another monday come and gone! i’ve lost count of which number monday piece this is. i’m going to check right now actually: the 25th piece!!!!! nearly halfway through a year! although it isn’t truly the 25th piece due to those two weeks i missed. but in spirit we’re 25! how cosmic!
i am writing from my uncle & aunt’s couch in hope ranch–my final dogsitting job of the season before heading east. i just got off the phone with john henry. it was a LOVELY phone call, in part because he answered! he always answers now, but it still feels like such a gift. there’s a part of my 16-year-old-self that always understood my little brother would be off doing things much cooler than catching up with me on the phone, and that makes our recent bond feel so much stronger.
i considered starting this piece yesterday evening but was rather preoccupied nursing a hangover that was surely exacerbated by a lack of sleep this weekend. kev and annie and i drove up to napa at 6a on friday for aj and lauren’s wedding, and i got no more than 5 hours of consecutive sleep each night over the course of three days. but it felt so right! weddings are objectively fun and beautiful, and well worth the cost of fatigue on the back end.
it was a stunning weekend. we were up in napa where it was sunny and 70s, a stark contrast to the fog that has consumed carp and santa barbara for the last month. after living in eugene for four years, i’m not keen that i need the sun to feel sane, but these last few weeks without it have been brutal. for anyone who’s ever heard me speak of my temperature tolerance–the way i feel that i tolerate cold better in Cold Climates than i do in places that are Historically Warm–i think my sun deficiency problem is similar. in eugene you expect the rain, the clouds, you actually bank on it. but here you get so used to the sun that you end up taking it for granted, so that when it disappears, lots of things fade to gray. i have to remember that as a kid, fog was my favorite beach weather. i’ve not been frequenting the beach much lately.
i revisited joan’s on keeping a notebook piece this weekend, during my bout of insomnia between 3a and 6a on saturday morning. i’ve realized that these pieces thus far have been my notebook equivalency. hers is an immaculate piece of writing. to be a writer is to observe, as i touched upon last week, and she talks about her stake in doing so. after a while of deliberating the purpose of keeping records [for oneself], she arrives at this: remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. i want to sum up the piece to something, but i can do nothing other than suggest you read it, and leave a link to it here: http://pdf-objects.com/files/00-On-Keeping-a-Notebook.pdf and an excerpt from it here:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is
going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford 8 and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
if i could encapsulate just precisely the way this piece makes me feel, i would, but i can’t, so i won’t! you must read it and feel it for yourself.
with weddings you are naturally compelled to think about and exist within love. i have never pretended to understand love. i have not studied it, nor spent many hours considering the way it roams about my life, my relationships. i have received it in abundance, and i have reciprocated it to hopefully a similar degree, but i cannot say i quite get it yet. i feel that it is a practice. it has always been a practice, although i don’t know that i realized that until this past year.
i do think that for a while i felt a deficiency within myself. a problem. i did not think that i was incapable of love, but i struggled to understand that i could achieve it; maybe i struggled to understand that i was worthy of it. it took about four years after my parents’ divorce to let myself believe in love again, to let myself believe that not everyone’s marriage was a sham, to let myself believe that love is real, and that it requires intentionality. it required the understanding that my parents may have believed that love was an objective answer, that love was a condition, that you could say you were in love but not entirely mean it and that was okay, that was normal.
when everything is right on paper, it is so easy to overlook gut feelings. i have felt this way in relationships before. i was acutely familiar with endings: i remember trying to navigate the complexity of “being in love” while knowing deep down that my relationship would eventually end. it has taken me until now to understand that the problems within my prior relationships were not exclusive to me, or my perceived incapability to give and receive love. it was merely an issue of misconnection. i have loved and been loved by people who could not understand me in the way that i needed them to, and i never felt as though i truly understood them back. i am not interested in finding the reason(s) behind that misunderstanding, i just know it to be true.
which leads me to the gist (and hopefully conclusion–it’s already 9p and i should be getting ready for bed) of this piece. i do not remember why i decided that these pieces should be written on mondays. i do remember realizing that a few of my mondays would fall on Consequential Days–a christmas piece, a new year’s piece, a may 20th piece. i remember taking note of it, and then forgetting it until a few days ago when i was reminded of this date.
one year ago today i was on the 101 southbound feeling this electric energy and unsure where to place it. i was driving down to meet a couple of old friends from summer camp and attend my first dead show. everything about this weekend had been a gametime decision–i’d decided to go to the show just five days prior, i’d been waffling about staying in la or just driving back to carp after the show ended, i hadn’t seen these guys in four years, and while we’d been close at camp, we weren’t close close.
in hindsight, everything about my decision to attend that show had been nearly fated. in the winter of 2022 i had just gotten out of a two-year relationship and i was ready to say yes to everything. i’d gotten myself a second job at a restaurant in an industry i swore i was Not Strong Enough to work in, i’d found friendship through an unexpected connection with carp dead family when JP came up and asked me about the stealie on my truck, i was going solo to soho shows nearly biweekly and meeting new people left and right, i was being courted by three or four men who seemed to understand me even less than my ex had, and i was just Riding It Out. there were no expectations for the future, i felt very free, and i felt very prepared to embrace that.
