Positioning myself in time: I hook my legs around the monkey bars, cold on the backs of my knees. That iron smell sticking to my skin, the sand below me mostly dust from the pockets of other children. When you get to a beach, you learn real sand is alive. Charged by the sun and the water, each grain has a different story. I want to listen to each one, but I am not fully where I need to be in time. I’ll try again: last night I sat at a table in a dark backyard, a line of tea candles offering a yellow chance at illumination. I want to have all my conversations this way, where we are just voices, the outline of eyes and a flicker of light across the lips. Is this how spirits feel when they are floating? Was that last night or last week?
Time is not trying to hold me, not today. I could be anywhere. I still have that voicemail from my grandmother, singing happy birthday when I turned 30, I haven’t listened to it yet. She passed before I called her back and now I want to just save it, for however long I can. When I finally listen, time will bend all over again for her voice.
I’m eating olives because that’s what’s left in the fridge. Olives with a little blue cheese in the middle. I can’t really taste the cheese, which is good because I’m not a fan of blue cheese. Boyfriend bought this jar, but he’s gone for three months and now I am in charge of eating them. I took over his office to write, that’s where I am now. I’m telling myself this space makes his absence worthwhile.
September moves in bullet time, like the matrix when it’s all happening but it’s slow enough to see the ripples of air. Summer was sweet to me, if I’m being honest. A syncopated rhythm of hermit tendencies and social occasions. Listening to what I need to know, knowing that it’s always been there. We’re not separate from the eternal streams. For millennia, a super nova has been happening right above our heads. The red clouds of hydrogen and smoky wisps of radiation are shifting all the time. Maybe one day the gravity of these elements will grow so heavy, we will get a new crop of stars. Right now we admire the beauty of undoing, a portrait of endings.
Two days ago, or was it two weeks—I found a dead wasp in my kitchen, on the windowsill to be precise. I have yet to move it, something feels sacred about its hourglass form, an abstract nod at time. Boyfriend has been in South Africa for under a month and everyday feels different and the same. I can describe it only in pasta: sometimes it’s a spiral fusilli, or a tubular rigatoni. Some days are clearly lasagna, wide and flat with a wobbled edge. But it’s all made of the same stuff, pasta. When boyfriend told me he was going to film a movie in a desert, I immediately thought of the many California deserts or maybe New Mexico. Nothing too far. But they needed a specific kind of desert and the only one that worked was in South Africa, six hours outside of Cape Town. When they first went out to see the location (the limitless desert) their car lost two tires on the unpaved roads. It happens to everyone who makes the journey.
So it makes sense why I am staying in LA, tracking my days through pasta shapes. I’m not writing too many newsletters, because I’m working on finishing the first draft of this book. My goal was to finish it during this period of time and then Boyfriend got this job so the opportunity for solitude actually lines up. I sit in Boyfriend’s office chair and stare at the words that need to be written, the sentences that almost make sense. It’s my story, but when I started writing it, I realized it was a story of my family. It was a story of all the aspects I buried so I could grow, I’m unearthing them with roots, with the soil so alive, just like real sand.
And now for the first time, I’m reading a bit of the book to people (!)
It’s happening at 7pm on Wednesday the 18th at Stories in LA. I’ll be supporting Alma Jette alongside Brittany Menjivar.
Together, we’ll see what kind of pasta that night will be—maybe Angel Hair. If you’re in town, I’d love to see you there.
xx
James