually true. Thanks for picking up the phone. Thanks for all the times you said “Believe that I believe” when it felt too hard. It’s never gonna be that hard again.

Keil and Ava: I was the last one out so it is any wonder that I managed to have any talent at all with you two. I think a lot about the childhood we had together despite the, at times, sense of distance between our ages. How strange 7 and 14 feel when you’re little. But I think too about now and the way sitting in a room we are speaking, for all the world, in a language understood by everyone who could be there to witness. But really something is passing between us that is undetectable to anyone who is not us, who did not grow up in our house, who did not hear ghosts and have crabapple fights, and listen to the shuffle of mom and the clinking of Dad’s dresser. That there exists a very beautiful language that lives and dies with us, is the greatest words my life will ever know.

Grandpa and Jane: How often did we spend our youth sitting on the ground listening to the grownups talk and waiting for that fateful moment we got to tell you both about the art we were doing? It seems to me a scarce thing to have such a family that are so willing to nourish and nurture the part of childhood where you are so keen to create. i owe so much of my continuation with the hopes that when you’d arrive those afternoons I’d have something to say. Thanks for listening, for being the first reader, for all your stories which are also my story in a way. I love ya.

Friends: Each year more of you get further away and each year I learn the tightness of my chest is really the braiding of a rope and I’m casting it out to you. You’re not going anywhere. Not in any way that matters. It’s hard to know what to say, to make finite the unending thanks I feel for having you in my life. I just think that I believe in multiple lives and that we will all get to be stupid and 22 again together is a gift. Almost as good as the one we have here, where I am meeting you all again for the very first time. I won’t waste it. To every universe. To you.

WOV: I think very often of the odds that were so stacked against my meeting you. Which makes it seem even more divine, which seems to prove something I knew to begin with, that IWIYNLN wouldn’t exist without you. That I'm not sure how I’d have ever written it. And so it seems that dreams happen because one night you go to a party and you meet a few girls and those few girls know some other girls and suddenly you’re in a group and though you’ve just met there’s a feeling you are about to know someone for a long long time. Thank you for making me better, for being gentle with my words, for trusting me with your own stories. I do not take it lightly.

Children: I want to say thank you to all the children I know and watch, who laugh and jump in my back and pretend we are being chased by piranhas, yell for me to watch them, who only feel brave enough to jump when they’re holding my hand. Thank you for your childlike wonder which reminds me of my own. I won’t say don’t grow up, don’t change. Thats not what I want at all. I hope that you are forever changing into the person I am lucky to know, that you are proud and happy to be. I’m so lucky at so young an age to watch the beginning of so many lives.

Andrew Garfield: There are many hotties and hunks I’d like to thank, but only one talks about grief and love and compassion and humanity the way you do Andrew. Thank you for your beautiful interviews and vulnerability, and overall handsomeness, but most of all, thanks for being kind. Please email me. I want to talk to you about the ocean.

Bart: Hey. Me again. Another year, another reminiscing on where we went wrong. Why you didn’t text me back after we matched on hinge but for some reason let me bother you in your inbox. Yeah. We’re back here, aren’t we? Isn’t there a movie about this? Maybe next year we should agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building. Yeah. October 10th, 2025, if you haven’t gotten sick of me and unsubscribed meet me at noon at the top. Let’s say all the things we never said. Okay thats a different movie, but really, who knows me better than you? (a lot of people, but we can change that). See you next year gorgeous.

To year five.

See you all so very soon.

Love always,

Chloé