supposed to be writing (#30)
... a bad writing practice and the moon
these are the brief moments; the sun rising over a river still hatchmarked by slush, smoke rising from a factory suspended in the still air. the sun is orange, and the rooftops go coral pink around the edges before they even out under or into a crayola box hue.
i keep trying to show you the moon and it hasn’t been working. i stood in the parking lot, and i pointed my phone, and as if on cue, clouds rolled across. someone called to me and i turned around and the moon was lost. it’s so hard to lose the moon; when i see it, it is always full. it creeps up on me, hanging low in an imperfectly darkened sky, capturing my attention because it burns so much more brightly than the neon signs, the fluorescent train overheads, the warm incandescent bulbs.
i keep trying to show you the moon—you are me, that much is clear. the moon hides beneath a gauzy blanket, blinks at me as i pass by it in the train, dances past me as i walk in a straight line in my neighborhood. i never know where the moon is going to show up; it hangs about me in dilapidated darkness, a night interrupted by street lamps and headlights and flashing bulbs. i suppose they are no longer neon, it’s just that illumination undermines the depth, shreds it, night rubbed raw from overuse. i don’t know how to show you the moon in its fullness. it darts backwards as you point the camera lens in its direction. it shrinks from the camera, a shyness that frustrates, a reluctance to be beheld. i do and i don’t understand.
i think of the moon as i stand alone in the parking lot. its brightness calls out to me only once extinct, the sudden yellow obscurity of the lamppost. look at me, the moon ungleams under the shredded veil of night clouds. after its light has dissipated, night rushes in around you. a dilated darkness, you think, would be easier to digest, would make you easier to digest, dissolve into glossy pupil blankness.
that’s the whole problem, it escapes you and you get caught in its whirlpool. the more you try to do something, capture the moon or write a chapter for instance, the less you reach for it. unable to touch it, you feel longing, but opening the document, the phone, you’re stricken—the brightness, blankness of the screen, disheveled page with its imprecise sentences or blocks of thinking that. you. hate. if you write stuff by hand it’s harder to escape from the thoughts that trail off, when you know where the sentence will end you can stop yourself from writing it. here i get so far ahead that the letters jump their turns slip out of order so that i can write the word and think it at the same time. when you don’t like what you’re writing you squirm, you avoid, your hand cramps your leg cramps your eyes break your neck is stuck, poaching egg in a vortex, your own inertial mass slowing the progress until it, i stop completely. how does one trip like water how do you make ink flow like a river, invisibly tracing a passage across the landscape. if i have already exhausted this pool of words, what am i supposed to do. i don’t know how to show you the moon.
i don’t know how to show you the moon, but it turns out you’ve seen it before. it turns out i don’t have to. i don’t have to show you the moon, i don’t have to move, it is enough to sit there and think about it in those moments. to sit there and think it through, to pace myself, appreciate its mystery and gravitational pull. it resists me, and i push back.
read / saw / heard / did
📚 to the friend who didn’t save my life, hervé guibert
📚 the life before us, romain gary
🎬 millenium mambo, hsiao-hsien hou
📚 une somme humaine, makenzy orcel
🎶 lau noah
🎤 living room variety hour (c/o sh)
📚 the living days, ananda devi
🎬 please baby please, amanda kramer
🎬 two small bodies, preceded by glowing annie (short), beth b.
💻 marriage of the minds, new yorker profile
🍽️ dinner w/ friends, drinks w/ family (including you tb), wine alone
💻 put my house (poem), eileen miles
🤸🏻 yoga, l-theanine, other people’s cats (yz, j&d), my dog, sunshine + fresh air
🖼️ transit museum (she’s in love with public transport)
🗣️ the end of eddy, édouard louis
somewhere else to go from here
I really appreciate the space you all create for me on this platform to practice bad writing, writing badly, and feeling bad about writing. I find it to be essential to fail, sometimes on purpose, mostly not. This is how you grow. Trying things, struggling, not really getting it right, and most importantly, allowing things to sit unfinished — it reminds me that there is always somewhere else to go from here. So that’s what I’m doing here, this obscure email in your inbox from someone you sort of know. If I didn’t test out these thoughts on real readers, I wouldn’t think them at all. So thank you, for signing up and for sticking around.