lovenotes: dispatch from the imagination
some thoughts, and at the end, some songs!
We used to read this picture book in my family, and maybe you did in yours, too: these children decide to go on a bear hunt. Each time they get close to the bear, or think they’re on the right track, a big obstacle materializes in their path; a forest, a river, a field of high grasses. They consider their options and come up short. They can’t go over it, they can’t go under it, they can’t go around it. They have to go through it. I don’t need to tell you this; you’ve been going through it. And I have too, but I’ve been giving myself a pass for not actually writing about it for a number of boring reasons that don’t matter. But I do think that I have to go through it. To get to something else. And I want that! I want to be out of it (groundbreaking POV, she wants to be out of it).
So. Ugh. Fine.
I’m writing to you this week about the pandemic.
When the pandemic first began to raise its head in America last year, the world became, for me, something from which to shield myself. My world, in turn, became wholly populated by the people and animals in my house, with the occasional extraterrestrial visitor in the form of a facetime from a friend or class on zoom. Now, as the public sphere appears to be blinking its sleepy eyes awake again, I am confronted by the scale of my wildest-dreams compared to what is possible. It’s stressing me out.
I go to theatre school, which is certainly a choice you can make. I know there is also a sizeable bunch of you, dear readers, who have also made this choice—look at us!
I made the choice when I was eighteen for reasons I can’t remember at the moment. Probably, deep in my Los Angeles heart, I wanted to be famous. When I pictured myself living my dream future, I was picturing Natalie Portman in Black Swan, riding the subway with an exposed clavicle, on her/my way to Rehearsal for some exhausting piece of performance art that was taking over her/my entire life. But a lot has changed since then, and when I picture my Living My Best Life dream self, dear Natalie is nowhere to be found, nor her demanding artistic schedule. Now, when I picture my happiest future, I am me. Well. Me, wearing opaque tights and a dress with fun sleeves, walking around an outdoor market, squeezing tomatoes for freshness and putting the good ones in one of those netted grocery bags. I guess that would make me feel famous, maybe, but that’s not what it’s about. The high end of my ambition at this point is a candlelit dinner with all of my friends and a fuckton of spaghetti in a hand-painted bowl.
Last spring, when I got the news that my school would be going remote, I was on an alpaca farm. Jesus. Yes, I was in the English countryside on an alpaca farm owned and managed by a perfectly pregnant lady with a button nose who made us scrambled eggs every morning. We were living in a part of her house she’d converted into a sort of hotel. I had the fleeting notion that she must have cracked some kind of code to self-fulfillment, that she must live in total bliss. I didn’t linger on the thought— I had fretting to do! How was I going to get back to work? I’d like to tell you that I noticed then and there that I was doing some kind of self-deception, convincing myself that while I might prefer the nice lady’s way of life, it wasn’t meant for me, I had to muscle through. I’d like to tell you I realized this was the wrong way to think about the future, as something obligatory and austere, but I did not. As I said, I had fretting to do. There’s not much room for epiphany during a fret.
Obviously, the logic is flawed. But at what point, if ever, do we reject this bad advice? Did the innkeeper (I’m deciding to call her that now) have an ambition she worked herself to the bone for until one day, releasing her life from its chokehold, abandoned it all for the alpacas? Or am I being ignorant, and the practice of innkeeping/alpaca-rearing is a competitive industry? Maybe my innkeeper is a big name in the business and I look like a fool. It’s possible.
It’s also possible that she rarely thinks of her success comparatively to the success of her professional peers. It’s possible she’s content. When the inn is empty, she dines on spaghetti by candlelight with a spittoon of her closest friends, alpaca and otherwise.
I fantasize about this life with one hand, and fear its translation into a world populated once more by busybodies with the other. I’m being neither original nor profound when I say I’d like never to think of “bustling” anywhere ever again, and would prefer to shed my responsibilities for a carefree life in a meadow stationed perpetually on the brink of springtime, just as things are beginning to bloom and little dear things are cropping up from everywhere. You’ve probably thought this at some point. So what is the solution?
During the pandemic, my solution to many things has been merely “visualizing”. Changing my (our) circumstances in any big way is out of the question, so imagining different ones has come in handy. I don’t know how my visualizations will measure up to our collectively reimagined idea of success once we can have spaghetti together again like it’s no big thing. Maybe I’ll be embarrassed by this log. But I’d like to preserve it, anyway. This is what a perfect day would be like, to me, right now:
My alarm plays to an empty room. I’m already out, and I’ve left my phone at home, which is a practice I’ve been in long enough not to feel its absence anymore. I start the day by swimming. I am met at the river or the lake or the seaside by the person I most want to be with in that moment. They swim with me and then we go inside to make sandwiches, which we bring back down to the shore. We eat and swim and absorb the early-afternoon light. When we’ve had enough, and we’re warmed like stones in the sun, we go home, rinse the salt/sand/sunscreen off, and get dressed. You will recall my opaque tights and kickass sleeves. I go for a walk alone. Maybe through a park. Maybe I stop and sit. Maybe more friends meet me there. Maybe we play a sport. I can, of course, roughhouse as much as I’d please, even in my gorgeous outfit. I ask them all to stop by later as I leave them, still playing, to go through town. Maybe, actually, I’m biking. Yeah. And I try the tomatoes. And I talk to a stranger. And I walk through a thickly wooded moor, just for the drama of it. Then, home. I kick my shoes off. I slice my tomatoes. The pot bubbles, and my friends will be here soon. There is a very good song playing. My seven huge and well-behaved dogs (including at least one Dalmatian) dance with me while we wait.
Okay.
We’ll see.
visualize and listen and please dance around a little?
cover art obviously as always is by my dear smart and talented friend Mckayla Witt