On forty weeks, the promise of the city, and the slipping by of time
July 4, 2019
Dear Eva,
It’s sliding toward sundown on the Fourth of July, and I’m laying on a rigid bed in a stuffy attic in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, enveloped in the strangely comforting white noise of a window air conditioner and fan. I’m in a strange mood after a day spent wrangling the boys amid long subway rides, hot meandering walks through Central Park, wading through crowds in the Natural History Museum, and then trying to navigate 3 hours of adult conversation with a single friend in his toy-free 1-bedroom apartment with a 3 year old and 7 year old. It’s been a full, fun day, but I am zapped.
On the ride back to the friends’ house where we are staying, I sat in the front seat and stared out the window full of longing as we passed block by block of Brooklyn life. I feel like maybe it is not something I am supposed to say, but I know it’s true: I miss city life.
There is no place I loved living more than New York City. I lived there three separate times in my 20s: once in Queens sharing a 1 bedroom apartment with a complete stranger during a college internship, once alone in a large dorm room near Astor Place the summer after my second year of school, and then again in a wildly overpriced 1 bedroom on the Bowery with Bill as young lawyers. I used to think it was the promise of the city that made me feel so alive — you never knew where a night out might lead and the physical proximity to fame and fortune somehow made life vicariously more interesting, even while it never touched me. But now, when there is truly no part of me that craves a late night adventure out on the town, I still feel an ache coming here and remembering what it felt like to call it home. I realize now that it wasn’t just about feeling a sense of personal possibility in New York City, it was really about being amid the patchwork of people from all walks of life, all cultures, all religions, the full range of human experience swirling around you — literally every food on earth available to you, every language spoken on the streets, millions of completely differing human stories taking place next to your own. There is something so humbling about it; such a solid reminder of my smallness, and of all that I have yet to learn and experience. So maybe it really is about the sense of possibility, just in a more expansive way than I used to understand it.
The fireworks are thundering outside the window. I just had to pause my writing to run down to take Simon to the bathroom and back to bed, then move Jonah into a bed in a different room because he was complaining about his brother making too much noise for him to sleep. I’m sweating now as I lay here in the sweltering attic typing on my laptop, thinking about what a familiar tale this probably is from a distance — a young mother feeling an ache for a time that has passed. I wonder, though, if it has to be a sad tale? I sure hope not. I feel lucky to have had the experiences to look back fondly upon, and lucky to have entirely different experiences filling my life now that I will look back upon fondly in the years to come.
I wonder what kind of an Independence Day you are having back in Minnesota? Are you filled with any nostalgia yourself, or are you purely looking onward? Do you feel any - or even think about - patriotism on this day this year? Or was it just a regular ole Thursday with a barbeque? I look forward to reading your letter tomorrow to find out!
Your friend,
Sarah
Thursday July 4 2019
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been relishing this week’s letter coming around — I think I’m starting to feel in a new way the weight of the thing we’ve been making together, and also feeling the number of weeks behind us, and the fact that even though we’re now squarely in the summer season, the midpoint of the calendar year, our year of letters — while not quite drawing to a close — is beginning its taper. Too soon? Week 40! That’s a lot of weeks. I just checked how many weeks a baby gestates in the womb and guess what — you certainly already know this — it is about 40 weeks. What thing have we made? (Is this a weird analogy? I can’t believe this is how long the women who choose to grow new humans have them inside of their bodies!) We didn’t make a human, but in some ways our letter-writing process is now fully formed, has a character, is becoming itself (if an accumulative set of two letters each week can have a self).
