a poem

 

save your voicemails

At the end of the work week, I found myself under my desk, resisting the urge to put my head between my knees, sipping electrolyte solution. For moments like these, I keep a pouch of this stuff in my bag, folded up into an Altoids tin along with some eye re-wetting drops, healing ointment, and a single Cold-Eeze lozenge. I'm still not sure what had caused me to nearly collapse. I sat there for about half an hour and eventually decided to call a car. 

I stepped outside. It had just rained. The sun was setting but not yet gone, washes of warm light and cold shadow falling over the cars and the apartment buildings. A man and woman stood nearby, chattering loudly about why prediction betting should be regulated, and probably soft drinks along with them. They didn't seem to know each other that well; it was news to her that he used to be a libertarian. She clearly liked him. He was clearly unsure. 

I put my headphones in and saw two missed calls, one from my optician in LA. Her name is Mimi, and she is also a DJ. Your voicemail box is full, said my phone, so I started to delete the messages, tens at a time, from robots and people I didn't recognize. I culled everything, save for a few here and there, and got all the way back to the beginning: mid-2022.

That can't be right, I thought. I checked my deleted messages. I checked my saved. 

I opened Voice Memos and searched "grampa." Where the fuck was my car? "Grandpa." Nothing. "Voicemail." Only one memo, 18 seconds long, labeled "Voicemail-105.m4a." Mar 17, 2023. I swiped away. It began to rain.

The voicemail I was looking for had been delivered in 2020. But what if I'd had the good sense to save it in March of 2023?

I went back to my memos, searched "voicemail" again, and this time I pressed play.

I wept. 

It rained. 

By the time my car arrived, my eyes were dry and I'd listened to it a few times. I fell asleep on the way home. 

All in all, I had a good day at work today. A good week, in fact, and I'd like to tell you about it, save for the fact that I'm supposed to have gone to sleep hours ago, and I should save those thoughts for the morning. There are a lot of them. The reason I'm up is my friend — my cousin, in effect. I don't believe in platonic friendships unless they're like this one. He once told me I'm as sexual an object to him as Dwayne the Rock Johnson. We decided to go on a road trip this year, one where we each have some kind of question we want to answer. I told him I wanted to go find a bunch of Filipino people in middle America and ask them how they ended up there. 

a phone call, a date, a memory

I called a friend today — he's funnier than me, often in this sort of dark way, but he's also wise and his thoughts feel well-measured. Maybe but is the wrong operator, because maybe "darkly funny" is something you only get to be if you're a little bit wise and good at measuring out your words. Whatever the case, I find him gentle and tactful when he needs to be. He asks good questions, which is the most important thing in writers and photographers of any kind, and he is both. So I asked him to write with me on a script I’ve been thinking about. He said he'd give it some thought. I hope he says yes. This is the kind of idea I haven't been able to shake for years, but it needs the right team.

I went on a date the other night. I felt almost nothing about it — good guy, good taste in sweater, good cologne, good face, good mustache geometry. Pleasant enough conversation. He explained what it would require, technically speaking, to gene drive mosquitoes out of existence, and why malaria vaccines are a better alternative (I had asked). But I wasn't really in it. The whole thing felt like a task. I had this thought at one point that he pursued a lot of the interests that I thought were cool on paper in a sort of boring way. He asked me if I wanted someone to walk me home, and I said no. 

Instead, I took myself to the bookstore, which was open late. While I was there, I shamefully purchased Rosie Kellet's In For Dinner on my phone while standing in the cookbook corner; it was readily available on the bad app for half the price. I needed to cut corners somewhere. 

I walked out with two things: A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver and the making of a story, Alice LaPlante — I've been in the mood for instruction lately. I made my way home, tiptoeing over ice, happy to be returning to my empty apartment, happy to make tea and think private thoughts to myself.

I fell asleep reading Oliver. In the morning I dragged both her and LaPlante to a teahouse the following afternoon, where I waded deep into the first chapter of the making of a story, where LaPlante proposes a few simple exercises. The first one is a finish-the-thought prompt: “I don't know why I remember…” A single image came to me immediately:

I don't know why I remember driving through downtown with ▭ when I first moved back to LA after that summer I spent living above the garage. Specifically, I remember reaching across the gap between the front seats and thumbing through the hair by his ears.

After a while he said, "You know, you don't have to keep doing that," which I now understand to mean please stop. And I said, "No, it's okay," which I now understand to mean I'm doing this for me, not for you. I was still in disbelief that he was real.  

I stayed home sick from work today and will probably do the same tomorrow, but I dragged myself to the grocery store because I needed some very important things: biscuit dough, green onions, silken tofu, mushrooms, frozen strawberries. When I’m sick I want to eat everything, like my body is burning fuel to heal itself. I mean, I guess it is.

to be specific in our affections

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about specificity. There’s this clause that’s bound itself to my brain like a barnacle, and I notice it whenever I get into the elevator or turn on the shower:

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since this phone call I had in December. At some point, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” 

You have two immediate options when you get a compliment: shiver it off or accept it. The latter is better. Then you can do what I do and spend your commute thinking about whether it’s really true, and why or why not, and what it really says about you. When people compliment you on giving compliments, it might be because you’ve noticed some small subtle something in them or picked up a pattern in the way they move, and named it.

