Imagine Tonight

Imagine tonight after the kids are tucked in, that instead of checking your phone or doing anything online, instead of opening your now nearly-exhausted-but still-maybe-one-good-hour-left-self to an onslaught of news and new To Dos, updates, fundraisers, reminders, requests, save-the-dates, campaigns, articles you should read, events you should attend, instead you sit listening to quiet music, maybe to the song “Ra Ma Da Sa” by Snatam Kaur that played at the end of the yoga class you took with dear childhood friend just a month ago, a Monday night when your hands touched during Savasana—final relaxation pose.

Imagine instead of answering texts, which only makes them multiply, Gremlin-like, that you pick up the Five Year Diary given to you by another dear friend, one who accompanied you during that semester in Toulouse, to whose French family’s house across the Garonne you walked from your French family's house on Rue des Fleurs, who sat with you outside in cafes at the Place du Capitole. Imagine you write a few lines about only today.

Instead of bookmarking Bento Box lunch ideas, instead of pinning Easy Weeknight Dinners or pining over Lemon Raspberry Cake, you pull out a cookbook, The Forest Feast Gatherings by Erin Gleeson, maybe, given to you by your publishing friend Mary Wowk, who hired you years ago to pack boxes and carry them to Mail Boxes Etc., whose daughter you used to sometimes babysit and who is now grown up and a friend as well. 

Or maybe you pick up another cookbook, Ripe, which you bought at a signing at the old Rizzoli on 57th street, and you flip through gorgeous photographs of artichokes, persimmon and radicchio. You read at the dedication from the author whom you met through your friend, her brother, Mark. You realize tomorrow you could make the corn with cilantro-lime salt to go with whatever you have planned for dinner. Or don't have planned yet. You'll find something. You have everything you need already.

Imagine if instead of reading an article on how to create calm, creative spaces, you light a candle, put on comfortable socks and make lavender tea.

If instead of clicking through on your friend’s re-posted post 10 Ways to De-stress you take out your yoga mat and sit on it. Try to remember some poses. Do them clumsily. Put your hands in front of your heart and take a deep breath.

Before you look at a screen, or touched a button, if you asked—why the endless scrolling and clicking, the what-am-I-missing? What if you questioned that sense that something is real and exists and gathers momentum and therefore significance by all of us liking it at the same moment, seeing Likes accumulate? Yes—I approve, the Likes seem to say. See? All these people approve of me. Look how many already! If the post is supposed to be funny, we know from the Likes they must have laughed. If you were venting about some frustrating situation, they empathized. If it's a picture you posted of your adorable kids, yes, they are adorable indeed. 

Instead of thumbs-upping political posts and jokes from people you know and sort of know and used to know, what if you pick up the phone and talk to one person you with whom you once ran across rooftops in Hanover. Most likely, you would only get to leave a voicemail. And if he returned your call—not particularly likely—chances are you wouldn't pick it up. 

But still.

You would have heard his voice.

What if instead of finding out what the moon says about your romantic prospects, you open the blinds back up and gazed at the night sky?

What if instead of marveling at the stack of locally-sourced pancakes your friend ate in a café called Little Black Bird, you write a letter to the friend. One that will likely never be answered. A street name in desperate, slanted handwriting. A stamp of a Western Meadowlark or White-Throated Sparrow. Birds you studied together in 8th grade.

If instead of staring at photos of grouchy kittens, you dig back up the photos, real ones, faded, out of focus, overexposed, from your post-college trip to California and finally, finally arrange them into a scrapbook and say the name of the places you went out loud, Calistoga, Eureka, Santa Rosa, as run your hands over the now infinitely wrinkled and tear-stained map.