where's the door?

This is not the North Atlantic

The last ocean K and I saw together was the North Atlantic. We sat on the empty shores of a beach in Bermuda and licked salt from cheddar Goldfish from our fingertips. At night, which is especially night on the island, where there are no street lamps, we nestled in the AirBnb’s gray blocky couch and watched episode after episode of the final season of The Good Place. The finale would air a week or two after we returned to our lives.

You know how it goes — we got caught up. Four months later, COVID shuttered the world and nine months later, he died. I still haven’t seen the finale. I don’t think I can bear to. I have seen so many ends since we sat on that couch and wondered what that end might be like. It’s the kind of wondering you do when you’re not afraid.

*

It is not uncommon for me to write on holiday and almost always, when I return from one, I write in furious long rushes, ignoring everything else in my life that clamors for my attention now that I have returned.

Last September, two months after the house burned down, I was the first and only person beside the pool in Palm Springs. I worked for so long my laptop pressed red divots into my thighs and the server wondered if I ever took time to really relax?

I didn’t take the time to explain to him that I was the most relaxed I’d felt in months. My brain felt electric. There was something about the bright blue of the pool, the total quiet. Things felt possible in a way that immediately dulled and tarnished the moment I returned back to the temporary housng.

*

I am not saying I need to be away to write. But I am wondering under what conditions I step into the writing the most easily? Where is the door to that rush and flow of language? And how can I swing it open more simply?

*

My friend Shira (who writes the beautiful Subby Freer Form) tells me that entering creative relaxation—her words for flow state—is something she’s always done easily. She slips into it, as if pulled by a natural force.

When she asks how I enter my own flow, I have no answers. It’s not an easy state for me to find — all my natural forces pull me in other directions.

How do you feel when you’re in flow? Shira asks me, her eyes bright and sharp. What exactly do you do? What is happening in your body? What is the physical setting?

*

I’m as of yet still trying to understand the answers to these questions. I know that quiet is a part of the answer — that a window with a line of sight into some form of the natural world is there too. I know too that there are talismans, books that ground me, the polished minerals and rocks given to me by my friend Hieu after K died, the bright cerulean slabs of rock that K collected as a child.

I know that when I am in it — when the words are a vast ocean into which I can wade, into which I can hold myself under and feel the force of it, the ease of it — it is one of the only euphorias I really crave.

*

In the living room, the Dane twitches on her bed. I have learned recently that dogs dream only from what they know. I watch the Dane’s muscles twitch beneath her dark fur and I am sure that she is running with all four of her legs — full tilt, without any fear of stumbling.

*

This is the thing about the door — it’s not just the way to joy, as complicated and enriched as joy always is by loss — there’s something like wonder that flings it open. In flow, where ever that may be for you, there’s the kind of authority that sets all of us free.

It’s the kind of authority grounded in wonder — instead of control — the kind that runs in its sleep, that leaps up, as K did from his towel in Bermuda, and sent him streaking down the length of the beach, howling. Doors wide open.

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