I’m sitting here tonight on a mission. On my desk are about twenty notebook pages covered in blue writing, the edges of each jagged and messy from being ripped from their spiral home. My handwriting appears neat from a distance but on closer inspection one can see blue splotches dotting each paragraph, their irregular pattern a catalogue of my mistakes, pauses and breaks. I take a sip of the Pinot Noir nestled in the pages. Removing the wine glass causes my notes to fan out onto the floor like the train of a wedding dress. I watch the waterfall of cascading thoughts I once immortalized on paper now drift lazily to the ground like dead leaves. I need a rake, I think, and more wine.
I return with more Pinot and notice stacks of printed notes sit like low rise buildings amidst the remaining wreckage of blue handwriting and loose leaf. Illuminating the compositional carnage from above are my two computer monitors, word documents stretch the expanse of both screens, their cursors blinking in synchronicity every so often. It’s late and quiet and I’m tired, but I know if I don’t go through these notes tonight I never will. The thought of losing a good line shakes me to my core, god forbid it’s an alliteration that gets trashed. It’s more than likely just garbage, my writing is usually only a collection of complaints and rants, with a sprinkling of wistful ideas on love and life, rarely anything worth keeping. But who knows? So, in the trenches of bad handwriting and drunken soliloquys I march on.
Sometimes writing is like this, you start and stop and ideas flit in and out of your mind, but I’ve never not been able to create something whole, a single unified post, in so long. If you look back at times when I’ve been most prolific in the past, they often correspond with emotional inflection points in my life. A move, a breakup, a tragedy, a vacation, a holiday… thematically I tend to roll with the seasons and my cadence of heartache and happiness. As 2021 enters it’s spring season, I find the haps and nuances that were once the fodder for posts of yore now drift quickly from my memory as I plan for the end of groundhog days and hope for the return of normal life.
Sorting through notes from earlier this year, it seems in January I bit off more than I could chew. Shocker. I was meal prepping, not drinking, working out, embarked on a writing project, all while working and enjoying a new relationship and being all I could be just days into the new year. Under normal circumstances, this would be too much. In a pandemic with multiple phases of lockdown and a looming vaccine roll out that unfortunately looks nothing like the one depicted in Contagion, we’re lucky my new year, new me plan didn’t spiral into a Britney shaved-head manic episode. Just kidding, I’d never do that. But I was spread too thin, and though I made it through dry January, I was one covid scare away from the aforementioned meltdown.
Ahh February arrived. I had been planning a trip with my boyfriend to Colorado. Incorporating all of the activities and people we wanted to see into the ten days of our vacation without becoming a nag to all parties involved (mostly my new boyfriend who still thought I was a cool, laid back version of myself… LOL rip) tested even my planning proficiency. Trying to extract dates and times from Jason in the month leading up to our trip was a challenge, it was the playoffs and things were in flux. Let’s just say having to plan for rendezvous with my people, his people, ski slopes and restaurants in a pandemic without seeming like the bossy wench I am was an education in restraint and required a lot of deep breaths. And we almost made it.
Cue COVID exposure. Meltdown city became my new home, population me and my hysteria brought on by many months of dystopian living amidst a global pandemic et al. It wasn’t pretty. That version of myself I so carefully tried to project during trip planning was overtaken by the demon of my normal self, and well – we got through it. After over a week of quarantine, 23894398429382 COVID tests, a billion flight changes, at least three teary facetimes, and a case of Pinot later, it all worked out. The trip was amazing. Vail and Breckenridge with best friends and skiing, bonfires and brewery nights in Castle Rock, and everything in between.
Reentry was tough, it always is, though this time it seemed tougher. Coming back to the grind of groundhog days and work with the long desolate weeks of late winter stretched out before us was a beating. Cue another COVID scare, work drama, Hudson drama, and family getting sick, and I was just about ready to run back to Colorado. And then life seemed to let out a deep breath, things settled down. My friends and I planned nights out, the weather brightened, and Hudson stopped acting like the ground was lava (bricks specifically). Jason and I found a new postseason, post-newly dating rhythm that makes me one-hundo-p less annoying as I obsessively plan my weeks. As the spring approached the months ahead began to take shape, a vaccine loomed closer, and so trips began to dot the horizon… as did normal life, whatever that might look like.
Seriously, what does normal look like? During the last year life changed a lot for all of us, and mine was no different. I guess normal isn’t something I can return to at this point. Months before the pandemic hit I moved out of my longtime home of NYC, a step taken for the wrong reasons at the right time. My brief stint afterwards in Boston was neither harrowing nor particularly positive, but it led me back home to Washington DC in August of last year. My circuitous route home, while completely on brand, was a beating of epic proportions. Since then, as you may have read in my last post, life couldn’t be better (insert giant COVID asterisk here) and I’m hoping my new normal is more of the same. Perhaps that’s been why I haven’t posted. Maybe in coming home and creating a better space to call my own I have been working towards what I want my normal to look and feel like.
It’s funny, initially I had wanted this post to be about love. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my friends and their husbands, have been reading a lot, and love of any genre has been on my mind. Evidently, I got lost as I always do, ended up complaining a bit (like I always do), and then settled on a dusty recap of time gone by (seems to be a theme). But, at the top of one page of a half written post attempt from January, I have written: Love… as someone who exists perennially between romantic comedy and that scene in Sex and the City where Miranda puts Palmolive soap on the cake in her trashcan… where does love leave me? What a strange question/way of phrasing an inquiry about the meaning of love. Now, as I read what I have written here tonight, I realize this post is about love. In the moves and turns and tumbles and falls of this pandemic year, one with changes beyond the dystopian weirdness and seeping horror of COVID, I realized something I can’t quite articulate in words.
If umami is the pinnacle of palatable taste and flavor, I found it’s living application in creating my own normal. It began with my move home and realizing that alone I shine pretty bright just me and Huds and my work. I met someone and we spent the holidays getting to know one another (and watching every holiday movie ever created, twice). Then 2021 arrived, where January’s typical flurry of goals was too much, the antidote was the escape of February’s vacation. Now, armed with happiness, surrounded by friends, and with trips and fun looming ahead, I’m no longer asking “where does love leave me?” Love doesn’t leave me anywhere, I’m wherever I want to be… love is the umami that has made colors brighter and my days sweeter, as the Japanese say “it’s the deliciousness that deepens the flavor” and only I can ensure it stays for good.
The Dog Hair Diaries 