Thanks for being here. This post is more of a personal essay than criticism, but hot takes will be back in the next post, promise. If you’ve somehow gotten here without subscribing, you can click this handy button so you never miss a post.
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I spend an incalculable amount of hours unsubscribing from email lists this week. The compulsion and desire comes from one incident: google warns me I have used 30 percent of my allotted storage. This doesn’t seem like much, but I do love a good cleaning project. I love to purge anything unnecessary. There’s poetic justice to rejecting emails from lit mags who have rejected me. Overstock and Gap have made it almost impossible to unsubscribe, but any time a new promotion arrives, I open the email and navigate its greatest puzzle: where is the actual button to cancel my subscription.
This activity quickly becomes a reminder of my shopping habit and subsequent debasement. How the fuck did I sign up for this much useless email? I feel unreasonable ire for companies whose websites just so happen to crash when you update your preference to “remove me from all lists.” What I realize by the third day of this activity: I have invented a new way to avoid writing. And packing. Then packing becomes an even better excuse not to write.
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For my move to New York, I make to-do lists like I’m outlining a bad John Green novel. There are two headers: before and after. My former therapist diagnosed me with OCD because I made lists. I thought this was a stretch, given these lists were mostly in my head. After a while, I stopped telling her about my lists because I wanted her to think she cured me. Of course, she still brought them up, so my experiment failed. I do get pleasure from crossing things off, but the more pleasurable activity is adding more items. After all, I love to set myself up for failure! Astrologically, this can be attributed to my Virgo ascendant placement. I keep one shoe in reality and then the other I have flung into the canyon of idealism.
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On my list of to-dos before moving is a visit the dermatologist for more tretinoin. The doctor asks me what brought me to North Carolina after I mentioned I needed to establish new care after moving. I don’t tell him I’m moving again somewhere else, so I explain I was studying writing in Iowa. He asks me if I’m going to be the next JK Rowling. Before I can say I’d have to be a TERF to be the next Rowling, he says, they had to dig her first book out of the trash! Now she’s richer than the queen. He tells me he’s so happy he gets to meet people like me. How he hopes I’ll remember him when I’m famous. I don’t tell him my favorite joke, which is: being a famous poet is like being a famous mushroom.
Will I write a book, he asks? This is a great question. I tap my forehead. Something has to be in there, I say. A whole fantasy world, he bets. He gives me a year prescription for tretinoin. Maybe I will include him in my future acknowledgements for this unforgettable act of kindness.
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I read a tweet that says it’s once again the season of strange coincidences. Is this because it’s summer? Or is it this particular moment? Either way, I’m enchanted. What coincidence will delight me next? I remember a moment from a homily a few weeks ago that I had written into my notes app. There are no coincidences.
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What can we name this summer? I saw, or maybe hallucinated, discourse about this on Twitter. On second thought, it could’ve been some cringe Vice article. There was hot girl summer (2019), hot vax summer (2021) which defeated Chet Hanks’ claim that it was white boy summer. Sweet coincidence summer? Soft boi summer? Slut summer? Good intentions summer?
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Any time you move out of an apartment, frustrations make you ten times less nostalgic for the time you were in the apartment. This is to say I have a little over twenty-four hours to move the rest of my stuff into storage before driving back to North Carolina to then drive to New York. Collectively, twenty-six hours of driving. I am getting great at math! Twenty-four hours in Nashville gives me time to box up every emotion. Go through every motion. Item to box, tape, label, lift, deposit in storage. I put a dehumidifier in a box with a cutting board. Nothing makes more sense than that. Chaos confined until it bursts at the taped edges. I curse everything. My stupidity for overloading flimsy used Chewy packaging. The apartment for being so cramped then made even worse by organization. Myself for thinking I could do anything at all alone.
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When I get back to North Carolina, I can’t find the keys to my new apartment in Brooklyn. I spend thirty minutes tearing everything apart before I sit down onto the driveway. I start to cry. I realize how ridiculous it is to cry over lost keys. This makes me cry harder. I think of the melting package of gummy bears in my car. The amount I have spent on gas in the last week and the amount I will spend this weekend. I don’t want to do that math. Plans are the opposite of coincidences. Either way, I have no control.
