"I loved them: my own bright dead things"

On reading poems again, and how to reckon

Dears,

Sometimes I forget that the urge to not write can be as strong as the urge to write. For months, I’ve been dealing with a distaste for my own words. Even typing the word “Dears,” I wanted to stop. I grimace sometimes when a poem pops into my head. I’m no eager transcriptionist for the muse. I let the words pass through me without recording them. Sometimes, a friend will comment that I’ve put something perfectly, or poetically, or say something akin to “What you said just now is writing.” And I purse my lips, lift my shoulders, roll my eyes, do anything to say, No, I am just being myself. Throughout the last year, more or less, I’ve thought, who cares. There’s no reason to prize words on a page more than words spoken to a loved one. There’s no reason to think that our attempts at permanence are worth anything. This was all part of my psyche’s self-defense during the pandemic, a flattening of most emotions into expectation of dissatisfaction, fear, insecurity, resentment, and self-doubt.

Yesterday, for the first time in over a year, I walked to work in an office building. And although I have gone for an intentional walk nearly every day for, oh, almost a year, this walk was different. It wasn’t a walk to get my steps or to kill time. I had a destination, and I think even more than that, an openness to change. And on that little walk, not even half an hour, repeating steps on a much-walked path for more than five years, I remembered all the other times I’ve “quit writing.” In college. After college. I think this may be the first time I’ve felt so strongly anti-writing in about fifteen years. But I remembered, in the midst of these familiar footfalls, that this antipathy toward writing is just a Cate Root Depression Classic. 

In the last few weeks, I’ve tried to let myself open again. The palpable changes of the last few weeks are unignorable — from massive expansion of vaccine availability in my home state of Louisiana to the inevitable return to a full-time office. The receding demand to treat fear as your full-time job. 

One sign that something was really off with me was that I stopped reading poems. I follow a lot of poets on social media, and when they would share new work or others’ poems that inspire them, I would just scroll past. 

At my work desk, I found this poem taped to the lower border of one of my monitors:

I might have read it yesterday and not absorbed it. But today I read it again, and I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking of all the destruction of the last year, piled high. I won’t depress all of us by listing the common losses. 

I “lost” at least one good friend, and an overwhelming number of acquaintances. I lost my strongest connection to the writing community, and that grief is still raw, hungry, and ready to fight. But more abstractly, I lost all the daily affirmations that I never even counted as part of the structure of my loved life.

I’ve worked in the office two days in a row, now, and I have said many times, “It’s good to see you.” How funny to mean that. To enjoy a tiny bit of small talk (if you know me, you know I generally detest it!). To actually feel that when someone says, “It’s good to see you,” that they mean it. 

In the last few years, I made an effort to invest more in “loose tie” friendships. But during this long year, where for the most part, we only saw people who we really needed to see, spiritually or otherwise, I felt so much of myself fall away. I’m incredibly grateful for the few close friends who I saw regularly, who helped me feel “normal” in some way or other. But so much insecurity crowded my heart during these times of few. 

The other night, a good friend texted “Can’t wait to hang out soon,” and I literally assumed it was meant for someone else. Wrong thread. Couldn’t be me.

I don’t remember why I wanted that Ada Limón poem on my monitor. Maybe it served me in some crucial way in another year, and I just can’t remember how. But as I read it today, I think about all the destruction of the last year. I think of friendships that ended, and patterns that broke, and fights that didn’t need to happen, and all the violence we do to ourselves wordlessly, automatically. I think of how, often, another human being’s intervention is what you need to be kind to yourself. I think about how I can be kind to others.

I have this thing where I sometimes don’t feel like “enough.” Not just in the way where I’m afraid I don’t measure up, but in the sense where I’m afraid that there isn’t actually enough of me to go around the way I want. I think of all my beloved friends, cherished acquaintances, people I want to help. How can I be helpful to others? I used to write notes in the mail. I used to read poems aloud. I used to bake cakes to share with 50 people. What can I do now? Who will I be next?

Today, I love this Ada Limón poem because she is kind to herself knowing the destruction she caused. She acknowledges that sometimes she still wants to kill the carrots. But that conflict inside her, whether we want to call it ugly or not (I often think my inner conflicts terribly ugly), it just is. 

This month, as I try to open, as I try to reckon with past and future change, as I try to let myself be, I’ll return to these lines: “I loved them: my own bright dead things / I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.” 

Maybe we can’t reckon with what’s happened. Maybe the only thing to do is repair what needs repairing, replace what can be replaced, and keep moving toward the horizon. I think of a favorite book of mine, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts: "The subject who utters the phrase 'I love you' is like 'the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name. . . . Just as the Argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase 'I love you,' its meaning must be renewed by each use." 

So here we are again. 

I love you,

Cate