2015, recorded
2015 felt the weight of my iPhone notes, where I learned you can write and it doesn’t feel like writing. My first and favorite little exercise this year was vomiting words into my notes app every morning while commuting, about commuting. I called them subway poems even though I still don’t know what a poem is. They hid in my notes and I nurtured them and then I had a list, a summation of what it’s like to hurtle through underground space with a bunch of strangers twice a day. I read them out loud in the back room of a bar one night in March, the same night I started hurtling into a love that would drag me through the next seven months of emotions and keep me writing bad poems in iPhone notes. I spent much of the year feeling desperate and consumed. At the beginning of 2015 I wrote down some goals and falling in love was one of them and I had to sleep in the bed that I’d made, or whatever.
I have another long one jotted on trains and in corners during times of anguish, all in second person, things I felt I wasn’t allowed to say, notes both to and about. I don’t think anyone would like to read it, but I feel fondly about all those feelings and words. I think the writing that we do that’s beautiful but not useful lives in a sort of purgatory because we cannot send it off into the world on its own but we cannot kill it, and I have begun telling myself that those words and thoughts will be pieced apart and used when I need them, little snippets in stories, small anecdotes of humanity. Becoming a freelance writer has been a scary process of navigating the value of my own output and the quality of my words. Most of the time I cannot tell if anything is good, and I imagine all the smart people I know shaking their head and tsk tsk-ing me. I can’t tell what should stay hidden and what should be pushed out into the world. I wish we could all just publish our bad love poems and love them unconditionally and never expect them to be good. I’ve thought about hosting this reading. Or a party, and we burn them. On the cusp of the year I can tell myself that in 2016 I won’t write about this feeling anymore. I’ll make a different sort of bed.
There were the beds, too, that’s another way to look at the year. There was my roommate’s bed where I sat and read a tarot card and decided to quit my job, where Hallie told me that I could, where large things shifted. There were crisp white hotel bedsheets in a few different countries that felt somewhere between a blank slate and a black hole, a dream, all of them in deserts, strangely. There was one bed with a scratchy plaid blanket where I spent a birthday and my heart started to shatter and one time we ate chinese food and talked about death, looked at corpses, sometimes I bike past it and ache. There was a dark soft bed where I giggled and screamed and hid from things. There were beds I was smart to avoid; we have to remember our small victories. I bought myself new bedsheets this year. I began to wash them regularly and even make them most days. I found a therapist and we talked about nesting, I called it “polishing my shell.”
I made new friends this year, which may have happened in years past, but not so forcefully. There’s a feeling that New York is my place now, or Brooklyn is, after three years. 2015 marks the first time that I’ve spent more than 12 months in the same bedroom and finally I feel settled. I recently had a stress dream about coming into my room and seeing all the art stripped from my walls. Sometimes I think about other cities and get sick to my stomach. It’s a prideful repulsion.
In 2015 I became a writer which sounds like a silly thing to say, because I was a writer before and I still don’t feel like one now. But people have paid me for words and I’ve created a few things I’m proud of and I’m mostly just excited to get better, at being a writer and at being alone. I feel like a wholly different person this winter than I was twelve months ago, more adult and more myself, maybe less stable but surely more sure. Getting older feels like hoarding information on yourself and the world and how to do things, every year we’re more powerful, it’s great. I keep joking that I’ll be pirouetting on the grave of 2015, but I’ll try to do it gracefully, have some respect.
When you’ve felt things in a thick and acute way it’s easy to look back on a period of time and only see that, the highlights or lowlights, whatever you want to call them. I’m doing that with 2015, both here and in my head, like a horse with blinders. But there are so many other strange little lessons we pick up on our own, so much agency to grasp. In 2015 I hid things in my files and stifled discomfort in my chest and in 2016 I’ll be direct and unafraid to say and publish my shit, whether or not you read it and like it and tell me you love me.
Also, here is a list of things that I wrote this year that I’m proud of.
