Comets

Certainly, you can imagine that souls have no real shape or form. They could be rounded and plush like clouds, or faceted and compact like gems. Maybe they are completely transparent, save for a single point of light. Perhaps it depends on the person they came from, or the next person they will be.

So it isn’t impossible to believe they could stretch for miles. If not all, then maybe parts of them reach out above and below. Long tails like comets, projecting behind them, leaving a path that alters gravity on some small scale. A sighting or a special event sought out in the night sky.

What if that happens while you’re still alive, and your soul is still inside you? Small parts of you, invisible to the eye, reach out without you knowing? To all the wants and desires you never talk about, the dreams you never attained. The people you never see anymore. The loves you can’t get over.

Each silent, auxiliary piece of us would still be us. The most concentrated version of us. With its own whorled structure, like a fingerprint. Its own level of warmth as it passes. A signature scent that wafts in its wake. A custom sound, too, the same way Tesla owners choose a backup warning as a personality trait.

And also, our weaknesses? An inability to calm oneself, a shameful compulsion for self-soothing. Incredible, all-consuming lust that blots out all other brain activity. Insecurity that wraps around the throat like a cold, dead hand. A restlessness that rivals even the most haunted of ghosts.

Your soul is showing, then, like a slip peeking out. It’s completely betraying your best efforts to be cool. But it’s also finding the other souls; the ones who are the same temperature, color, taste. Entangling tails as they sniff each other, get in to the real parts.

And when they do — get all wrapped up like that — there’s no undoing it. It would be easier to untangle a million fine strands of gold chains and pendants.

That’s why it’s so hard to forget them.

Basic Cotton

Facade

Which version of me do people see?

I ask myself first thing in the morning, all the fluid still puffing my face. My hair an absolute catastrophe of errant waves and wisps. It seems almost disingenuous that it isn’t this one.

And when I’m in the gym, is it this one? Gyrating (some would say, uselessly?) on the elliptical. Pumping my shoulders and arms with weights and pushups. Panting through burpies. Sweat and salt, and not in the good ways.

Or while vacuuming the office, and I’m finding a dead moth folded on the floor, in a corner. Picking it up delicately by the wing, so as not to disturb it, and tossing it over the balcony as a proper burial. Maybe her?

After a shower, is it the me who is slathering myself in age defying oils and moisturizers. Spritzing on perfume. Matching my bra to my panties. Wondering if they are too worn yet, too passe. Does underwear actually go out of style?

Walking out the door, locking it behind me. Which version of me is my outfit? Straight to work me. Polished for dinner me. Playful and creative me, regardless of the destination. Do my sunglasses nail it into place? I might have to switch them out.

Coming home, me. Exhausted and showering, slipping on the least amount of clothing, melting slowly into bed. Or me, tipsy and sexy, sending you videos as I undress. Remembering what it was like to have you in my bed. In my kitchen. In my life.

Or is it this me, quietly drinking tea, looking out the window at all the cars passing by. Normal people, normal schedules. Imagining that they all have families, purpose, radios on in the background. Futures spread out grandly before them, like wide open plains or the autobahn. Any number of possibilities. All the money in the world. Passing hands, theirs for the taking. Muscles and blood and bones under skin, behind faces, powered by pure will.

That was also me.

Low Cut

Bad

It doesn’t happen all the time, but there are mornings where I wake up craving a cigarette.

Not the mouth feel, or the taste. Not the smoke coating my lungs and staining my fingertips. Just the practice of it, the art. Stretching out in the morning air in my pajamas, coffee in hand, smoking.

My body hates it now. It’s tolerated it the last few years. Before that it was scarcely a blip. I could breathe it out of my body, and my blood. It’s barely ever registered as a habit. Just purely as a love for the sport.

Though I am less self-aware overall as I age, this is one thing I am conversely self conscious of. Who would get near me, breathe me in, touch me, kiss me? if I smoked. It becomes a social delineator. Once it’s done I can’t leave the house.

And I don’t want to socialize with other smokers. Especially not ones my age. These are not my people.

Which begs the question, who am I? To be so singularly acceptable in this private transgression. To crave a sexy cigarette, without anyone ever seeing it. To put my body through yet another vice, and more toxins it can’t afford. What the fuck am I actually doing?

Maybe it isn’t just the cigarettes.

Lacy Things

Location

I have an imaginary life. Everyone does, right? A little place I go to in my imaginary future, where I’ve figured out the grimy and annoying details, smoothed them over, and put them in their place. Where I can step forward into a light that looks like artful monochromatic photos of models in model homes overlooking Manhattan through picture windows. So I can move the way I want, dress the way I want, talk the way I want, be the way I want, everyday.

Some parts of that life are so clear it almost feels close enough to touch. Between this life and that life I can see webbed strands of connection, like the gelatinous bridges of the mind. Cartoon sparks run back and forth across them, feeding one into the other. Somehow I have images of that self and that space as if they were memories; a parallel existence I’ve lived through a double-sided mirror.

In an effort to piece that reality together within this one, I have mood boards and collages of items and people and tastes that seem accurate. Ok, really, it’s Pinterest, but it’s no less real, no less saturated with desire. And the elements are no more clearly defined than my just knowing what feels right. Each piece completes a puzzle picture that, like real life, continues to evolve over time. But with a glow, an undercurrent, that is cohesive and always me.

What do we do with these lives that are such a pleasure to construct, but have absolutely no value in the real world? Could they be actual goals, or is that too naive? Maybe reflections, premonitions, overactive idealizations? What do they say about us, in their complexity and investment of real world time. Do they make us seem hopeful or pathetic? Are they something to be shared, and do we need to explain them? Would we even know how to begin if we did?

