Presence is something I still have to consciously drop into. Teabag into cup, body into water, me into my body. I get nostalgic at the slightest provocation. At its best, it’s indulgent, the well-cured relish of an old memory. These days, it’s more defensive: when the present becomes too much, I drift off into the rosy-eyed elsewhere. Anxiety also makes me a reluctant fortune-teller, playing out a dozen different scenarios for the future at any given moment. But sometimes the present and its fellows on either side come together, the burst of clarity leaving me breathless.
It has been a year, approximately fifty-two Thursdays, since I launched Small Histories. In large part, I was running on trust. I knew I wanted to write, in a longer format than my novelette Instagram captions. I had a few concepts, but not much of a plan. I trusted I would fumble my way through, learn what you needed from me—and what I needed from writing—as I went.
It has also been about a year since the onset of stay-at-home orders and the first real, panicked surge of the pandemic. When that switch flipped on daily reality, Small Histories became something I never could have predicted: a balm, a way to process the utter overwhelm and uncertainty. It has not been without its challenges, its hair-tearing moments. Many times I’ve left the writing til the night before, convinced that I have nothing left to give, that this one spells the end. Somehow, often exhausted and occasionally satisfied, I have pushed through. The credit is due partly to you, reading: a reply over email, a comment here or there, letting me know what resonated with you. Thank you for that kindness; it means more than I can say. It has been more than strange to start an endeavor like this one without any whit of normalcy, of stability.
There are some tarot cards in a traditional deck that make me flinch on sight (even though I know there is no such thing as a “bad” card; a deck can’t hurt me, only offer guidance). One of these is The Tower. It depicts a tower struck by lightning, burning in the dead of night, visibly starting to crumble. It speaks of calamity and upheaval, the suddenness with which our lives can be upended. The past year has undoubtedly been marked by The Tower. The catastrophic pull of it, the lightning striking again and again, has spared no one. Unemployment, housing loss, violence, illness, death, grief — even those who weren’t such casualties have to continue to work while shouldering unthinkable stress and trauma.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Tower card, though, is survival. It’s a reminder that even when calamity strikes, we all possess the reserves and instinct to survive it. In my deck, the card also harbors a flock of white doves, rising above the chaos. Their light is a sliver of optimism in the midst of disaster, as they head for a gap in the storm.
I despise what I call “machine-gun optimism” — that unrelenting, bare-toothed kind of assurance that things will get better no matter what (also termed toxic positivity). But I do think optimism, even if grudging or exhausted, is a good reserve to keep stocked. I didn’t grow up any kind of religious, but I think optimism has become my form of faith — if we define faith as something we cannot see or prove, but believe in anyway. I don’t know that good is coming, and in fact, I usually brace for its departure—force of habit, survival instinct. But some part of me, timid and tired and hopeful, still pipes up, Maybe things will be better tomorrow.
I have tried my best, with this fortnightly reflection, to be as honest as I can in describing my own upheavals and survival. Not to sweeten them with platitudes, not to exaggerate them, but to speak to them exactly as I see them. I also try to remember that flock of doves, their airiness. They are marked by what they have survived, but they move anyway, into air unmarred by smoke and ash. It’s rare that I end one of these missives with heaviness, a dead end with nowhere to go. I am always trying to find the way up and out. I think it would be irresponsible, at the very least, not to offer you that.
Sometime in the first quarantine season, that silent spring, I started a mood board. In it, I put everything I missed, every mundane and awestruck pleasure that will reblossom with fervor when safety permits it. Sitting in a coffeeshop with a friend, traveling to the places I love most, dinner parties, live concerts, picnics, good company, good sunsets. I think it’s clear to most of us by now that “going back to normal” is no longer an option. And I don’t think that things will slot back into place. I think that they will surge forth into the hungry space left in the interim, filling the cracks, molding into newness. A flood, not Biblical and destructive, but life-giving and needed. I think of it as the sunny after.
I know that it won’t be as clear-cut as that, the barriers here and then gone. It will be a slow soaking, the crust around a jar loosening in hot water. But I can sense that something about this year will be different. Just as the last winter ice belies what is still living underneath, we too are moving under our extended isolation. There’s a restlessness, I can feel it. Something coming, a break to the surface.
And that brings me to what I have to share with you. I’ve decided to step back from Small Histories, temporarily. I’m preparing to surface in more ways than one, in ways that are going to take a lot of my energy, and I want to devote myself to that for the time it needs me. I think I’m also at a point to consider what Small Histories will look like going forward — how I’d like to experiment with it, how it might serve you better. (If you have thoughts on that, feel free to comment, I’m always here to listen!) I need to be here, now. To drop into my body, with intention and grace.
I’ve been thinking about Calcifer, a character in Studio Ghibli’s film Howl’s Moving Castle. Calcifer is a living, talking flame that keeps Howl’s titular castle puttering across the landscape on its rickety legs. When he’s removed from his hearth, the castle begins to fall apart, and Calcifer himself dwindles to a bluish sputter. It’s revealed at the end of the film that he was once a star fallen from the sky, and Howl took Calcifer’s power in exchange for his heart. Calcifer, in ways literal and figurative, is Howl’s heart.
Here is something to do for yourself. Find something that lights you up at the thought of it, and make a home for it in the hearth between your ribs. Something that maybe this last year has robbed you of, something you’re looking forward once the great indoors is no longer our only habitat. You may not have any control over when it comes to you, but what matters is the faith that it will. The wax-moon sliver of optimism. The dove fleeing the burning tower. The living, breathing flame that keeps everything in you going.
I don’t believe that anything comes all at once, or that we can ever reach a static state of goodness. Life just doesn’t work that way for human beings. I think those things that bring us the most light come in pieces, in flashes. Like an eye in a shard of mirror, the last flare of the sun over the horizon. So my concept of “after” is a bit of a misnomer, really, because time rarely gets clean-cut that way. To me, the sunny after is a feeling: the sense that the world has righted itself, that everything makes perfect sense, for however short a moment.
I’m hoping that what I have coming next will be the first returning inkling of that feeling for me, after a long time being starved for it. I’m hoping that it trickles in for you sooner rather than later. I haven’t decided how long this pause will be, but likely I’ll wait until the spring and the projects up my sleeve are well underway. You’ll get a note from me when I have a return date in mind.
In the meantime: tend that flame of yours, even (or especially) if it’s just embers right now. Don’t let it go out. You have so much coming to you.
Parting notes—
If you want to know what I’m up to while I’m gone from this space, subscribe to this email list. You’ll know before anyone else.
If you’re in the US, you can check whether and when you’re eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine via the CDC website, based on your state.
I’ve started adding to the soundtrack of my year here. Come along for the ride.