Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.

Sorry for the late email~there was an unscheduled snafu with Buttowndown (the newsletter platform) last night.

I gave myself a task: to reread a particular book in one day. The first two essays undid me, which was not unusual. I had reread the second essay a few times since buying a copy of the book. Last fall, I created brief PDFs of excerpts from it, using my phone as a scanner, and therefore including in the image my blood-filled thumb in the corner of each page as I pressed the paper down for a flat copy.

The essay, per usual, made me cry, and crying is so exhausting—it leaves its trace on me for the rest of the day. A temporary renegotiation of what I know and recognize about my face; a fatigue that seemed to start behind the eyes and crept out to destabilize the bones in my face. There’s a hangover feeling to crying, something I don’t remember experiencing until the last several years.

Lying on the couch, I flipped around the book. I took out the bun in my hair. My hair is perpetually somewhere above me, but I let it down as though I’d need its presence for sitting down to confront one notebook in particular. A notebook I have been meaning to burn in a ritual, though it’s summer, and the last thing I want in front of me is fire.

It’s the thinnest of notebooks. Purchased in a Korean market, most likely in Koreatown, where I used to live before my long-ago divorce, the notebook’s cover shows, in the background, the side profile of a person on a bicycle, leaning forward with effort. The foreground is all the green grass she rides across. Small white shapes pit the expanse of grass—the image isn’t sharp, so they could be mushroom caps or flowers that got flattened in the perspective of the photo.

One of the greatest achievements in life is doing what people say you cannot do

is written at the bottom of the notebook in large white font.

Underneath the figure on the bicycle, who is headed toward the left side of the notebook, it reads

If you have faith in yourself no mountain is too high to climb

only this font is both white and gray, and the words aren’t level. The words are topsy-turvy in the grass, like they’ve been tossed there amid the possible mushroom caps. I remember buying this notebook because it was thin, cheap, and the words made the notebook look earnest, cliché, and funny.

Inside, on the first page, I had written

massage notes

disconnect—not keeping a hand or finger on me—doing everything right but something missing—spent too much time on back, not enough on legs, arms, wouldn’t go thru my hair, felt perfunctory & no switch between touch and ending.

—she moved away after going deep

—I still fell asleep, hallucinated tho

—wash cloth on eyes

—left water by the tray—I am a horse when other times I am a queen

Pages before this one had already been torn out, destroyed.

The next page:

do I care about the history of the black gown?

or should I focus on the briefest history of the wedding gown, and why they should never be black?

black—mourning. I am already mourning.

why I sometimes want red drips, blood, on this hypothetical gown—mixing our blood.

And a page later:

I have a bad feeling

I follow bad feelings

Last week I emptied out a trunk full of my journals. They begin in 1981 and there is no end. They continue, just relocated to my office cabinets. This notebook with its earnest messages is one of the first to be discarded. Not a journal, but more of a slim project notebook. It contains old teaching notes, ideas, and the fits and starts of work I haven’t been ready to let go of until now.

the beauty in deletion. To clean.

The inside cover of the notebook contains a short description of what is meant by its declaration of being an “eye soft notebook.” This notebook, it reads, is anti-bacterial neutralized paper to resist harmful germs.

Inside, my handwriting is of black dresses and dripping blood, of lists I wrote that hold no meaning for me now, because I am no longer the same person who made those lists. I’m burying the notebook in the recycling bin. It’s [sic] restful color scheme with a luminosity of 8 and a saturation of 2 helps to prevent tired eyes, the tiny text on the inside cover reveals.

My eyes, tired today, from the earlier crying over an essay I’ve read at least ten times. When I shared a portion with my students last fall, I wanted them to wonder after they read it, But what happened to the cat? as though that would lead them into finding the book and reading it whole.

Sometimes I appreciate when it feels like no one else has read a book I’ve read. I’m alone in my thoughts with it. We have our own secret relationship. I can return ten, twenty, a hundred times and know who and what I’m getting into.

I want a bookcase of only this kind of book.

A photo of me on my ig grid from 2015: she is such a different creature. The caption I wrote was something to the effect of sharing my glee in knowing that my interior life was mine, no one else’s, I didn’t have to share it, and I lived inside of it with great pleasure.

That was taken and written, obviously, before the mountain ranges and valleys of grief. Those were still off in the distance. The setting sun made the mountains purple and then I forgot them, and enjoyed what I was building internally. I appreciated seeing that one writer heart the photo, because I imagined they knew exactly what I was talking about.

Will I tear the paper out of the notebook and shred it? Maybe. It’s not like fantasies I’ve had, of the right container for fire, of violently tearing out pages to throw into the flames. It’s quieter than that.

what happens when I pull off the black dress

A couple weeks ago in Portland, I said once again in front of an audience that sometimes I begin writing with remembering the stories I have inside of me that I will never tell. I’ll sit with those stories, as rotted as they are, and as shimmering and singular as they are. I remind myself that these are the stories I will never share, never commit to words, even, for an imagined reader or public. I luxuriate in what is unsaid and untold, holding the unsaid in one palm and then the other, before I close my hand and write outside of that place, for my imaginary reader.

Book referenced: Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard. Essay referenced: “Werner.”