Going Through Old Notebooks Part 3: My First "Five Things"

Jardin du Palais-Royal at night, digital painting. iPad and apple pencil.

Dear Reader,

This is what I wrote, in December of 2020, when I first began to work with my own version of the “five things” prompt. I believe this started as a kind of stream of consciousness, which I then lightly edited before hitting publish. I eventually gave up on the convention of including the numbers, but for a while at least, I left them in.

Anyway, here you go, a glimpse back at December of 2020:

1.

I forget how to do this.

I haven’t kept a diary at all this past year. For a few years I would try to write in a journal every morning, but I found, when reading back over them and typing some of them up, that they were mostly vessels for my anxiety. The things I needed to do. The things I hadn’t yet done. The things I had promised myself I was going to do better. Just reading through them, I was filled with a rising sense of alarm. It was as if the journals themselves were contaminated, contagious, perhaps even radioactive. It was as though I was going to catch all those muted, early morning terrors all over again, just by opening them up. I did not want to revisit them.

Still, there amidst the high whine of quotidian difficulty, some little polished stones of observation could be found. These, I imagine, are the point of such journals. In the moment, it might be useful to exorcise oneself of the day ahead, or the day before, but when it comes to posterity, we value only the look of the light on a wall; the events of a day; the moments that can give context and meaning to a life.

I hated these journals, or at least I hated reading them. I hated the incessant patter of my own anxious mind. I hadn’t thought of myself as being particularly anxious. Still, here it was, a mind that was always behind deadline, always living in a kind of muffled, abject terror; a mind full of panicked promises: I know I am bad, I intend to get better, all I have to do is this, or this, or this other thing, and then things will feel clean again, then things will improve. They were the journals of a person in distress, and that is not what I wanted to remember.

So, I stopped making them, but I also stopped doing a particular kind of writing that was useful to me, and I have missed those daily reflections. I have missed what I wrote that was intended for a reader of some sort. I was busy, and writing was demanded of me by people in official positions—editors, agents—and so I felt stupid, perhaps even delinquent, to simply be writing and giving it away in raw form, without trying to hone it or monetize it first. But I hate that, too. In the end, it meant I had lost something, some honesty, or spontaneity, or something else that I couldn’t quite describe, having grown so rusty.

2.

It reminds me of the year in which I could not listen to music. Some time ago, I had something terribly distressing happen. I don’t want to get into it, but it was a thing that shifted something in me. It changed how I operated in the world. In the short term, the change was dramatic. In the long term, maybe not so much, but one can never be sure. In the short term, I needed to forcefully dull my exposure to certain forms of stimuli. Music felt too emotional, too unpredictable, and so for a time, I stopped listening. When I wrote, I wrote to silence. If I wanted something on in the background at home, I put on a television show or a movie. When driving, I listened to NPR talk radio or to podcasts.

I’ve gone back to listening to music of course, years ago, and even during that year of no music, music pursued me. Bands performed at bars. Music played in bakeries and in restaurants and at friends’ parties and at the dry cleaners and the supermarket. I don’t know how conscious I was of avoiding it, only that I never chose to listen to it when I was alone. It was also the year I wrote this, about being haunted by the songs from a Mix Tape made in 1998.

3.

I’ve been eating a pomegranate every day for about the last two weeks. They are in season, and cut-open pomegranates are displayed at the front of many greengrocers, arranged atop massive piles of the mottled red and gold fruit. They are sweet and tart and pithy, and seem somehow appropriate now, as if we are all Persephone, clocking out our hours in the underworld.

Every morning, I arrange before me two bowls: one white and shallow, one deep and blue. With a paring knife, I cut out the crown of the pomegranate, and then score along its five ridges, before pulling the six bloody pieces apart. The rind and the pith goes into one bowl, the white one, while the seeds collect in the other—red in blue. It is satisfying to push them out one by one from their hive, like kernels of red honeycomb. They make a satisfying sound, the plink of the seeds falling into the bowl, and the rustle of the rind releasing them. I find it strangely soothing, a short burst of familiar, meticulous work.

4.

In Paris, the shops are open, but all of the restaurants are closed. All of the cafés, and bars, and bistros, and brasseries are closed too. Without them and their lights, with with the metal-shuttered doors and windows presented instead, the streets are very dark at night. The shops and the streetlights are not enough to light them.

In the summer, I noticed a space of about twenty minutes every evening, when the deep blue sky had grown too dark, but the sodium streetlights had yet to come on. A grayish-blue twilight would fall over the pale houses and the monuments, and over the river, which was suddenly dull, reflecting nothing. Then, the lights would come on. The streetlights and the lamp posts in their ancient frames, and the lights on the bridges, would send columns of gold shattering across the surface of the water.

5.

This was a year that most of us tried to make pass faster, and for me at least, it worked. Like everyone, trapped on our own individual planets, I suppose I was compelled to just keep looking forward; to make my world smaller, and smaller—small enough to manage; reducing my life to the tiny space of a single asteroid, the home of my own little prince of a life, my Asteroid B612. With its many sunrises and sunsets flashing by, and its volcanoes that need cleaning, and the baobab trees that need weeding, and what roses that may land and take root in my soil, as I continue on, as we all do, hurtling through the dark.

Paris, December 16th, 2020

xo

S