The Way Back

Sunday morning.

You know what you have to do. You have to write.

You have to come into the bedroom, where there is not good light. You have to flip open the laptop, find the charger, open a new blank page. Later you can check email, The New York Times, the polls, your To Do list, your texts, your project management spreadsheet. No, but what if there is an urgent text? It can wait. It has to. Later you can put music on, music that will help you focus, but maybe it will help you focus now? But it will also remind you of the song you want to play for the kids, the Biden/Black-Eyed Peas mashup of "Where is the love?" So for now there will be no music. There will be the rain on this dark morning, whatever you can hear over the sound of the trucks backing up and the construction that has been going on for seven years outside your window. Entire skyscrapers and all of Hudson Yards built in that time, art buildings, an empty mall, luxury gyms and rooftop skydriving. But still, on 29th street, the pavement torn up, the digging, the excavating—of what? What are they searching for? All along the blocks and avenues buildings are vacant, favorite stores gone. Both beloved pizza places—one from when you were a child, the other cozy, wooden walls, a shelter on rainy afternoons after a long bus ride home—gone. 

There are these gaps all over the city, and to fully process these gaps, to do that work that will make them into apertures, it seems like it needs the ground underneath to be solid. There is a lack of centering now every day, a delay. We will get to centering after the election. Before it was post-Covid, post-Covid we will return to center, but post-Covid is now not a thing that we can wait for. But you can not wait for post election either, because you don't know for sure that the election will go your way.  Either way, you take a deep breath, and prepare yourself for battle. It doesn't stop, so it doesn't make sense to postpone the moment of feeling centered. 

But then, how?

You remember the children's story about the lonely island you began when your now middle-schooler was in preschool. Should you dig that out? Or what about seeing if you can make anything of the novel draft from ten years ago. There's a short story you want to send Sunday, a flash fiction piece you want to complete for a contest ending in 5 days. You promised to bake brownies for the Kung Fu class today, there's an application to fill out, meeting notes to transfer, voter post cards to mail, a present to buy, the blog post which is a paid gig, a book pitch, which is also official. Any of those would be easier. But that's not what you wanted to say. 

This is a rare moment. Two children in the house and they are both quietly reading. You winced when you asked the younger to read in her head, not out loud. You love to hear her read about the witch-girl Heidi Hecklebacker or Ramona. Ramona, of course, always gives you the most comforting waves of nostalgia and memories of days you wore rainboots over shoes to school. 

It is surreal to open this blog and see more than a year has passed since the last post. 

What is the way back? 

Meditation? Buying a magazine on meditation? Running? Yoga? Tai Chi? Qigong? A latte? A sketch class. A Halloween craft? Incense a candle a phone call, re-reading The Art of War? A constellation map posted to the bulletin board a conversation with your dear grad-school/writing friend Amie who is writing furiously, furiously every day. Reading a post that makes you leap up into the air. Or sink into the ground. Or both. But the kids are grown now, for example, Catherine Newman's kids I mean. All her beautiful writing couldn't stop them. 

Elizabeth Bishop could stare at words all day. Sometimes I think back to what it meant to write at a computer when I was in high school. How it was not connected to anything outside me. The computer was in the basement and it was quiet and it was just the blank screen and the words that appeared.

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Two days later. You haven't written this really, whatever "this" is, but by opening up this post, opening this space, you have done something worth celebrating: you haven't not written. 

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Indiana was never a question —I'm trying to tell them. They're in the other room, waiting for results from Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina. We have to stay focused on states we thought we could win.

But now there are are states we're supposed to win where we are not winning. But also we knew early numbers wouldn't look good, but we are not holding onto this.

Wasn't the extra hour on Saturday night into Sunday morning so cozy? That was one thing to hold onto.

Either way, we fight. Either way, we way we have to be grateful. Either way we look outside in the morning and see that the trees that were green for so long are finally turning red.

Nobody can focus now. Nobody is trying to focus now. My grad school friend is. She already sent me back the writing I sent her marked up with comments. How was she able to do that? But whatever happens—a win, another crushing loss, or neither, uncertainty for weeks, we will need to wake up tomorrow and do our work.

I am tempted to keep checking, but checking what? There's nothing more we can really know tonight. Why toggle away to check guesses and estimates. We will need to sleep without knowing. We will have to stop wondering about Grand Rapids. We will have to think bigger than Miami-Dade. We will have to remember the Waning Gibbous moon. It is easier now in the evenings to see Jupiter and Saturn.