Blurred at the Edges
Today you and I will keep going
My friends!
Thank you for such tender, kind responses to my last letter. There was a huge release for me from that deep share on the burning impossibility of grief. I felt love bloom. I felt pain unclench its tight grasp. Right now in our days together and apart it feels like we are living in a made-up thing of unimaginable pain and love. I think we call that thing: the world, here and now, twenty-twenty-five, living.
It’s a maddening time in this made-up thing. I’m here thinking about the illusion of control for the personal and collective. I’m here frustrated over not having the answers, the direction, or the energy. When I get quiet with myself, these frustrations tend to lose their shape. What’s left is the realization that I have quite a bit to offer in words on love and on how to keep going. Because today you and I will keep going.
People matter. I can’t let go of this line by Hanya Yanagihara in her novel A Little Life that reads: “All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.” We can play the game of what-if from the lens of pain—What if I never met this person, what if I had moved here or there, what if they stayed—and play the same game from the lens of love. On and on it goes quite beautifully because through pain and love, people matter.
“All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.”
-Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
I want to share with you how my days are filled with people who matter. Our lives are braided together through language and expression. I have a guestbook of summer visitors, ticket stubs from travel, stacks of voice notes, pictures for the “just because.” My calendar has never been this full. My heart is stretchy — a description I have lovingly borrowed from a friend. My senses are overwhelmed. There’s friend, foe, stranger, and those folks in the blurry future I have yet to meet. I believe each and every person we encounter matters deeply.
I want to share with you the new shape of my days. I write and collage. I flip through magazines. I take evening ice-cream walks through my neighborhood. I look into the eyes of strangers and I cry under treetops. I sing in public. I collect CDs. I dump money at every suffolk county thrift. I blast jazz through the windows and collect ceramic dishes. I dance my ass off and I laugh. No one told me just how good the laughter would be on the other side of pain. Take note friends, it will be good for you too.
I want to share with you that I remember how to have a good day. A good day unfolds slowly, through bundling in a colorful knit to sitting down at the writing desk and gazing out a window. There’s jazz playing softly and the warmth of a mug and the comfort of the room. I built this room with good days in mind. It is filled with books and art supplies, stacks of notebooks, magazines and a small bed. I’m here returning to the room, to the good day, to remembering and beginning. I return over and over again. Of course I tend to forget the way. I bet you do too. Let this be a reminder to ourselves of the dance between remembering and forgetting. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about remembering how to practice the steps.
I’m writing and having conversations about my own return. There are notes jotted down to myself, conversations over coffee, chunky paragraphs sent to people I love. We fill the air, the space between limbs, with this delight of returning. I want to share with you that I have returned to living. I have returned to sharing. I have returned to my body and spirit. I have returned to a deeper understanding of love. The last chapter in my life was painful but I never stopped loving, not for one damn second. I don’t know how. Love almost killed my spirit and I’m so grateful for that almost. I have seen how far my stretchy heart is willing to go. Love is the only way I know how to take another step forward, especially when it feels impossible in this made-up thing: the world, here and now, twenty-twenty-five, living.
I believe we have many seasons ahead together where we will feel love and pain. I want to witness you remembering and practicing how to take the next step, to keep going, just as you are here witnessing me. Catch me in color, in art, in song, in laughter, in tears, in ecstasy, in silence, in gazing. Keep loving, keep looking.
With love & possibility,
Jordan
Love to watch your good days unfold and for the ideas to construct my own good days!