a near future with less clenching in it
a note from korea
I’m writing this in Korea. I wasn’t thinking to come, it wasn’t possible, until a few weeks ago. I’ve been out of full-time work since my last workplace abruptly closed down late October, and travel has been out of the question. In the intervening time I was trying to live as small a life as I could in New York, trying to surf above despair all winter, thinking about the ways I use the time I have at hand, how much or little control I wield over anything, to say the least my own attention, all this against the smoldering backdrop of the escalating genocide in Palestine. I drove myself into the grind of flinging my stupid, strident cover letters into the ether. I did leave the city to sit a Vipassana meditation course, back in December. Not therein, but not long afterwards, I came to terms with a breakup, which dominated my emotional life, which felt like most of my life, for most of the past year. It felt, as trite as it sounds, like a switch flipped and all the colors were right again, just like that—but of course it was the culmination of months of processing and, at least equally instrumentally, the support and counsel of friends. The paradigmatic conventionality of that heartache was so brittle, actually, and suddenly meaningless when posited at the center of the now several fragmenting concentric schema and structural realities, the climbing numbers of the martyrs, that were, are, my world, of late. Or those feelings just expired, as all feelings do, if you observe them for long enough. While this was happening I was taking walks, watching movies, making dinner with friends, looking at my phone. It snowed a few times. I went to a few great parties and one really bad party, so bad it clarified to an extent that felt like altering my expectations of parties, what I felt they make possible, my desire for such experiences. Nothing was hitting the same. At moments this felt very clearly the local correlate of seemingly global insanity. It felt like time to start writing again (I can’t or won’t recapitulate the period in which I wasn’t writing), if only to consecrate space in my life to recapitulate, aestheticize, wallow, etc., with complete freedom. Alongside other projects, I started writing these, so that the attention of others might oxygenate my practice—prophylactic or exposure therapy for shame. I don’t know why things happen like this, but shortly thereafter, I was asked to one job interview, then another, and then another. Most of the preceding has not been described in strictly chronological order, but a few weeks ago my mom called me and said, why don’t you come visit? Your grandmother keeps talking about getting ready for the end of her life. You should come talk with her. You may not get a better chance, or a chance at all, when you start working again soon. If, I said, if I start working again, but I said yes. My father bought my flight with his airline miles. I left the city last Friday just a hair too late to skirt the weekend-opening rush hour. Stuck in standstill traffic on the expressway, I opened my email; I was offered the job. I was driving up to visit dear friends in Vermont; I texted them the news; the traffic loosened up eventually. In the radiant, lumber-fragrant heat of the new sauna in their basement, I felt newly aware of infinitesimal muscles I’d been clenching for several months. I wouldn’t say that I’ve totally unclenched, exactly, but I can imagine, with more fidelity, a near future with less clenching in it. I stopped off to see my younger brother in Boston; he made me potato pancakes and drove me to the airport. I landed at Incheon a few days ago. My sleep schedule was so mangled already, unmoored, before I came; the jet lag could have been worse. Right-side up and diurnal again to this locality, a familiar feeling is fading in, but I will try to describe it another time. It’s a new moon in Pisces right now. I hope you’re doing well where you are.