In an instant
Meditating on time, change & my Saturn return
*The image used in this post was taken from the Instagram account @subliming.jpg*
This week I had a conversation with some friends about my Saturn return. I’ve found myself in the midst of an experience historically foreign to me: I’m not so sure that anything is that good, both in terms of people and in terms of, well, everything. I’ve started asking myself, is anything or anyone that cool? Is anyone that special, myself included? And there’s something liberating but heartbreaking about it. I’m so accustom to putting people on a pedestal that I grieve, now, as I realize and accept that everyone has their own problems, everyone is equally imperfect, and because of that, everyone is just like me. One might see this as a solely liberating realization, but I guess there’s something sort of lonely about it. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve traded one form of loneliness out for another. Thought liberation can be lonely, because once you see something that you can’t unsee, you can never return to that place of blissful ignorance. And it’s not like I want to—change is good. But change is hard!
As I sit here writing, the room has gone dark. From the dining room table, I look out my living room window and the sky looks stormy and uncertain. Will it rain all afternoon? I hope so. It’s been lovely to live somewhere again where things feel so alive. This morning as I walked to the park, I saw an Australian lesbian I had befriended on the sidewalk in the first few weeks of living in Brooklyn. At the time, both her and her girlfriend donned ankle-length winter coats with a medley of other winter gear that made me feel like I hadn’t been an adult on the East Coast in a very long time. Which I hadn’t. But today when I saw her, she waited for the crosswalk on the opposite side of the road and wore an MS paint blue terrycloth matching short-and-shirt set. And in that moment, time bent my mind. How did it go from 30 to 80 degrees so quickly? How long have I been here, and what the fuck even is my life?
Not to sound cliché, but I feel like I keep waking up one day to realize that everything is different. I feel like I’ve been in my 30s for ten years and now I’m actually about to turn 30 and it’s nothing like I thought it’d be and yet exactly what I thought it would be—just like time. Time is like, exactly what I think it is and functioning exactly as it’s “supposed” to (maybe?), and yet it is constantly exceeding me, confusing me, and causing me a great deal of grief, despair, and ambivalence. A good example of this is the Covid-19 pandemic and all of it’s BULLSHIT, which flipped everyone’s brains and hearts and buttholes inside out. I reflect on that time and think of all those days during a year and a half or so where my life just seemed so…ordinary. I stayed home and made bread. I did yoga on Zoom. I watched all of the Real L Word and Hannibal and felt horny and political. But then I am jolted by this deeply strange and borderline uncomfortable sense that life is very different now, that things have really changed, that I have changed, and that things will never be that way again. And it feels that way because it’s true, but it befuddles me nonetheless. Does it really make me “uncomfortable”? Not quite. But it makes me feel something. Something overwhelming and intense. Maybe it’s that I’m afraid that life was better back then—because I was thinner, because I had more time, because I was younger, because my hair was better, because my apartment was nicer, because it was then and not now. It’s this feeling of wondering if there’s something I should be doing to get back to that place. I believe the phrase to describe this sensation is, “the grass is always greener.” True, but is it also a secret third thing (à la that one meme)?
I write about time here, now, during a time where TIME is particularly mind-bending in some of the same ways that Covid was, because it was marked by George Floyd’s death mobilizing people across the country, and now the genocide in Palestine has mobilized people across the world. Of course the glaring difference is that people are doing a very good job of participating in collective amnesia re: covid, but what I’m referring to is the fact that the same feeling has returned to me, where weeks stretch into months and months stretch toward a year and something major is happening right before my eyes but how is it possible for anything to occur “right before my eyes” if it’s been happening for almost a year? Grief, anger, and injustice can shake you to your core so much so that your life feels marked by it, but the longer it goes on, you start to wonder if it’s marking you at all. “It feels like it happened in an instant,” I hear myself say, but what is an instant anyway? Two definitions of the word:
happening or coming immediately
a precise moment of time, i.e.,“come here this instant!”
When I examine these definitions side by side, the paradox reveals itself. An instant is a precise moment of time, but no one tells you how long that moment is supposed to be, and that moment feels like it happened or came immediately. Covid happened in an instant. George Floyd happened in an instant. Palestine happened in an instant. But it’s been almost a year. But Covid isn’t over. But George Floyd. Am I making sense to any of you? Knock knock, it’s my little fist tapping on the glass behind your computer screen, asking you in a puny little voice if I sound sane.
I’m experiencing the same feeling now that I did then: that so much is happening, that we are in a time of significant and substantial change, yet I am here in my dining room, writing a Substack post that feels radically unimportant. I don’t say that in a self-deprecating way, but rather in a topical way. It’s the same as all this shit I’m talking about with time. It’s like, suddenly and then all at once. It feels conceptually and viscerally extreme, but I’m sitting here doing almost nothing. During Covid and George Floyd, it always felt, to me, like something more extreme should be happening. It felt like lighting cop cars on fire and flipping out in public with thousands of other people was supposed to be happening 24/7, literally, until the government collapsed. It felt like instead of going back to work, we were supposed to not only get paid by the government to not work, but to then use that time as an opportunity to all—as in every single one of us in America—not work ever again until things changed and the world got better. Or until capitalism…collapsed? Is that stupid to say? I never claimed to be articulate or good at talking about politics, or rather, I never claimed to be good at describing personal/collective visions for a communist utopia. But if I may speak plainly and give you the tl;dr: I wanted that. I still want that. I really want the world to change. And guess what? I’m ashamed that I never seem to be doing enough to make it happen. Maybe it’s just the cold brew, but I think I should be trying harder.
Is that enough? I’m not sure when to finish monologuing today. Okay, I’m going to try to explain one last thing and maybe you’ll get it or maybe you won’t. But I think what’s happening at this very moment, as I write this, is similar to all this stuff I’m saying about time. When I write, I put music on, drink a lot of caffeine, and let it rip. I read it back and do some editing and fire it off into the universe for all my hungry readers. Then a week goes by. Then two weeks. And then I get to thinking about my writing and the fact that at least, like, three people read it. And I’m like, what was I even talking about, and did it make any sense at all? I’ve been wondering about that in general, if this whole Substack thing will lead me anywhere or help me grow as a writer (and a person?), or if I’m going to look back on it in a year and think, “Wow, how embarrassing!”
Thank you for reading this. I hope you feel me. I’m just going to sit back, relax, and assume that you do. Lastly, if anyone has any spells they want to send me that teach you how to get someone to watch your Instagram story, please let me know. I’m not strong enough to do this on my own! He he he he he he.
Don’t forget about fertilizer season
I’m leaving you with two poems today. The first poem is written by a writer named Rachael Gyunn Wilson, who I just so happen to nanny for sometimes. Lucky me!
Conversations in War
i.
Why not take down
the state, let in the light
o we who are the state
who write political poems
enjoying a long hot shower though
more than most things
— Rachael Gyunn Wilson, from Go On
Tasha
She prefers
my phone &
using my
computer
w out the burden
of her life
last night
I described
it open
a circle
she kisses
my knee
its life
that is
my name
they thought
she had
a lot
I think
it’s enough
I mean
it’s astonishing
if I had (his)
I could
feel everything
but as it is
I know
what it is
I love your
lips.
— Eileen Myles, from A “Working Life”