on the morning of may 20th i’d woken up early to meet sami and louisa for a killer hike at rattlesnake–the water was rushing, the rockroses were spitting out their final blooms, the snakes weren’t out of their holes and our favorite fig tree was in full abundance. it was a beautiful, indulgent morning, sami pulled out carrot juices for us and we shared a joint under the snake-tongue waterfall about a mile and a quarter up the trail. i left and drove straight to the jolly oyster to celebrate mad dog’s birthday over steamed clams and calamari with our friends and family. i was checking the clock constantly, eagerly anticipating the 12:30 mark upon which i would begin my drive to tommy’s house in north hollywood.
i was also on the phone with sam, who had convinced me to sell my single ticket to the show so that he could buy us tickets to sit together, something that struck me as very odd–he had great seats, it was his favorite band, the whole ordeal was very novel to me, we’d not properly caught up in years. somehow he managed to sell my ticket, get me my money back, and comp my new ticket next to him in the upper left wing of the forum.
and i remember just the one bit of that drive down so intensely, just past thousand oaks and just before calabasas. i was really gripping the wheel. i didn’t know where this energy was coming from. i remember speaking to myself out loud. i’ve no idea what i said, but i’m certain it was something like oh my god, ryder. oh my god!!!!! it’s going to be fine. it’ll be great! with eyebrows raised and eyes very wide and lots of disbelief at where i’d landed myself with my resolution to Say Yes To More Things. surely a lot of this charged energy was coming from this inherent repulsion around the thought of Driving In LA.
to make (what could be) a very long story short, on this day one year ago i said yes–with intention, somehow–to the idea of a future with sam hollister. everything changed. i think i knew it on that very night, but there’s no way to be sure: i was not saying yes to a love in which i felt constrained. i was not saying yes to a love which terrified me. i was not saying yes to a love that i felt incapable of sustaining.
i said yes to what felt like–and what has proven to be–this grand opportunity of exploration, in terms of self, life, and nature. long before i knew i loved him, i trusted him as a dear friend and a man of integrity, a man of nature, a man of fire, a man of a real good time. i said yes with very little expectation and very high hopes. this relationship has challenged all of my prior beliefs about love. i have been seen in ways i never dreamed i would be. i have felt what it feels like to truly know somebody not just in friendship, but in love. i have made decisions that past versions of me could have never. i have confronted fears that would not have presented themselves without this love i’ve found.
it has come with hardship! relationships reveal some of our deepest truths, our largest insecurities, our darkest secrets. relationships demand vulnerability. they demand honesty, even when you know that your truth may create more problems to solve, more conversations to have–especially then. i am learning every day. i am appalled to find that, one year after the beginning, i feel more in love every week. i am appalled, i think, for all of the people i used to be. in nearly every iteration of myself for a decade, there was this trepidation around love. and here i am within it. here i am, eager for more of it. excited for not just the happy parts but the hard parts too.
there are hard parts. and after every single one, i’ve felt like i have stretched my roots just a little bit farther into the earth below me. i’ve felt like i have grown just a tiny bit taller. i’ve felt like i have come to know myself just a little bit more. after every single Difficult Conversation–once the realization sets in that this particular hardship was not, in fact, going to result in us immediately breaking up–i feel more in love. i feel even more intentional about my choice to be so.
i’ve thought long and hard about the ways i choose to write about my relationship here. oftentimes, my hesitation to share so much about sam hinges on this feeling of luck. i feel boastful, sometimes, i think simply because i feel so lucky on a day-to-day basis. i feel lucky to do this work with somebody that i respect so much, somebody that i cherish not just as a lover but also as a dear friend, somebody who respects me and supports me enough to encourage me to continue doing the work. and i feel extremely privileged to have found somebody who says yes to things with a whole heart, who pursues the same experiences and emotions that i set out to at the beginning of 2023.
i still carry bits of my old selves with me, as i think we all should. somewhere there’s a bit of me that’s still cynical about love. maybe cynical is too harsh–i know that it’s grounded in self-preservation. i can’t look too far into the future. i’ve been heartbroken a few times, but absolutely nothing comes close to the feeling of watching my parents’ marriage dissolve. i’ve learned a lot about what not to do. now i am learning what to do, how to do it, how to–at the very least–try.
all of this is to say that i am very thankful, and that i am very much myself, certainly more myself now than i was when sam proposed this crazy idea of a connection between us on this day last year. i’d never known love like this. i’d not realized that i could know myself more, that i could grow into myself more, while being so deeply intertwined with another human. i feel incredibly privileged, and proud of myself for the mental fortitude it requires to be seen. it is unbelievable the way that the world around you changes when you allow yourself to believe in love.
anne carson repeats a line in a poem 12 years after the original poem was published. give me a world, you have taken the world i was. i stumbled upon O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love a couple of months after me and sam’s first smooch. the prior poem, published in 2008, is called Tag. i could write a while about both of them, but i’ll let you read between the lines:
here is to many more years of discovering the wonders of nature through love!!!!! as always thank you to anyone who has read this far, especially on a piece so personal and so romantic–i love you! xxo until next time,
r
loose change 
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