i live alone now.
in a tiny studio apartment. in a small neighborhood a little bit south of that place called manhattan. and i love it. i love everything about it.
i love walking east on fourth place just at the moment the subway is crossing ahead in the distance, above ground. the slow, soft rumble of it--its gentle movement--makes me feel as though i'm living life in miniature--like i'm a small piece on an oversized train set.
and sometimes it feels really good to feel so small.
i've finally gotten good at cooking dinner. it's almost always quinoa. or pasta. and almost always consumed between the hours of 11 at night and two in the morning. this feels unique to new york. and unique to living alone. and unique to not having a partner. unique to this particular, passing moment.
and this moment will pass.
i am grateful for the lonely. and grateful for the quiet evenings. i am grateful for how the air cools after the sun sets. for the soft summer rains and the smell of water on earth and pavement.
for how fleeting the wet is. for how fleeting the summer is. for how quickly time is moving.
and yet.
all of these many things terrify me, too.
how quickly time is moving! and how quickly this moment is passing, even as i use what little breath i have to curse the damn. thing. for. standing. still. for. so. damn. long.
sometimes i think, the reason i started this blog, all those many years ago, was i wanted to write a love letter.
to pause the movement of what was moving too fast.
i constantly look at things now and remind myself to look again. new york has this way of hardening a person, of making defense the default position. so, often i must ask myself to look again. to look again through new eyes. softer eyes. to look again and with great compassion.
i began writing this blog as a love letter to the life i wanted to lead. to the person i wanted to become. as a way of looking at myself, just as i was--in that moment, that paused moment--a second time and with great compassion.
somewhere along the way i forgot this. somewhere along the way i forgot that this was meant to be a-love-letter-to-life-as-is. somewhere in that land where the anthroplogie aesthetic met kate spade saturday i developed a tremendous and nagging suspicion that this blog was somehow not good enough. or glittery enough. or marketable enough. no commercial niche to speak of. and blogging is such a different world than it was just a few years ago. and so i began to wonder if in this land of what to wear and what to buy and how to look while doing those things--i began to wonder if this blog still had a place? if it still had value? i want to be very clear, i do not admonish or fault anyone who has figured out the commercial element of blogging--it is an art form unto itself. and as a single woman living in new york city who knows just how hard it is to make a living--let alone make a living doing what one loves--i fault absolutely no one for figuring out a way into the world of business. i both admire and wonder at the talent of it, truly.
and then there is the question of how this blog-as-a-love-letter affects love--or rather, the search for a shared-sort-of-love.
if ever i think of throwing in the towel altogether, it's mostly because of men. because dating is hard enough. and dating in new york city is nearly impossible (and not in the good, rewarding, wow-i'm-so-glad-to-have-this-experience-sort-of-way, but more in the this-is-an-as-of-yet-undiscovered-circle-of-hell). and to blog as a single woman about actual experiences when we're all just trying to figure it out, both separately and, when we get so lucky, together...well, it may just be... too. hard.
because i worry about the men i go on dates with. i worry about last names and the power of google and the sheer volume of information. i worry about the internet or a blog supplanting real conversation. i worry how oblique and out-of-context information can be misconstrued and misunderstood and falsely placed atop real experience. i worry that my melancholic writer's voice will somehow sound more loudly than the stutter of my laugh as we sit at the bar.
i dated a guy for four months and never once told him my last name. eventually he stopped asking. he knew why and he respected why and we made a small go of not-it,but something. and for a time it was really good.
sometimes i think if i could just hit the blogging-pause-button. figure out the man thing. get a grasp on the next five years. get married. have a baby. write a book. or some such. and then pick it back up again. assuming of course that (1) the aforementioned things will happen, and frankly i should be so, so (so very, very) lucky and (2) that blogging will still be around after i've lived my way into those major milestones (and the chances of that are...rare. no? perhaps just not blogging as we now know it).
i won't stop. but i will beg your patience if i go quiet for longer stretches of time. i'll beg your patience if my writing seems tedious and staid. if there aren't enough photos. if there are too many words. because, believe it or not, i am trying to figure out the next five years right now, day by day. and sometimes that means there is not the time nor the desire nor the energy to blog.
but if all of this is a love letter, a second look, than i ask for your kind eyes, your great compassion. i beg your understanding if a quiet does come. because sometimes silence is it's own sort of delight. sometimes silence is a love letter unto itself.