I would like to have that life, despite my few complaints in this one. I would like that body, that broodingly beautiful gaze, that wardrobe, that gaussian filter on normal afternoon light. I’d like to put it on like a silk shirt over an unlined bra, slipping over me and hiding very little. Or grip it like brass railing along a marble staircase, to steady myself as I click down in stilettos. I’d like to tell it a joke, make it laugh, and find that I’m popular and engaging to the glamorous crowd around me. Say, ‘money is no object,’ and pop champagne, my leg languid through the slit in my dress. Then wake up next to it in the morning, amid a swath of white sheets and huge pillows, with tea and the New York Times.

And nowhere else to be.

Laundry Day

Fit to Print

I would never say I’m a purist, but part of me favors the decadence of simplicity. Freshly painted white walls, a solid gold band, 100% Kona coffee — all examples of how concision and focus make a simple product superb.

When I was very young, my Dad gave me a typewriter he had acquired as a hand-me-down from our babysitter’s family. It was an old, very basic machine; just a ribbon and keys. Heavy metals, stiff levers, and black-blue ink. Initially, I spent as much time typing on it as I did untangling the long arms of letters when they crossed. Not only that, but the ink was not erasable, so every click had to be intentional and true. Mistakes were annoying and unsightly to correct, so I learned to type gracefully and with a purpose.

As an older child, I was introduced to electronic typewriters (word processors, in some circles), which amazed me for a lot of reasons. First, they were much better at feeding paper, the whole key-tangling thing was never an issue, and many of them came with an especially exciting feature: the backspace key.

Backspace was a point of contention for me, though. Frankly, it felt like cheating. Any pride I had ever taken in my carefully coordinated typing was suddenly moot. Errors were incidental rather than ruinous. One could type with reckless abandon and never worry. In one easy tap, backspace could lift its eraser-y ribbon and stamp over the mistake, leaving only its ghost on the page.

My love for typing suddenly felt cheapened, and even a little hollow. What I had once considered a craft was now just a rote means to an end. Versus the heavy metallic slap of the typewriter, the diminished clicks of plastic buttons seemed to look up at me and say, “What’s the big deal?”

Oddly enough, I was reminded of this early disappointment today when a girlfriend of mine texted me in a flurry. She had gone out with a guy a couple times and given him her home address, right before he flipped a switch and turned into a supercreep. She started Googling him to confirm his identity, and found that he didn’t seem to exist online. This only served to freak her out more, and she was seeking advice on what to do next, all the while admitting that she had been too quick with her trust.

It made me wonder if the typewriter gives us all a big hint about life: that the best course of action for a desired outcome is slow, measured, and practiced, and adding features to hurry through life just waters down the simply sublime. Mike Powell addressed this beautifully in his New York Times Magazine article, Washing Dishes, where he debates the purchase of a dishwasher for his family over losing the lovely, normal ritual that washing dishes can be. In it, he recalls the solace that activity had been on occasion, and reflects on how mechanizing the mundane further disconnects us from the hidden gifts of ordinary life.

Life doesn’t have a backspace key, and even if it did, it wouldn’t completely erase our errors. Rather, it would just cover them up and move on like they never happened. The mistakes are obviously still there, though: butting curves up against lines; creating unintelligible symbols out of conflicting letters; subjugating the text you meant to write, but rushed through the first time.

Silently reminding you, with each finger stroke, that nothing you do is inconsequential.

Basic Cotton

Here, Kitty

melissa-van-gogh-1608907-unsplash

In January I adopted a cat. My last cat and I had a good run, right up until the moment she ran out the front door to meet up with her new cat boyfriend. I started to miss the easy company and tuna-can-licking perks, though. So down to the Humane Society I went to pick up my next shedding loaf of quirks.

She was a former street cat missing half her right ear, and she was just aloof enough. I gathered her paperwork, brought her home, and locked her in the bathroom as advised. She would spend a couple days hiding, get used to my apartment, and then would we be besties. Or so they said.

Instead, new kitty hid in the bathroom for weeks, in a tiny little corner behind my laundry basket. She was like a lazy bathroom attendant who eventually learned that, when sitting on the toilet, I was a captive audience who would pet her on demand.

I started to worry I had accidentally adopted a defective animal, and began doing things to force kitty out into the world (aka, my one bedroom apartment). Naturally, forcing it only made things worse, and her trust in me slowly began to degrade. When bribing, overfeeding, and smothering tapered off in effectiveness, I sort of resigned myself to having a creepy little toilet troll as a pet, and just decided to leave her alone for a bit.

I was reminded of this beginning today when I read Madison Taylor’s blog post, Timing Can Be Everything. In it, she talks about the dissonance between human-imposed timelines and natural ones, and our tendency to either want time to slow down or speed up. Rather, she advised, we are better served by believing that timing is always at a purposeful pace, and life is unfolding as it should.

Taylor isn’t the first to point this out. It’s in Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success as part of The Law of Least Effort: I will not struggle against the whole universe by struggling against this moment. And Gabrielle Bernstein repeatedly states that, “obstacles are detours in the right direction,” throughout her book, The Universe Has Your Back. In other words, lots of smart, zen people believe that one of the secrets to life is to simply chill the fuck out about your five year plan.

Kitty certainly embodied this philosophy, because she finally emerged from the bathroom when she was good and ready. Not only that, but she has since blossomed from a mangy street mongrel into an adorable lap cat.

All I had to do was just let her be.

Chonies

In Other Words, Underwear

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