From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

I have had so many lives while trying to get to the one I imagined for myself. My life has been made up of vignettes—suspended and disparate vignettes. I remember a dinner I had years and years ago with my first love, and a family member and her then-boyfriend; afterwards, my boyfriend told me how every time we did something, every experience always led him to think this is how it's going to be now. From here forward, we would be having these dinners with these two. But they broke up not long after, and after a time, so did we. It was the only dinner of its kind. Still, I think about that idea, the way a pattern develops, or even just an occurrence, and it feels like the way things will be.

I've made a sort of tenuous peace with my life unmoored.

I was once a girl waking before dawn to trudge through the snow to lifeguard at a swimming pool in a college town in new england. (Remember the night sledding down the Brown Green on cafeteria trays?) I was the child in rowboats, and the woman painting inky blue skylines, the preschool teacher, the nanny, the woman in a business suit presenting at museum conferences, and the apron covered in printing ink, and artist talks, and high heels and hiking shoes, and watching the sun rise from the roof, and the woman who's loved so hard and so deep and so many times over that counting doesn't suffice.

I was once the girl who built gallery walls, and tore them down, and wrote poems about what life would be like in ten years. It isn't anything like what she imagined.

In this life, phosphorescence is my season. But I haven't seen it since that week in August, at grad school. The one where possibility felt palpable, where ideas and artmaking felt wide endless and expansive, and I snuck away from the beachfire late at night to kiss a man I shouldn't have, and I watched the stars fade and the sky grow pink, and love and life and future felt like the sun rising in me.

I haven't swam in phosphorescence in years, but it feels like swimming among the stars. It was just this summer that I rediscovered swimming in lakes—the silence, the wide open blue sky, the way a toe breaching the surface makes a sound deep and echoing underwater and the sound of my breath and heartbeat amplified. The first night of that camping trip we all stumbled down to the lake's edge and dove in and under. Stars thick in the night sky. This was a life that felt so alive, every part of me was happy. Free.

And what about that brief vignette of red lipstick and Lana Del Rey, boozy fancy cocktails, and dancing all night?

And there is the night I spent out in the gorge last month, the spur of the moment trip we took after hearing bad news, the company and the drive into the golden hour lifting my heavy heart, reminding me of hope and pleasure and open air. He held my hand and touched my face, and things felt actually better. We drank hot chocolate from stainless steel travel mugs after watching the light drain from the sky, slept in the folded out backseat bed under the skylight in the car, made coffee at dawn and hiked up to where we could see the gorge and the river spread out in front of us. To the west, greens and blues, and to the east the trees gave way to rich yellows and golds. We were on the precipice, sitting at the very edge of where the landscape changed, the newest place that felt like this is how it's going to be now.

But the quiet white sky, the golden hue of the worn-down wooden floorboards in my empty apartment, the sound of cartires on wet streets, the poet in me finding meaning in sounds and colors and the words written on passing trucks, the familiar tinny voice calling out the line number on the bus, the mixture of sadness and hope settling in my chest, sleepless nights in the company of sitcoms or my thoughts under the yellow halo of my bedroom lamp, laughter with friends, walks around the lagoon, my studio... this is the life in-between, the thing that always returns between the hypersaturation of each vignette. The baseline is the sound of my own breath in the space between the notes.