the hollow-days
Two days ago I saw a friend that I have not seen since the summer. Have not seen since we stood in a gated-off portion of a vast pop-up tent and listened to a DJ push bass through our chests. Have not seen since a woman, clutching her purse in her left, a vodka soda in her right, looked at me and screamed into my face: you don’t look like you’re having fun! Smile a little!
I hoped the evening with my friend would lift me. They are a dear one. I have missed them more than I admitted to them because they has been busy with a new professional adventure, with fresh personal starts, with the business of being alive! I don’t want them to feel weighted by my need to sit down and hear them talk, the soothing sound not just of their voice—so familiar—but also of their presence, which has been constant for so many years of my life.
Still, the morning after we caught up, I woke in the early, early morning and I was hollow. That is no failure of theirs, it is the holidays (hollow-days, as I have come to think of them).
I fought tears in the morning. Sent emails and skimmed over the list of things I needed to do. I poured into the emptiness green tea. Then an egg sandwich. I did not look at photographs of Kurtis or listen to his voice or talk about the way he would wake on Christmas Day, eyes gleaming—the wonder of the morning still glowing within him, never lost, as it can be with age. Or, as it is with me, rarely found. I have to scrap for that kind of joy, that’s just my way. But his way was all honey, and this was a season for sweetness.
I didn’t go to any of those places yesterday. Instead, I got into my car and drove thirty minutes toward the mountains. I have started seeing a chiropractor whose office is open on Saturdays, meaning I actually show up for the appointments now. My other chiropractor is only open during the week and I have found I never go after a day of teaching. I call, apologetic. But then, my neck! It pains.
So, Saturdays.
The new chiropractor is far. The mountains are massive in the windshield and the moment I break over the rise of the highway and see the towering forms, steely blue-gray and white-capped this morning, I start to cry. It has been 1,225 days since. I look this up while I am pulled over on the side of the road.
Sometimes, when I fall into the valley, the grief is a storm. Other times, like this one, it is an emptiness. The weight of absence.
I scrub my face with spit on a rag kept in my car for purposes of cleaning the dashboard before I walk into the chiropractor’s office. I ask if it is OK to leave my boots on because they’re dry. A sign near the door asks that wet shoes be removed.
“Doesn’t matter!” the woman behind the front desk says warmly.
Yes, I think. Nothing matters.
In the office, I close the door behind me and face myself in the bathroom mirror. I wash my reddened skin with water and brown paper towel.
Many hours later, in a day that does nothing for the grief, I will be standing in a room full of people. A holiday party. The woman I am talking to has learned of my book, is now telling me about her mother who died in her arms. She is telling me of how, a year after this, she was in the hospital, brutally ill, and, in her words, “finally forced to reconcile with her fear and anguish in those final moments with her mother.”
“Sometimes life just presses what you need to deal with right up against your face,” she says. She holds her palm up, flat, not up against her face as I expect, but up against mine.
I startle. Take a step back and find I am now across from another mirror.
“You don’t look like you’re having fun,” I whisper to the solemn face, my face, looking at me. “Smile a little.”
I think the woman is trying to make a point about how life will inevitably find a way to bring us up against our most painful, even if we run from it, but it is very loud in the room and I’m having a hard time staying near anything.
I careen out of that conversation into a conversation about double breasted blazers. In one corner of the room, a standing lamp is flickering. No one else seems bothered by the erratic flashing of the lightbulb but I can’t handle its stuttering, its struggling to stay lit. There is pain at the base of my skull.
The holidays are not always like this, but they are always sometimes this.
A few hours later, I reach home, scroll my phone, find in it a List for the Lost, as I called it. I wrote it months ago for this very season. I wanted to offer something to everyone who feels hollow during this time of light, of bright, of cheer. I read the words I wrote and then I stood up, sheathed my feet in slippers. Filled a glass with water.
Earlier, at the chiropractor, he pins me with thin needles that he connects to a machine and then the needles shake my too-tight muscles. It’s all heartbeats across my body. I can’t tell which is really mine and which are the needles. Sometimes, I shake for close to twenty minutes. I put headphones into my ears and listen to a podcast where a poet posits the idea that, through writing, we can literally hold and tend to the selves we have been in other times. She speaks of a journal she found, written in her early twenties, speaks of holding it to the chest of her much older self, a self that her twenty-something self could never have fathomed. I grow cold in the chiropracter’s office and my headphones begin to die but the poet is right.
I read the List for the Lost that I wrote for you and time folded on itself. I took my own words like medicine. I sipped the water. I made an appointment. I zipped a caramel fleece up to my chin. I let myself be held.
An update on the letters…
In January, I have taken a temporary leave from my teaching job, in preparation for my book Here After publishing March 5 and the resultant book tour. It will be the first time in my working life that writing will be my full-time practice. It is vulnerable, tender, and entirely mysterious what it will be like: to have the book in your hands, to be without the financial stability of teaching. I know it is the right choice but it is frightening in many ways.
In this time, of course, I will be writing. I will be writing in private on new projects, on essays, online, and of course, here. This means for the first time in the over three years of this publication’s existence, I am turning on paid subscriptions.
If you have been heard or seen by these letters, I would be honored if you would join me beyond the paywall. Or, perhaps, in this season of giving: you want to send someone you love a subscription. Either way, by doing any of it, you would be holding me in a way that makes it possible for me to write in this time of leave. If this is possible for you, thank you. And if you want to stay here as you are now, thank you too. I take both so deeply to heart. I am always so grateful for your witness.
I will continue to write these letters as I feel to. Because I will have more freedom of time in the new year, I will write at least 1 per month, but sometimes more. I want to let the letters find their way to you with their own rhythm. Because of this, monthly paid subscriptions will be $5 USD a month, which is the lowest Substack will let me set. An annual subscription will be $50 USD, which is also the lowest Substack will allow me. A founding membership is $100, but you are able to enter an amount anywhere between $51-100 and this membership will also allow access to all the letters and will include a few ‘extras’ that I am in the process of making real.
Finally, thank you, always, for reading, for writing to me, for reading my writing, and always, for opening to these letters when they find you. We’ll talk soon.