From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

I am both very happy and very sad. This is either a character trait or an extended state of being. This is both a character trait and an extended state of being.

Last week I camped at a lake, floated weightless in bracing cool clear water. Blue above me, blue below me, that special submerged silence, the small muffled splash of a toe breaching the surface.

......

For a time I prided myself on the shortening, the simplifying of my long languid sentences. See how I am breaking form? See how I am laying bare what I used to shroud in epiphanic gesture? See how I am revealing what simply is? See how I don't need to pretend there is beauty?

I need to pretend there is beauty.

I need for there to be beauty. I need to believe in it. It is the believing that makes it.

......

On the second night by the lake—the blue hour, the gloaming—the swifts dove and darted low and sweeping around me. It felt like something. It was that familiar something feeling, the precipice of something. 'I know I should be too old to believe in that feeling anymore,' I heard myself say, 'but I think I'm a better person when I believe in magic.'

I love that swelling feeling inside of me, that buoyed feeling of hope, that intangible slippery something. It is what I feel on warm summer nights on my bike, at sunset on the beach, with my face buried in the crook of the neck of someone I love, the feeling when artmaking and living are imbued with the same breath, when they are indivisible, that feeling that makes me want to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, unfurl my fists and fingers, breathe deep. It is something like delight, something akin to peace.

......

In 3 days I turn 35. Three fat decades, plus half of another, a baker's dozen—almost twice: My mother's age at me 5, a few years shy of when my grandmother first got cancer, the age they start calling a pregnancy high risk... Because I don't have children, a friend of mine says, of herself. She speaks of it as a foregone conclusion.  Another woman, 10 years my junior, talks confidently of her future children. It is such a part of how we know ourselves as women, locate ourselves in society, in time, in culture, in lineage. I once spoke of my future children—a younger, sharper, more fierce and naive me—now I hear the story shift in the telling: If I have children... If I had children... The maybe crept in. And it isn't really sad in the way the younger version of me would have thought it—the 28 year old me who saw babies everywhere she went, who felt that ache in the pit of her at the sight of them, the smell. Now it is an abstraction more than a feeling. And now I know that lakeside champagne breakfasts and dance-parties, and collapsing on the couch at the end of a long work day, and spur of the moment beach trips or spur of the moment pretty-much-anythings are a product of this childless life I am living. My twenty year old cousin told me last week that being an adult seems alright the way I do it, that my adult life is blackberry picking and drinking beer. And from a certain angle she is right; it feels good to see this vision of myself, this particular freedom, the way the sound—the feeling—of the wind stops me in my tracks, spreads a grin wide and slow across my face. This is a good life, a full life, a thrillingly happy life.

It is a life in which I am learning to embrace being both very happy and very sad.