A version of this begins with an apology for the long silence. A version of this begins with hedging and shyness around the idea that my writing might take up space in your life, if only for the length of this letter. A version of this begins by lamenting the impossibility of words.
Instead, I start this newsletter with desire. As with much of my writing, we are beginning in the middle of the night, from bed, unable, or perhaps, subconsciously unwilling, to sleep. It is 3.51am, and I have been wanting to write to you. All of my favourite writing comes from this place of longing. With my newsletters I’ve often felt like I wait for life to pour itself into me til I’m brimming and I cannot help but share the overflow, but that image does not capture the anticipation I feel as the water level rises and reaches toward the lip of the cup. I am longing, as Adrienne Rich writes, to expand the possibilities of truth between us.
Since writing to you last, in February, I think, a great deal has unfurled. Fingers and wrists in a joget class with a cheeky toddler who shares a name with my nephew. An unexpected friendship. A picnic mat on the sand, our bodies flush in the moonlight. A pomegranate swollen full of crisp sweet rubies, aching to be peeled apart by attentive fingers. Breath between you and me.
As much as I have been longing, the truth is that I have needed the silence. I’ve been eating new foods: sashimi, beef lung, shrimp, squid ink. And drinking, slowly, red wine, which I’d thought my stomach would always disagree violently with, in a purple-tinged projectile fashion. I have been cooked for by friends, lovers, strangers. I am learning to dance new dances. I am learning: choose again.
Just earlier tonight I saw an ad for a salon looking to hire and I fantasised about a time where I quit whatever job I have to become a hairstylist. I’d love to be a canteen uncle who tattoos in the evenings. I want to write a novel one day. Perhaps I’ll take up sewing. At some point I know I’d like to throw myself headlong and foolish into becoming someone new, again, because I’d like to keep surprising myself with the ways in which I’ll change and the ways in which I’ll stay precisely the same.
Which is to say, hello again, dear friends. Much has happened. There are new caverns of loving and grieving and feeling that I have just begun to discover. I love my life, and I love this world, and I love all of you. And to love and to be loved is to be changed. As another friend wrote in her newsletter: we're going to keep changing forever!!
My loves, I am excited to keep changing with you.
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