Lessons From the Kissing Booth

For a while there it was like being a bundle of nerves in a petri dish, everyone just clustered around and watching to see what stimulus provoked a rainbow or a rat king or a neutron star. I know being performatively exposed is the way of things now, but it came to a place of feeling hollow and forced, a place where what was once a release was now a burden. I have never been much of a liar. And I was ok with having once been good at something that now seemed colorless and dry--sometimes wells go empty, and deserts are their own kind of beautiful. There are other ways to make sense of the world.

But we live in a world where the permafrost is thawing and you can find pretty much everything you've ever lost somewhere, and I guess a solid side effect of going hollow is that there's space for something to be again. Eventually. If it feels like it.

And then Mary Oliver died, and I couldn't stop thinking about the poem that is tattooed on my bones:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver is always right, of course.

So you have been on my mind, is what I'm saying. Last night I had a dream that I was at a party and people all around me kept saying things that I wanted to tell you, referenced over and over articles that I wanted to read and torture and turn back around. In the dream I was filling my pockets with stories, greedy for them like when stone fruit finally comes into season after a long winter of potatoes.

For the moment, I guess the wind has changed.