Hello....... it me
The subject line of this email is something I said (in the style of Adele obbbvs) once when greeting Andrew and he fell over laughing and it makes me feel good to think about it.
Today is August 6, 2019, which would have been Brandon’s 33rd birthday. I never know what to do with these anniversaries. I don’t know how I’ll feel or what I need or how to prepare.
For the last two years, I’ve isolated myself completely by booking an Airbnb out of town for a few days, ostensibly to work on the memoir I’ve been writing since he died.
Thus, last year, I was alone in St. Louis for the first week of August, in a beautiful two-story cottage (idk what a cottage literally is*, but the listing said it was a cottage so I guess it was??). I wrote thousands of words and I cried SO MUCH. I cried while I was writing, I cried reading and listening to podcasts and cooking meals, I cried torrentially while watching YouTube videos and Terrace House late into the night, avoiding going to sleep in the silence.
All of this was mysterious to me. They weren’t tears of sadness so much as a side effect of major excavation. I was dredging up stories from my childhood and remembering conversations and moments and people I didn’t have the opportunity to think about in my daily life.
I was also just completely overwhelmed by the fact that IT ALL FUCKING WORKED. That making myself sit and write resulted in… writing being done. That pulling on one thread of an idea so often revealed a knot to another thread, a whole different color unspooling. That I really did have all this inside me.
So maybe they were tears of sadness, or at least tiredness. I’m exhausted when I think about how much time I’ve lost fighting my compulsions and distractions and fears. Just writing that sentence made me 20% more tired.
This writing retreat, as it were, has been more clinical in every way. I’m not in St. Louis, I’m in a city not super far from home in Illinois. I’m in an actual Tiny House where I have to unplug and move the Keurig before I can unbox and use the toaster, and climb a ladder to go to bed. (It’s not charming, it’s stupid. I keep thinking about the so-called “cleaning crew” the host kept referring to and I want to know how much she pays them for climbing up and down A LADDER. LADDER LADDER LADDER.)
Yesterday when I got here, I just paced the square hundred feet, sweating and looking out the windows and thinking about how much money I’d spent to leave my nice big sun-drenched home with the two soft cats and husband WHO WOULD BE AT WORK ALL DAY ANYWAY to be here.
But I knew I’d done the same at the St. Louis house. I’d written a shit ton in my journal that week, starting with the first day, when I yearned for home.
Thus.
I didn’t freak out and shove my suitcase back through the Tiny Door of the Tiny House into my actually tiny car. I made spaghetti with homemade sauce while listening to an audiobook. I brushed my teeth and climbed the Tiny Ladder, at which point I plugged my laptop into a Tiny Outlet and wrote and continued to watch Bon Apetit YouTube videos until 2am, gummying up my clean teeth with Haribo cola candies.
There’s this series filmed in the Bon Apetit test kitchen called Gourmet Makes, where Claire “Half-Sour” Saffitz (I’m very familiar with the oeuvre, ok) is tasked with recreating popular processed snacks from scratch.
A few of them are around 15 minutes long, gimmes like Cheez-Its. But most of them are impossible, factory-processed, scientific-processed guys like Skittles or Doritos. These videos are longer than an episode of Mad Men, and almost always feature Claire saying “I think I’m onto something!” within the first 10 minutes, then failing. Other chefs test her attempt and chew, nodding thoughtfully into the middle distance, and say “Hmm.” So she tries again, tweaking a few things, and fails again, and swears she’s gonna quit. Then tries again, and fails, and swears she’s gonna quit, then tries again, and fails, and swears she’s really gonna quit while almost-crying or actually-crying on camera, then she tries again and gets it, and everyone gathers around her station and wants a taste.
By the time I lifted my sleep mask this morning, it was almost 10am, an unheard of hour for my farmer-ass circadian rhythm. I made coffee and then unplugged and moved the Keurig so I could make toast. I sat on the Tiny Couch and wrote for a while, before getting really cold from the Tiny Air Conditioner and pulling open the Tiny Armoire to retrieve a quilt, until emitting a Tiny “Wow Fuck This” and going outside, where a few plastic chairs were jumbled next to a metal firepit and a dried-up creek.
This was, as they say, the move. I kicked up my feet on the firepit. The leaves shaded me. I wrote in my journal and I didn’t know the word count. Birds called to one another in their birdy horniness. Cicadas buzzed, then roared, then quieted again and again.
When I realized mosquitos were biting up my legs, I went inside, where I checked my phone (key to both getting a lot of writing done and avoiding others’ feelings is putting your phone on Do Not Disturb).
My dad’s cousin, Jill, had sent me this photo:
Brandon. Wispy and smiley and scoopable. There are so many photos of him at this age, so many I’ve seen for the first time after he died, and at every one, I feel this intense maternal instinct to pick him up.
I can barely take it. I can only take it at all if I think of how much he’d laugh at my huge head and trademark pageboy.
It used to frustrate me when people would tell me it would get better because I thought “better” meant it would be normal for him to be gone, which it isn’t.
I opened the giant Scrivener file and moved every piece in it to one of two folders: THE BOOK or NOT THE BOOK. In the end, THE BOOK has over 52,000 words in it. Most of them are sloppy. But.
I spent the afternoon see-sawing between despair and triumph, chopping and screwing. I don’t know when it will be done. Done doesn’t even mean success, it just means done.
I ordered Chinese food for dinner and as I waited on the curb in the darkness, I looked up from my phone and there was a little kitten, tail up, looking at me curiously from the street.
Done can mean quit or done can mean complete. I’m gonna fucking make it mean complete.
*lol ok I googled it and apparently a “cottage” is JUST A SMALL HOUSE, in which case I’m definitely in a cottage now, bitch!!!