Where I’ve Been

Suddenly it’s fall and when I look back on social media from the past season, I notice I’ve been absent. Absent from the digital world but all-consumed by the physical. I could try to explain what this summer did to me.  I could say this is the summer I learned to share space with myself. This summer, I lived alone and in my own company. I spent hours in the garden and watered plants with equal parts hose water and tears. I drew the blinds each morning. No one else would. I bought toilet paper and dish soap when I ran out. No one else would. I mowed the lawn for the first time in my existence. No one else would.

I could say this summer I lost people and friends and lovers and family and parts of my heart in the process, and I could tell you with aching honesty that not all those things have or will return. The simplest way to describe my summer is this:

The summer sun killed me then brought me back to life. Three-day resurrection turned three months.

The summer days stretched long and felt like they would never end. I felt like I would never survive them. The days went by in a haze of tending to the garden, trying to convince myself worthy of tending to self, and calling my mom.

I found little loves in my summer. I invented things to anticipate. I dumped money into a pottery class and learned my hands are capable of building. I took water and pressed it to clay and watched as the clay learned to bend to its surroundings. I wondered if I could bend this way, too. I learned clay has a memory. That if you bend it and try to bend it back, it may look like you were successful. But, bit by bit, the clay settles into its original shape. It remembers, and that memory shapes its current form. I learned that memory has a place in my life but that I am not clay. I can find new form. Memory can influence me but is not me. I spoke this to myself each night. I spoke this to the garden.

This summer I learned to French braid my hair. I found the movement of strands between fingers soothing. If I could focus on the order, on which hand went where, I could forget the past briefly. I could be entirely in the under and over of right now. I am where my hair is in my hands. I am here, now. The strands did not always form a braid. Sometimes, they fell through my fingers no matter how hard I tried to hold on. Sometimes I could not think my way into a French braid, but through the braid, I could find my way back into the here, the now.

The summer brought feathers to my doorstep. Each day I would find multiple and wonder what they meant. Wonder who sent them. Wonder if they would continue to find their way to me. I made note of them: their color, their size, how they made me feel. My home is overrun with feathers. I find them on sidewalks and between layers of leaves. Sometimes I just begin to walk in a direction that feels right, somehow magnetized to where the feathers hide. I always find one there. Even when I do not look there, I find them elsewhere. There is something in their lightness and ability to float on a breeze. There is something in their willingness to adapt to that which moves them. Though I’m not sure exactly what it is, there is something there.

Words returned to me, even the ones I thought long gone. From the depths of my uncertainty, the words began to rise. In the most unlikely places, I rediscovered my voice. Lines of poetry whispered in my ears as I drove to work. Among canned green beans and corn, I scribbled bits of fragmented longings on the back of grocery lists. I made voice memos and returned to them, newly unphased by the sound of my voice through recording. I wrote words I hoped people might want to read. I wrote words I hoped no one would ever read. In the end, I read all these words to classmates in writing workshops. They received them with such generosity and care that I began to see a certain beauty among difficult truths. Their generosity and care is what led me to create this website, a place where my stories and photography can live and breathe. Hopefully, eventually, a place where the light shines through.