ceilings, sky
Mood: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - U2 (I know, I know, but hear me out. It’s a live version. In Paris. 1987. So it’s French history. At the start Bono describes it as “a gospel song with a kind of restless spirit” so it was all just a little too on the nose for me to pass up. Here’s to making lemonade.)
When you lose something important, people will suggest a myriad of things. They’ll suggest looking under the bed, suggest closets, & laundry hampers, & in some peculiar cases to check under the fridge, a lost artifact potentially kicked under in some long ago hurry. You will spend a lot of time echoing yes yes I know I know yes already yes. & when the next person suggests under the bed again, you will check again, for the fifth time because maybe just maybe you have been stupid.
No one will call you stupid. No one will call you any of the mean things that try to slither off your own tongue. Your people are good – they will say bathroom cabinet? They will say may every significant bit of luck slide through your roaming hands. They will say I know you’ve probably looked here but have you checked underneath the bed? & the words foolish, foolish absent girl will get squashed beneath your ninth-lifted mattress.
There’s nothing to do but look. Maybe cry – depending on how important your loss is. If there’s an appropriate level of grief, you’re not sure you’re showing it appropriately. Too calm, too frantic, when people look at you, you sense that your turmoil never quite matches expectations. Yesterday was surely the absolute worst day, today you tell someone that you’re feeling super good, & in both instances what you’ve got is gone & you’re desperately sorry for it.
It goes on like this forever probably. At a certain point, you wash your dusty hands & say fuck it, I’m done. Then you check beneath your roller skates. It’s now a matter of pride – you hope it’s gone forever because if you find it later, after all this trouble has gone away, you’ll scream & scream your whole head off. Still, you stick your clean hands between the cushions. Grab the vacuum since you’re at it. Sigh & woe & turn your home into an archaeological dig site. Everything must go upended. If you can’t find what you need, you’ll simply find everything else.
You'll find satchels & satchels of Organic Throat Coat tea in forgotten pockets & think about the man you dated who once said that that was the single most inappropriate name for a tea that's ever existed, & you'll laugh again at it, even though that guy eventually left your heart a mangled & confused wreck. You'll page through every book on your shelves, of which there are hundreds, & reach the stack of books that your friend gave you, some of which have still gone unread. You'll learn that her bookmark of choice, tucked safely between these middle pages & those, are stickers that read you are good enough, you are good enough, you are good enough, & that read we believe survivors set within a tapestry of begonias & you'll think that this is almost as good. This learning. These little reminders of how perfectly you have chosen the right people to love. The right people to take books from. You try to guess at whether she put them there on purpose for you to find - it was most likely an accident, something so personally common, but then again each message felt so precisely for you & she gave the books to you & she is exactly the type of human to spread kindness in these tiny, quiet ways.
Now your hands pass through everything with more care. You'll continue your search but now for tiny kindnesses, most of which you've left yourself. A cashed check from a corporation you worked for a decade ago, remember the rush of that sudden windfall. A pink tank top that you love but hadn't been able to find for maybe three entire years. An extra condom wedged between the lift of your ottoman coupled with your favorite yoga pants, missing for months beneath its stored blankets - the start of a good & joyful something. You'll leaf through Tonya's book & see find fewer ceilings & more sky & think girl, I'm literally trying. I'm sorry you're gone. We're sorry you're gone, too.
You'll find the world's most formidable collection of old tote bags & old gift bags & who in the entire entire world needs this many bags? You only have two arms. More gift bags than you have friends. & where are all these mysterious gifts people are giving you, anyway? You look around your home in suspicion. Everything you can see you’ve purchased yourself. You touch the petals of your preserved & in bloom sunflower – a birthday gift. Sniff a candle that purportedly smells like “fiction” – Christmas. There are too many thank you cards, I Love You cards, Just Because cards than you know what to do with. You notice all the ways your friends can scritch your name to paper. All the poems they've written for you. Your people are so good & are so good at loving you through time. There is not enough time for you to find everything nor everyone that’s gone.
So you don't find the thing you're looking for. & maybe you guessed before you even started. That it was hopeless. That all the advice & suggestions & whatever hurricane season you could make of your home would not bring you any closer to what you want. & it's not okay. But it's a little okay. Hope beat its salubrious tempo in your head anyway & wasn’t that, even in its falsity, something sweet? Your cat has found its pouncing cat-like joy in all the absolute garbage you've unearthed. Look at it all. Your mountain of a mess of a life tangled up in the threads of everyone you’ve known & everything you’ve done. How can you focus on loss when you’ve got so much so much of everything else?
Author’s note: This post includes a referenced line from the late Tonya Ingram’s “How to Survive Today.” It is beautiful and she was beautiful.