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I lean into love that feels specific. It’s easy to forget how actively we can design our affections for every recipient: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to vaguepost. I want a love that’s conscious of my quirks. And when you have a love that exists specifically between two individuals, this creole of affection starts to emerge. The love gets wonderfully weird, and then it becomes durable. How can two people constantly designing their love to welcome the strangeness and specificity of the other do anything but last?

There's this poem I think about a lot but can never find, which I think I encountered in an anthology when I was in high school. The poet writes about his wife's elbows, how they matter to him — it’s a comment on how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? So much hinges on them, literally.

Don’t bother looking for it. None of the poetry that surfaces on search for love and elbows is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, too corny. I liked that one poem because I think the author understood that his job was simple, was to show you something small.

a night to myself, friends in town

Last night, I came home from work early. The milk at work may have gone bad, and I had two big milky coffees. Oops. I took a nap and woke up feeling like everything in my stomach was going to keep going in the right direction.

I thought about calling my friends, which is usually what I do at night, but I've been feeling so inward lately, and last night I really wanted to just watch YouTube videos and do my nails. I pulled up the imaginary calendar of my week and saw that on no other night would there be any guaranteed evening to spend on taking care of myself. I set up my station and chose nine different colors. The white is actually a cool grey chalky color, kind of like #FAFAFA, with a layer of milky jelly white on top of it, and there's no way to capture the translucence on camera, but it reminds me of really thin porcelain.

Anyway, I let myself take my time. I didn't do much but carefully, meticulously sculpt each nail, and for the first time in months, felt very satisfied with the process. I remembered my posture. I sculpted and filed and refined and resurfaced until each one was basically perfect. 

I watched this episode of Sad Boyz and let my brain go into art mode. I really like it when Jarvis gets into tech commentary. 

My friends are in town! I got into DC on Sunday afternoon and spent the day cleaning my place, then had Ethan and Elvira over for cookies and ice cream. She tried on a bunch of my clothes and took home the $400 Tory Burch turtleneck I picked up at a Virginia Goodwill for $6. Elvira pointed out that I'm always finding things. This is true. We also discussed the theory that everyone's allowed one crazy ex, and you're allowed two crazy exes under one of two conditions: (1) they're crazy for completely different reasons, or (2) they're crazy for the same reason, and you were able to discern the pattern.

I woke up at 6:20am this morning to meet Elvira for morning yoga, and we had breakfast and coffee nearby. In our sleepy state, we got speculative about the future, as usual. Tonight I'm taking her and Ethan on a tour of the National Mall. We will be bundled up, hot drinks in hand, then probably stop somewhere for for pizza.

songs of surrender, a drive through the sticks

Savannah drove me to the Park & Ride today so that I could take the Logan Express to Boston for my flight home. It was close to three when we left, sun already low in the sky, coming in through the trees, casting a soft auburn glow, battling back the gray. Savannah gave me a tour of Florence Welsh’s new album — unmistakably her, but way more literal, more resentful, more mournful, more raw. I realized that when she’s angry, her sound is almost bellicose. We spent a lot of the ride listening, reading road signs, tracking headlights. I think there’s a sound so distinct of a woman’s grief that any woman acquainted with grief herself can pick it up immediately, no matter the genre. 

This one song came on, You Can Have It All. I thought about how I’ve seen this sentence make tons of appearances in the music in my life — all over worship songs, and then in secular love songs (Adele, lots of Adele). Always in songs of surrender, a type of song I find so fascinating. If to surrender is just to give up ownership and control, “you can have it all” is both loss and release. Much of the time I feel like these songs are about surrendering stuff we never had in the first place. Or about offering ourselves up completely.

I was thinking about this when And Love, the last song on the album, came on. I think it’s my favorite on the album, and this one is an even more direct meditation on surrender. If I could ask Florence Welsh anything, I’d ask her to describe how grief and surrender and love are knit together in her life. I’ve at least been thinking a lot about how they are in mine. 

[Verse 2]
And love was not what I thought it was
More like an animal crawling deep into a cave
Than a romance novel heroine being swept away
More like surrendering to something
And more like resting than running

And then I was at the bus station in Braintree, hugging Savannah goodbye in the little bus terminal, making plans to come up to Falmouth at the end of summer. 

One of the things I love about our friendship is the familiarity. This is a friendship that welcomes visits from afar to sit on the couch for a week and do very little, to tell each other what we’re getting each other for Christmas and end up getting each other the same thing, to FaceTime on the way to the grocery store. A casualness that is the product of diligently showing up for almost nine years. 

finding a way out, portuguese stoneware, and my face

The other night, Savannah and I watched the Deathly Hallows Pt. I and II, and we sobbed, sweater cuffs to eyes, when we watched Snape's memories play back in the pensieve. I think there's a lot JK Rowling doesn't understand, but I do think she understands tragic love.

Immediately after that we watched The Hunger Games (But Better), and I went to bed. Except I stayed up and watched the entirety of the first Hunger Games film and cried when Rue died and District 11 rioted. It’s possible I needed to cry for other reasons, and this was just the way out. 

Savannah's dad took us to Portugalia, where we saw all this food in huge crocks. This is how life is supposed to be, I think. I also want basically all of the stoneware for my kitchen once I break more of the Dansk plates I have, which I found out are entirely American.

For the duration of the trip, I kept looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and thinking, “this is your face now.” As in, “this is your face at this very moment,” and “your face really does change with time.” Maybe I will think this every time I look in the mirror for the rest of my life. 

my current face