When I sit here to write it’s like a beam of light inside of me is searching, hoping someone will catch it. You who I know well and you who know me. You who I don’t know well at all but hope to. You who are a stranger. Because when I’m here, present as I watch each word follow the one before it, I feel lucky to be alive.
The act of writing always feels like a magic trick. I don’t know myself unless I’m putting thought to paper, setting it down. When I stopped believing in God I started believing in this act.
I didn’t expect to write to you today. Normally I plan these so carefully. (A quote from Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”) A stain on silence. That phrase has been buzzing in my mind since I first heard it.
I suppose I’ve been sitting silent, biding my time. Consider it a summer hiatus. I’ve been working and listening and reading and saving things to share to this nebulous you.
This is the time of year I find the hardest. Summer in Los Angeles lasts too long, the sun seeping into everything, lulling me into a daze, turning me blue. In Georgia it would thunderstorm in the summer, in my memory always in August or September, just at the start of the new school year. My favorite room in our house was the sunroom, which my mom painted a bright yellow.
When it stormed the air turned grey and the windows would fog up. I loved the sound of the rain hitting the roof, the relief of the humidity finally giving way.
Janet Planet, a film I loved, brought me back to that specific feeling.
I miss that specific turn in the year. Summer into fall. The delicious fear that lightning would strike and split the tree right by my bedroom, split me in two.
I turned twenty-eight in Kaua’i. Everywhere were signs that said “try slow.” A mantra I keep returning back to, now that I’m back in Los Angeles, which sometimes makes me feel crazy.
On Thursday I will have officially lived in Hollywood for three years. I’m in the belly of the beast, caught in between a dream and a nightmare. Those hills. Those helicopters swirling. But then I hiked Runyon Canyon Friday morning, saw the entire city blanketed under a soft haze, and remembered why I love it.
I have fallen in love with Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan. I am still thinking of this passage from Shifting the Silence, her final book:
In this time of war it is the poets, not the politicians, who have given me hope. Adnan and Adrienne Rich. Ross Gay.
This is my second year in the garden. Last year the heat defeated me; I foolishly tried to plant watermelon and my tomato plants withered.
This summer I planted squash and sunflowers, marigolds and zinnias. I remember hesitating before buying the sunflower seeds—to be honest, I considered them a lesser flower, too basic, I thought—but marveled at the idea of red ones.
Because I’m bad at labelling my beds I tend to forget what is what when my plants are at the seedling stage. So I told everyone my sunflowers were the amaranth I tried to grow for my mom, and when they turned out to be sunflowers I was delighted. I love what they look like before they open up, their buds pinched tight, to me alien-like.
I’ve been growing cosmos too, in a patch where nothing else would grow.
I think my favorite tree in Los Angeles—more than the famed jacarandas—are the cassias that appear at the end of July.
A few recommendations:
Two forthcoming books: Didion & Babitz (This was a perfect summer read, a shame because it isn’t out until November) and Colored Television by Danzy Senna.
For the Time Being by Annie Dillard—like everything else I’ve read by her—shifted something within me. (To start, I’d recommend her essays “Total Eclipse” and “Seeing.”) I go to her for truth and to remember my humanity.
The feeling of late summer is perfectly encapsulated in Didi, which follows thirteen year old Chris the summer before he starts high school. It takes place in 2008, which brought me right back to middle school, a heinous time for most human beings. It’s funny and tender and heartbreaking all at once. I cried three times.
Lots of love to you and your red sunflowers 😌