A long holiday weekend kicked off today — it’s a Thursday, and I took tomorrow off because that’s the only way to live when you have a Thursday holiday. M and I don’t have any special plans, just enjoying summertime in our new home, in our yard, enjoying the open space of no plans and no obligations stretched out before us. In recent weeks I’ve occasionally had the feeling that I’ve accidentally missed our letter exchange, even in weeks where I’ve just written my letter — the weekend will come and I’ll gasp and wonder if I missed the week completely, if I forgot to send my letter, if Friday has rolled past unannounced. This feels to some extent about needing to find a way to enjoy my down time. When time is quiet or slow I search for things to fill it, find some worry to fall back on, like a pillow tucked under the head as one lounges on a couch, that old comfort of something to occupy the mind. Sometimes it’s possible to have time and truly not have anything that needs to get done in that time. It’s the sweetest of moments, and the hardest to recognize: free time. It can just be. My fingers itch to tickle the screen of a smartphone, and my mind itches to dredge up miscellaneous external obligations, to ingest more news, to see what everyone else might be doing, even though I know that my mind really just wants to breathe a little bit, to feel time the way a pool of water will hold a body: floating, bobbing just below the surface, suspended, peaceful, thoughtful.
I was thinking today about time, and the fact that we need time to rest on ideas, quietly turn them over and over until they are polished and smooth. I was thinking about this New York Times article that I missed in June but that I saw in my email from Headlands Center for the Arts. The article, by Bonnie Tsui, is about the importance of fallow time, of not doing anything some of the time. I was thinking about this article and more generally about the idea of time “slipping by,” and I was wondering what amount of time is an acceptable amount of time to let “slip by.” This might be about the difference between “letting” time slip by, and feeling that time has slipped by. It seems perfectly acceptable to let minutes and perhaps hours slip by, but a whole day? Is a day a long time to let slip away? It feels like it to me. What about a weekend? A week? A month? A season? These longer stretches are periods of time that we may feel have slipped away, whether we let them or not. In summer I feel that the time since the winter has just slipped away, and I am fine with that because the days of summer are long and glorious and punctuated by rushing summer thunderstorms — but if the time between winter and summer can slip away, then so can the time between summer and winter, and it’s too soon to think about winter coming around again. And yet, it’s there like an inverted seed in my mind, waiting to bloom in the cold, dark days and nights of the long Minnesota winter.
I gasped and chuckled and jotted notes to myself reading your letter last week, thinking about you pronouncing to Anne that you were not creative (what was this moment? Why pronounce such a thing? I can see why Anne might have been confused!) The idea of the blank page is a red herring. There is no need to pull a new idea out of thin air to plop onto a blank page. These days, more and more, when faced with a blank page, I find myself comfortable just putting some words on it. Any old words! These sentences seem contradictory when I re-read them — but I think there is a subtle difference between an idea, and simply some words. A page with some words on it is no longer a blank page, and is free to be scribbled upon. I write lots of freehand pages, and start new pages at any moment even if I only have a few new lines to put there — I start a new page for a new idea (word, thought, curiosity, exploration), and know that it’ll be there in the stack for me to riffle through, pull out, build on if I want, or to ignore completely until never or until some time in the future when I say, This finally feels relevant. A blank computer page is marginally more intimidating, blinking cursor like a stoic eye staring you down, but even then, a few words and sentences about anything are enough to get some juices flowing, and they can always be deleted, moved away into some other holding document where they can age like a piece of cheese, getting musty and moldy but perhaps with something still delicious there under the surface. You went on in your letter to note that you no longer say or think that you are not creative (phew!) — but I still thought about this idea of creativity somehow being attached to the blank page. It is so easy to make any page a page that is not blank! I used to think that a page had to start and end in a moment, and perhaps you felt the same way: that an idea needed to spill out fully formed onto a page, something fresh and complete, straight from the brain. But here we are, 40 weeks into this exchange, and our letters feel richer to me every week — and richer all together than they would have been had we decided to write one or two letters to each other and call it quits. These are ideas we’ve woven together over weeks and weeks, and they are different even than a fresh page filled in the moment, which, even in that moment, is the product of however many years of living and thinking. This is something that is both a many-week project, and a weekly project, a weekly set of blank pages suddenly covered in words. No page is a blank page, I say! Happy week 40, this thing that is not a human and yet has been growing all these weeks! What happens next? It’s to be determined! Happy summer vacation to you, and talk soon!
Your friend,
Eva