A lot of not knowing
On Saturdays at the library, we water the plants. We keep an enormous lime green plastic watering can under the kitchen sink for this purpose, which takes whole minutes to fill. You have to lift it very carefully to avoid making a big mess. Slowly, heavily, you visit each of the building’s many plants: monsteras and succulents, ficus and snake plants. At each, you dispense a little water. It is sucked up so quickly, it’s as if you were never there.
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Recently, I’ve been listening a lot to a Joni Mitchell song called Amelia. The Amelia of the title is Amelia Earhart and the singer is addressing her while watching six jet planes leaving six white vapour trails in the sky above the desert. Roughly speaking, it’s a break-up song. It’s so hard to obey his sad request of me to kindly stay away, the lyrics go. But the core of the song is not so much heartbreak as a vast feeling of displacement and wist, of Icarus ascending on beautiful foolish arms and till you get there yourself you never really know. The key fluctuates continuously between F and G major. Amelia, the refrain goes, one lost woman calling to another, it was just a false alarm. What exactly was a false alarm isn’t specified.
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Last week, the on-ramp at the end of Roscommon Road was dark with unmoving cars and rain, as if the motorway were some kind of mass, frustrated unconscious. Eventually, just past the turnoff to the airport, we passed the source. There were bits of silver bumper scattered all across the road, one large piece upright on its side, looking unspeakably wrong. For no clear reason, I cried all the way home, another forty minutes.
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I’ve been doing a lot of crosswords lately, to fill the quiet hours during my shifts. A friend taught me to solve cryptic crosswords five years ago. The meaning of the answer is always at either the start or the end of the clue, she explained. The rest is the puzzle you have to work out. It was miraculous, astonishing, to see shone come out of some of the bee’s honey glistened (5); I remember her laughing at my open mouth. That friend belongs to a time of my life I have very little touch with now: a time with a different boyfriend, in a different part of the city, believing something different about what I’d be doing at 25. I view all of it with ill-placed nostalgia. Its traces are all but gone from my current life, except that I’ve done so many cryptics now that I can usually solve the anagrams without writing out the letters.
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I started a Twitter account this week, on the advice of several people who told me I would struggle to freelance without one. Well, I hate it. I don’t want another noise machine. I don’t want to witness any more people stating their moral positions as if it were a replacement for acting on them in real life. I have no desire to perform myself in snippets of clever text, or to train my brain to pick life apart for tweetable things and form them into words. I’m goddamn sick of irony. So far, I haven’t tweeted anything, even though the only point of having an account is to tweet so I build a following so people will read the things I actually wanted to write. Instead, I find myself scrolling the feed like a problem that might someday solve itself.
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Once, there was a clever girl. She could do calculus, and she knew how DNA was replicated, and she could recite Shakespeare most beautifully. She thought she knew what she was doing. She left home impatiently. She adopted a cat and cared for it ably. She tried to show kindness to all the people she met. One day, she found herself without a map and even the Shakespeare was very little help.
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I still don’t know what I find more upsetting: little children who are too young to know their lives are difficult compared to other children’s; or older children, who know it and are starting to grow hard. I see both sorts, among children who are neither, every day I’m at my library. Such children make all my luck heavy to me, which is a good thing although my arms are very sore now. So do many of the adults, needing help to print off their passport applications and church fundraising spreadsheets and CVs. Once, I helped a young man photocopy his corrections history. He wanted to place every page on the glass himself without me seeing. Once, I helped a teenage girl print off the bank statements of her mother, who had died the previous day, so she could send them away to ensure her family would continue to get welfare support. Every single day contains at least one utterly devastating moment, one that six months ago I would have remembered for years. Now, I drive blankly home to my affluent suburb and make dinner without crying. After all this time, it seems, I still know nothing about other people’s lives.
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In “Letter from Paradise, 21 19’ N., 157 52’ W”, an essay in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion describes a sense of ennui, the experience of disillusionment with a city and a type of self and a mindset. “I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter,” she writes. So she goes to Hawaii. It’s really very helpful that the essay’s title gives Hawaii’s exact coordinates, for anyone looking to get there.