I’m moving! I’m finishing manuscript edits! I’m starting a new day job soon! There’s a lot going on :))))
As such, there isn’t much between my ears lately besides static. I figured I’d share a short from earlier this summer, when things were weirdly stagnant-not-stagnant and I felt like an animal in a cage that was a little too small. Make of this what you will; all I know is I felt better after putting all to the page.
More erudite things to come once I’m settled in the new place. There is a proliferation of very friendly deer in my neighborhood, and I envy their calm.
—
Withdrawals, As Allegory
I’m listening to Sigourney Weaver narrate a documentary about sperm whales.
Alone, I watch the TV on the opposite end of the dentist’s waiting room. All of the chairs are pushed against the walls, a poor use of space. A relic of its own present.
I have seriously considered quitting my job twice since Monday.
It is, evidently, Wednesday.
They will tell me my teeth are a nice blue-white, a win of the genetic lottery. They will scrub my enamel clean while Sigourney expounds on how whale milk has ten times more fat than human milk.
I realize with a stranger’s fingers in my mouth that I want to be something delectably unhinged. I want to be a minor danger of association. I want to make noise in new ways. I have never been a thing that cowers, but somewhere in the small bones of my self there sits a child so afraid of things like risk and reward and the potential for more that I will cripple myself in many ways before I see her harmed.
Sigourney talks about a diver named Brian whose life’s work is to study the societies of sperm whales as they run my insurance for billing. I marvel quietly at the fact we live in a world in which someone’s life’s work is to study the societies of sperm whales.
A whale calf is playing in sargassum weed, oblivious to the human watching her. I charge a copay to the card I share with my spouse. I am still learning how to inhabit two hearts at once—someone told me once that whales have two hearts, but I can’t remember whether that’s really true. Brian would probably know.
I leave the office to step again into the beady Texas sun. We’ve had three days of rain. We’re still technically in a drought.
I start the car. The wheel stings my palms, cooked under the windshield while I was getting the gaps between my teeth plucked and siphoned.
I discover later, when I look up the documentary from the waiting room in a stoned haze that has flayed my brain like a rosebud peeled open before it’s ready to bloom, that they named the whale calf Hope.
I don’t want to hope for things. I want to know things for the facts I’ve made them become. I want to hold things in my teeth, my blue-tinted teeth, and bite down until something changes while both whale hearts in my chest beat in their own separate tempi.
~*~
I cried a deluge this afternoon as though my eyes could predict another storm we’d get come sundown.
I’m losing a piece of myself, I can feel it—a great dislodging, growing pains of a different sort, the exact kind of change Ovid probably held like dip between his lip and bottom teeth when he wrote about women turning into trees and birds and all sorts of reckless, mournful things.
How do you safely fall out of love with old aspirations so they don’t burn you on the way down?
My spouse holds me in the way he does best: lets me cry it out, heaving, ugly, my body wracked and raw with it, until: I’m trying to help. I’m just trying to help.
I know, I reply, in the same voice that has shouted so many times I’ve run out of words to count it, I just don’t know.
He takes us dancing then. We’re too early. We sit instead and listen to the duo act at the front of the dining room, all twang and bluster, tucked into a booth in the little shack of a dancehall clinging to its own identity sandwiched between a luxury condo and the hulking block of commercial realty that’s been vacant since before the pandemic.
Isn’t this better? he asks gently when I’ve had my food, tapped my snip toes a little, tipped the musicians with the crumpled five I’ve had in my wallet since God knows when.
And I know he means This, Currently; the distraction, the tender ways in which he quietly helps me grow into something greater than myself, but I hear it rather as This, Cosmically; us, a whole, two halves of the same thing wrapped up in a membrane of contracts and promises and everything that makes one life out of two.
I love you, I say, the best way I know how to mean Yes, it is.
We’ve always joked that You’re right is our love language. It goes both directions. I love you. It’s always better that way.
~~~~~~ Book Updates ~~~~~~
SHOOT THE MOON, a midcentury story about wormholes and clinging to the time we have left with the people who love us, comes to Putnam Books in fall 2023 — stay tuned for more coming soon.
~~~~~~ Reading Recs ~~~~~~
LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry
I’m on a cowboy kick, and I had forgotten how effortlessly this book sings. It’s got WAY more subtext than I can recall from my last read-through, 12/10.
~~~~~~ Currently Listening ~~~~~~
Belladonna — Daniel Lanois
A weird little romp of sound and color, listen while bundled under a cosy blanket with a tasty drink in hand.