Today was the first nice weekend in nearly two months. Beth came to visit following a conference in Portland. It’s been a while – I’d thought by moving to the northeast I’d see my friend all the time – tickets are cheap between DC and Boston – but it’s been over a year since I saw her last.
While I was at work yesterday she went to the yarn store in Harvard Square and bought me two pairs of knitting needles and a ball of purple mountain goat yarn. She said it was a belated, belated birthday present. I cooked chicken cacciatore and we drank wine and talked about things like her friend in DC who [sincerely] believes “we are what we buy,” and the frightening cost of real estate, and her upcoming wedding, and the new Coach bag she just bought, and the disarray of her friend Brie’s love-life, and her fiancé’s experiences year-two on the police force and then, somewhat drunkenly, she taught me to knit.
“Knit One, Purl Two,” Den contributed, quoting the Tweety Bird granny. We spent the evening curled up on the couch with wine and yarn and cats, Beth knitting a scarf for Lorin’s mother, me knitting a line, ripping it out, knitting two, starting over. “Knitting could be an analogy for the way one lives their life,” I observed, observing also that if I had a time machine I would probably spend my life going back in time to rip out and knit again entire years of imperfections. If I ever make it through an entire scarf, perhaps I will learn a little self-tolerance.
Today, at Beth’s request, we made a special trip to Christina’s Spice Shop, which I don’t visit nearly often enough considering it’s just a few doors down from 1369. I’m dying to find a recipe that calls for sumac, just because I know where I can buy it. Or Hawaiian pink sea salt, or juniper berries or huge bags of peppermint.
And I also took her to my favorite paper store where she happily browsed pretty velum stationary for hand-made wedding invitations. And I bought myself a new pen. And a card for Clem and his soon-to-be bride Brooke. The actual wedding cards were all sappy, so instead I bought him one that read:
“One of the hardest things to realize,” she said “is that our ‘someday’ is right now.” The trust that others place in you is your grace.
A nice weekend – I certainly don’t get enough female companionship anymore. Friendships just don’t grow like they did in my teens and twenties. But so exhausting. My energy reserves seem to get depleted so quickly these days. And extended social interaction drains me where it used to replenish
Used to be, wherever I happened to be living, I always had a confidante. Someone to whom I could pour out my soul, weep out my heart, without fear of judgment or disdain. Used to be I would talk freely, like a wind come from my soul, share and over-share unabashedly, unselfconsciously. Talked myself inside-out without ever pausing to think, “am I talking about myself too much?” Never did I politely – politely false – ask: “And what about you?” because I was in the moment back then, always and every moment, and I talked from the heart, talked what I felt in a great big gush, fully expecting my companion to also be in the moment, so that when a thought struck them they would pull the conversation back like bedcovers and ramble on equally self-centeredly about their own feelings and hopes and dreams and fears…to which I would listen attentively and then interrupt again when a new thought struck me …And so it would go, back and forth like racquet sport, and I would feel bonded, connected. Cathartic.
No more. Somewhere along the way my spirit of self-revelation got stifled. My soul sits like a lump in the back of my throat that I can’t swallow and can’t spit out. At some point during the awkward, precarious, sensitive years of my twenties I began to hear a certain refrain that I deemed unflattering: Heather talks about herself a lot. I don’t do that anymore, thank you very much.
Being an adult sucks. I don’t like being self-conscious of how I appear to others, or painfully aware of when others talk about themselves too much. I don’t like polite conversations that consist of questions about one’s new job/new house/new baby. I don’t like living adult realities. My own misgivings about my career or buying a house or investing or having kids or whatever are all quite real, but they lack the rawness and authenticity of those ethereal inside-out existential feelings I lived and breathed age sixteen to twenty-six.
All day I’ve been wanting to write with my new AG Spalding & Bros pen. It’s pretty and silver and has a satisfying heft. But I don’t write anymore. Used to be I kept journals – took them with me everywhere. I would sit in the sun on the library steps scribbling pages and pages of passion and angst. Used to be I wrote long letters on onion-skin airmail stationary in mocha brown ink with my special fountain pen. No more.
So tonight, after dropping Beth off at the airport, as Den napped on the couch, I sat outside eating an apple, reflecting on the remains of this first beautiful Saturday in over two months, and in the looming dusk I took out my new pen and my Moleskine pocket journal (which has only the first ten or so pages filled, mostly with lists and doodles and names of books I should read), and I began to write. And as pages filled up with my messy scrawl, I began to feel better.
A few spittles of rain splatter down onto my pages, leaving round runny spots in my prose. The kids next door shriek and giggle in their yard. The sky darkens to gray. In a minute I’ll go in and boil water for pasta. Heat up the left-over cacciatore that’s waiting in my big yellow pot. Eat a light supper. Do laundry. Go to a movie at the Kendall. Hope that tomorrow will be another beautiful day. Try to swallow down that lump of soul stuck in my throat.
Heh… It’s taken *me* nearly a decade to realise I’m not in my mid-twenties anymore. That I could be an adult without turning into my parents.
Things balance with time.
this beautiful, soulful blog entry is a sign that all that life, all that intense and lovely heatherness, is still very much alive in you. keep the pen in your hand. keep those fingers poised on keyboard.
it takes practice to get back to that place.
[when did we decide, as a culture, that talking about yourself makes you selfish?]
I would find a really awesome hobby – something that keeps you going, something to look forward to! Not knitting. Maybe not even reading **gasp** We know you’re a cool, and good person H but reading this makes you sound like you’re 87.
Writing about yourself is not self-centered. It’s part of the healing process. You are dissecting, totally mulling over and weighing important issues in your mind. No one knows our thoughts like we do.
Those who complain may go to a shrink. You on the other hand, are keeping yourself sane. Keep writing. Keep questioning. Keep discussing your own views. It’s healing, and it shows you are alive and growing! You are expanding and becoming a more complex person. And, that is perfectly okay!