constellations #7: current unraveling
Hello, it’s nice to see you again.
I took a few days off work last week and it was a rush of good and bad. “i kind of feel like i'm unraveling a little but alas,” my friend told me on gchat when I logged back on this week, “aren't we all?” Yes, I said, it feels like the whole world is unraveling. August often feels this way, and of course this year in particular. There’s the global trauma and the national trauma and the community trauma and the personal trauma; it’s a lot of unraveling to make sense of.
Mostly I have been kept afloat by my friends. I hope you have, too. Other recent snapshots: 1. Narrowly escaping getting caught in two heavy but short summer storms and afterwards emerging into air that felt so magnificently cool, one of the promises New England almost always keeps. 2. My parents’ dog seeming, incrementally, more protective of me lately. 3. In the car, late at night, dark two-lane highway, Matt putting on an absurdly long podcast about Sartre featuring a writer who’s so handsome I immediately regret having Googled him. I slept through a good chunk of the drive but all weekend we kept interrupting each other in the middle of conversation to say “and that’s the anti-dialectic!” Even though we were always wrong, or probably because of it, it was a good inside joke.
Right after college I kept up an email exchange with a friend whom I miss dearly. They were long, emotional missives about our crappy office jobs and our troubled love lives and our favorite sitcom rewatches and our (my) fear of the future. We used to start our emails by situating ourselves with “current,” like: “Current: Sitting in my living room with all of the candles lit” (her) or “Current: sitting with not much to do at work, waiting to go to lunch, figured I'd email you instead of reading an article about gut bacteria I just found” (me). [Ed. note: Charming!]
So, here, I adapt it for this medium. Current: listening to Carmen Canedo’s Know It All (which came out earlier this month but I am just hearing now); Sweeping Promises’ Hunger For A Way Out (same); Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song (which is out this Friday); a 100 Watt Horse album from April; new songs from Wendy Eisenberg and Gulfer.
Current: reading Luster by Raven Leilani (which, due to a confluence of good and bad luck, I now have two copies of. I really enjoyed it; some of Leilani’s sentences have a rocketship’s worth of velocity that make the book a joy to read. There were some moments of on-the-nose metaphor that didn’t land quite right with me — the autopsies, the masochism — but anyway, I did really like the book); the Wikipedia page for “dialectic”; how QAn*n is using the anti-trafficking movement’s playbook.
Current: watching I May Destroy You (the finale of which I am reeling from); this skincare routine video.
Current: holding in my mental shopping cart but would never actually buy: this truly marvelous shirt; fancy perfume samples only available one month per year; expensive scrunchies; a dress for a party that will never happen; eco-friendly floss.*
Good luck holding it together this week. I’m rooting for you and your friends.
xo
Marissa
P.S. Thanks to Lyndsey for the video and everything else.
*If you clicked that link, you’ll now be followed around the internet by eco-friendly floss ads. So sorry.