Hi friends,
How are you doing? Are you suffering from post-debate brain rot? I am. It’s been a while, I took a week off from writing to rest my brain and regroup. I’ve been puzzling through what shape I want Salve to take going forward and I haven’t arrived at a decision yet. I’ll keep you posted. Recently, I’ve been ruminating on festivity. It’s obvious that there isn’t much to celebrate in 2020. I’m turning 24 in a couple of weeks, and I can’t shake this nagging feeling that the prime of my life is out at sea––dashing in front of me in brief silver slips, like a reclusive whale or an aloof dolphin.
The instant response that my brain conjures to this nagging feeling is to be grateful. For good health, family, and friends. These are, of course, ordinary blessings that don’t warrant reverence until they’re revoked. It’s less of a parental voice from my subconscious and more of a chastisement. How dare you not count your favours, it says, as if gratitude were a cloak I could wear to shield me from badness. Is there a bartering process for it? Must I give up some other good feeling? If it comes, is it tenable?
I imagine gratitude as a warm golden feeling that takes over the body and relieves the hot sensation of unfairness, like an ice-cream truck in the thick of a sweltering summer. I’ve had an ordinary blessing taken from me in the madness of this year. It still feels unfair, I am less grateful than I was before, if I was ever grateful to begin with. I’d like to ask the holidays and general festivity for clemency this go around. If I were an exhausted housewife and the holidays were the unruly children I would take to my bed with a migraine and leave the chaos for someone else.
How else to proceed? First, there is my birthday, which becomes less of an occasion each year. Linear time feels less remarkable when the years stack. In a few weeks I will be 24, but yesterday I was 16 and the day before I had just turned 9. The pain of my birthday is this: I remember feeling that this day was created for me. As a child, I was most myself on my birthday. The world seemed to stop and remember that I had arrived and now I was here. You’ve grown this many inches, I remember the day you were born, do you recall when the miniature schnauzer arrived at the front door as if by magic when you turned 5.
I have grown no inches since my last birthday. My mother will forget to tell the story of the day I was born. The miniature schnauzer is dead. As an adult with some sense that the world does not revolve around me, I only notice who forgets to send a message, or the waitress who does not smile when I tell her it’s my birthday like some delicious secret. It’s just a day, it’s not your day I have told myself since the novelty wore off. This mantra is like the voice that tells me to be grateful: don’t get ahead of yourself, count your blessings, be quiet.
I don’t want to go through the motions of a birthday this year, because that mantra will come, the voice will speak, and there is a new addition to the loop––this is the first of many birthdays where my Papa does not breathe. It’s not that he was a central character in my birthday fables, but he was always reachable by telephone should I have wanted him to be. Perhaps the nagging sensation I am trying to explain is the futility of this season. In my manuscript, I keep circling back to a phrase I used to describe growing up in the tropics, where there is no elemental passage of time to chart––it rendered motion motionless. Though the world is undergoing a tectonic shift that I’ve never seen before, there is an uneasy sense of stasis–– it’s like time has stopped but is also hurtling on without me.
In my mind, this motionless motion has summoned gratitude as a makeshift raft in the sea where I have lost my prime. I hope this year that I can coax the silver slips back to shore and feel struck by the warm golden feeling of gratitude that I have sacrificed an ordinary blessing for. To conclude, I humbly request that you PLEASE SEND ME A MESSAGE ON THE 27TH OF OCTOBER WHICH IS A TUESDAY BUT ALSO MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!
Xoxo,
Z
Salves for your sorrows
Read this thoughtful piece on the allure of obfuscation in autofiction, a response to Natasha Stagg’s Sleeveless (which I did not like very much btw)
This very elaborate and soothing ASMR video where you are being served a cocktail at a speakeasy in the 1920’s
Delve into the highly structured world of a sex cult/MLM organisation for the elite
Consider donating some money to an organisation that allows migrant workers in Singapore to call home for free
Check owt this depressing coverage of how weird neoliberal start-ups use soviet-era aesthetics to hawk wares you don’t need