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This is something else I wonder at quite a lot. Do any of them have fun? Is fun even possible anymore?…I
The concept of boundaries seems to have gone into overdrive to balance out all the connecting.
Increasingly, I find I am almost entirely devoid of envy.
I’m never more aware of it than when I’m face to face with the thing I’m supposed to be coveting the most: youth.
wouldn’t hand over my eighties childhood for a lifetime of smooth skin and perky breasts.
The vision I had of myself when we left Ellie’s flat is now the wrong vision. I’m not sure why, but I can’t seem to fit it in anywhere. I’ve slid out of the rhythm of the night somehow.
Every few songs I get up and try to join. Try not to be the person on the sidelines. But it’s too far away from me.
And now how to get myself out of the forest.
Movement is only enjoyable when it’s a choice. Bookended by places of respite and permanence.
There is no sense in panicking when you’re alone. Particularly when your aloneness is the result of your own decision-making. Panic needs an audience to be useful. All I know is that at some point I will emerge from these woods, and when I do I will either get a signal and know where I am, or be able to see the rotating spotlight atop the Eiffel Tower and orient myself from there.
A woman unafraid of her own desires, freed from the expectation of asking permission to satisfy them, even briefly. There’s not a shred of shame.
Who knows how this is all supposed to go when it so rarely has gone this way in the past. How am I—well, forget me for a moment—how are we supposed to know we’re in the right place if the destination is not a recognizable one?
I remind myself, I will covet this self too. This trip. This freedom. This joy. This movement and this skin I have now, even if parts are less vibrant than they were, they are more so now than they will be.
When the inciting incident in your life is having been left, by marriage, by family, by parents, by culture—by the person or place whose very role it is to hold you close—it is not something you overcome once and get on with afterward. It is something you are always overcoming.
Then there was me. Wedged between the two. A woman alone. A woman who wasn’t required to ask permission. Who could do as she pleased.
was knowledge I possessed, was reminded of, and put to use. Over and over again.
some point I will be once again in the valley of uncertainty with walls rising up on either side. And it will seem deep and at times insurmountable. But that too will end. For now, I simply ride on.
