Sometimes when I haven’t shown up here for a certain amount of time I begin to worry that I never will again. But what a meaningless thing to worry over.
I write in a lot of places, these days. I started keeping a journal in 2021 as a product of unmanageable levels of stress, and while the stress, thankfully, has changed, the journal habit hasn’t. I don’t write there everyday, but usually two or three times a week, and I don’t ever worry about what makes it in there, or doesn’t. I am working currently on two manuscripts of sorts with a small group of friends, accountability writing partners on the east coast, and we jointly participated in #1000wordsofsummer back in June. (What a wild thing to say: “back” in June? oy.) I am a writer and I will always write, even if, for so much of my life, so much of it has always been private. Even if, as I have mused on before, the most pressing question in my writing is often what to leave out. (This feels like a funny pun, to me, which would take some explaining, but suffice it to say that in all of my writing which is not simply a personal chronological record, but instead a creative literary exercise, spare would be my most aspirational adjective. Whereas my wholesale person — blogging, journaling, or talking — is, instead, quite verbose.)
I went to Paris, and I came home. I did not take the golden field of stars; I still haven’t finished it. My friend’s beautiful baby came (after I left) and they are all home safe and healthy. I assumed I should show up here and write about my trip, and then I didn’t really feel I could, in this public way, and I did not. What would a blog reader want to know? I didn’t comport myself as a tourist, I don’t have an itinerary to share of what museums to see or landmarks to photograph.
I have lived in many big, world-class cities in my life and I didn’t find Paris to be radically different – except, of course, in all the small but most substantial of ways. The quality of the food. The green space. The ways in which I saw people spending time, outside together, in what feels so starkly different from, and more communal than, anything in the US. My friend Jess, recently back from Berlin, described this phenomenon, too. Books, also, are shockingly cheap in Europe. I spent two hours on the Eurostar and then countless hours in bookstores in London, pawing through everything. I saw lots, and lots, and lots of art. I read. I wrote. I spent hours in designer clothing shops, in both Paris and London, touching things and trying things on and making copious notes, videos, photographs on my phone — describing what I liked, and how I could dupe it for myself at my sewing machine.
In truth, I didn’t do all that much in my two weeks. But what I did do was everything to me.
My favorite photo I took in Paris.
Cimetière du Père-Lachaise
the Louvre
My favorite part of Paris is my friend. I spent two weeks sleeping in her beautiful apartment, cooking her dinner while she sat on a rolling desk chair we had crammed into the narrow galley kitchen so she could ease off of her swollen feet but still be close enough to talk with me. I can’t describe how it salved the scars of all my heartbreak to stay up with her night after night, until one am, or three, and talk. Just talk to each other. About everything, and nothing, about our lives. When we finally went to sleep, we’d sleep late, and then wander down to the street to buy fresh pastry and a loaf of bread and come back up to eat it all with a fried egg, and then she would nap in the afternoons and I would go out walking for hours on end. I’d come home, picking up fresh vegetables on my way from the little markets on every street, and we’d start the whole routine over again, back at the beginning. Up until the wee hours, together. Just talking. For two glorious, beautiful weeks that I will treasure for the rest of my life.
The month after I returned, I had more time with friends — this time, five straight days with a pair of loved ones I’ve known for fifteen years but haven’t had the pleasure of time with for the last five or six. These days were spent almost entirely outside in the summer heat, in camp chairs or at park tables or on picnic blankets, and for some hours just walking barefoot in a stream. I stayed up too late some more. I learned how to play hearts. I laughed so hard I cried and fell over, gasping and weeping and laughing more.
Oh, the incredible, irreplaceable feeling of sitting, day after day after day, looking into the faces of people you love and just talking. Of sharing, of telling, of listening, of laughing, and crying. Of feeling seen, wholly, and loved. Of loving without reserve. It was not that long ago I thought that this sort of joy simply no longer existed for me, as stark and clearly ludicrous as that may sound.
The requisite moving-of-all-the-furniture to baste a quilt on the living room floor.
The view from just inside the kitchen, with the tools of the trade alongside the misplaced records and the beleaguered air conditioner.
I believe it is all this buoying, the joy of deep reconnection with people who I love and who love me, that is responsible for the pool of energy and resilience from within which I am now working. I returned to the large diptych work, the grief project, in earnest. I’ve spent days and days, long days, consecutive days, plowing ahead on each. The blue half has been backed, basted, and has quilting stitches beginning to run through it. The red half has exploded across the design wall, and has quickly become an absolute favorite of mine. Hard to imagine, considering at many points over the last two years, I hated it – hated it! – and thought to throw it out. Impossible to have predicted, a year ago, let alone when they were begun, that I could ever feel the way I feel about them now. Eager for them to be fully born into the world. Knowing, now, that I will finish them, and find the doing so meaningful, and fulfilling. Someday, I hope to show them together. And I know just how to do it – also thanks to the brilliance of friends.
It’ll be a year, still, likely, until they are “complete.” And even then, I wonder. But more on that another time. For now, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, here I am finding “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” Beginning over again, indeed. More on these pieces, and other new studio bits, very soon.