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My solstice is spent packing for the third time in less than a week. I’m reorganizing my clothes. The days have felt longer because of this, not because of the sun. I should be outside trying to catch the waning daylight into a bottle or charging some stones meant to bring good luck. I’ve tried hard but I can’t believe in crystals. I’ll believe in anything, basically, but rocks don’t do it for me. I’m still obsessing over how I’ve lost my keys. My mother tells me to pray to St. Anthony, but then I’d have to google the prayer. I wish I knew it by heart. I can barely remember the Lord’s prayer.
With my clothes, I try to make executive decisions, but I’m attached to everything. Rather than everything must go, nothing must. My sister, patient, roots around the house and produces 3 vacuum seal bags. I realize I’ve exclusively selected clothes stained with too many memories. A green sweater I wore in London in 2016. All the Brandy Melville pieces I bought in Nashville (sue me!) A pair of silver hoops Hayes brought to me during a shift at the diner I worked at last fall.
I begin to realize I don’t need half the stuff you have. I cram 10 t-shirts into suitcases I’ll only have to unpack again later. Some have pit stains, some I haven’t worn since 11th grade. I consider two tiny crop tops, one blue and one purple. I show my mom and note their lack of versatility. Throw it away, she says, which becomes shorthand for if you know you don’t want it, you don’t need it.
Is there a reverse prayer from St. Anthony’s evil twin? To forget rather than remember?
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Some coincidences: a coworker is friends with a poet who was a mentor to another friend; another friend and I are waiting for a dinner table behind two women we shared a table with at a karaoke bar the night before; three friends bring up Annihilation within a week of each other; a different friend used to work on the same street and cross street I’ll be moving to in Prospect Heights; the day I download a devotional app it has my favorite verse from the Bible on its home screen; a song played on the radio I take to be a sign. It has to be.
“Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke
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When I drive out of Nashville on Monday morning, I think of my other last drives out. In the rearview on the way to college, I saw the house I grew up in shrouded by pines with my mother waving from the driveway like a country song. I didn’t like country music back then so I played Bleachers to mute my sobs. Four years later, there was a downpour as we walked out of our favorite breakfast spot in Chapel Hill for the last time. I cried hard because I’d miss the first life I made for myself as an out-of-college adult when I left Boston for Iowa. We saw a bald eagle flying over the Hudson later in the afternoon. It was unseasonably warm and unusually sunny for December on my last day in Iowa. Then I didn’t bother doing a last hits tour like I usually do. I just wanted out. I had imagined myself in a road movie. Looking over my shoulder like someone would chase me down and drag me back.
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For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest.
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Because I’ve packed my clothes, I have to ask to borrow a dress I’d given my friend when I was going through clothes to donate. It’s my last night in Nashville. After dinner, I take my friend to Love Circle. You can see the skyline there even when there are trees. I point towards a direction and tell her, that’s where we live. Correct myself: lived. Sunset is far off. Darkness not even close. It is what we call golden hour, though I’m not thinking of Terrance Malick or Kacey Musgraves.
I’m thinking about my friend’s poem recently published in Poetry. “[…] the graceless eclipse of all our promises and plans.” I’m thinking about how much I prefer this view in the dark. The last time I was here it was under the full moon in Libra. I was very in love with a picture Hayes took of me. A few days before Cancer season and all I want to do is cry. There is no moon in sight. I’d take even a glimpse of a Moon Pie marquee down on Broadway. But blue is all there is. The brightness almost unbearable until I realize I already have borne it. When we get home, I fold the dress neatly and put it into my friend’s suitcase.
On the last morning, I drag my feet. Double check the locks, look under the bed. I wonder what I’ll remember when I remember today. There’s an alert on the interstate’s variable message sign about poor air quality. Lana Del Rey sings your head in your hands until you color me blue. It’s myself who is pulling me back. All these places are places I’ll return to.
It’s a cop out, but you’ll have to believe me when I say there’s a symmetry to everything.