I teased the book cover last time. I told you how I saw it and wept because it was perfect. I am not expecting you to have the same reaction, but know that this cover is deeply special to me. The model is someone who played a big role in my life and who totally embodied the spirit of HALF WILD.
And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
So while life progressed in beautiful ways, sometimes working on that book felt like wasting time. I struggled with stepping into the past and spending late nights regurgitating old timelines that almost don’t feel real anymore.
A woman quietly breaks down amid the off-gassing plastics lining the shelves of her local Target store. It’s Christmas.
I worked fear through my brain like a third base coach gnawing on a wad of Big League Chew. Under the pressure of mental mastication, it shifted shape and took on a thousand new forms that evaded rationalization and neutralization.
Deep within you there is a tiny space that contains the infinite universe. Most people won’t tell you this because if you knew, you’d stop going to work and instead spend your whole day roller blading or skeet-shooting or whatever it is that makes that space light up like a disco.
But if I wanted to know her, it would mean building a mosaic out of the smashed pieces of our collective memories.
A notebook with a green cover like a pool table held accounts of trying and failing to spend less money. It landed on the coals with a sigh, and a hundred pages of angst and sadness went up in flames.