february 20-25
Jimmy Carter, Dubai, COVID, and beautiful unsustainable life
This week I kept a notes app where I just recorded some “swimming pool thoughts” as I had them. I’m intrigued by the themes and words that repeat across moments, which I hadn’t even identified until pasting them all into Substack today and finding myself with this impressionistic portrayal of some of the tensions I’m (apparently?) subconsciously wrestling with.
Let me know what you think.
Sober Monitor
I LOVE being a sober monitor. I like feeling like I accomplished something by being there the whole time. I like feeling responsible even if I’m doing the same thing as usual. I know I’m an extrovert now because I absolutely THRIVED having to just talk to random people for 2 hours straight. I made SO many friends! Reconnected with so many acquaintances! It absolutely was not my responsibility to rope wallflowers into discussions and make introductions and strike up conversations with the people who looked like they wish they were in bed—but somehow I was the host and Feb Club was my party. I was the socialite and this was my ball.
“You’re like a shepherd,” one of my friends said while we surveyed the crowd from a balcony. He’s resting against the wall, ankles crossed, holding a drink. I’m leaning backwards against the railing, looking over my shoulder at the sea of people beneath us.
“These are all your little sheep,” he continues. “You’re watching over them.”
I turn to look at him, pausing for a moment. Pāstor. Shepherd.
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe they are.”
nineteen
I miss the girl I was at 19. I miss the girl who dressed like a Depression-era farm girl and read laying down on the carpet and journaled every night. She ate oatmeal every day and got 8 hours of sleep and replied to all her emails. She lived in a quiet world with green tomato gardens and hymnals open on the piano and copies of Thoreau as soft and worn as her dresses. She did water color paintings and knew every bone in the human body and could tell you what time sunset would be.
And she couldn’t survive the life I was asking her to lead. She wasn’t the person I needed to become. The woman I am now—who hasn’t been prepared for class since January and scrapes by on six hours of sleep—took her place.
Despite all the problems that nineteen year old girl had, I miss her. I miss being her. I miss being alone. I miss living in a quiet world.
I wish that girl hadn’t had to grow up.
things I read on Tuesday
Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech
“Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.”
covid
Having COVID is one of my best memories at Yale—eating B Natural on a garden table still wet with spring rain. This silent golden room where I was promised nothing but solitude for the next 24 hours. God really brought me to a place of rest and a place of peace. I’d been living an unsustainable life and somehow the physical consequences— getting sick for the first time in two years, spending a week in and out of bed—were a blessing.
late nights early morning
My heart desires to stay up late talking to acquaintances who tell me I’m beautiful—but what if I woke up early so I could talk to a God who tells me I’m loved?
masquerade
We got to Masquerade before the crowds did, while the night was still young and Commons was mostly empty. Everything was fresh and beautiful and bathed in purple light like a perfect neon dream. I’d been drinking from a little plastic water cup, but we started taking pictures so I put my empty cup down on the ground so that I could pose with my friend and twirl for the camera.
I thought, it’s fine if someone kicks it over—I’ll just throw it away and get a new one.
And then just as suddenly, I thought, this world is going to end.
Just taking infinite cups, drinking a few sips, tossing it in a trash can, getting another, doing this all night long because it’s easier to get a new drink than to hold onto one all night long. We’re all living in a dream where nothing costs anything, objects float away as soon as you let go of them, and we’re all just young and free and flawless. Decadent, ephemeral, impossible. Smiling at a camera in a ballroom that looks like Grand Central, living an unsustainable life that simply can not last forever.
I’m still standing in front of the camera, supposed to be grinning like a princess—but as I look around at all these beautiful young people in their dresses and suits, just taking their first sips of wine and still happy to be surrounded by strangers—I feel like I’m watching a speakeasy before the Great Depression, or Berlin on the eve of war. I feel the way I felt three years ago, when newspapers began to report the first COVID cases in Connecticut: somehow we all looked right at the evidence that things were going to change, that life as we knew it was about to end—and we kept on dancing, still convinced that we were invincible, buoyed by the foolish optimism that this world would last forever.
How can they all just go about their nights, oblivious to the fact that it’s all so fragile and finite? That when the clock strikes midnight all the magic fades? That we’re all about to graduate and this exact cocktail of enemies and lovers and roommates and acquaintances is a combination of people who will never be in the same room again? Our candle is burns at both ends, it will not last the night; but as I look at all my friends— none of us rage, rage against the dying of the light.
These are the things I think, wearing a ballgown, frozen in front of the camera, searching this massive, ornate room, looking up through glittery eyelashes at that elegant train-station clock, overwhelmed with the knowledge that it’s all about to be washed away. I stepped away from that plastic cup and suddenly realized that we’re all asleep, and I can see the dawn rising. I’ve walked away without a glass slipper.
“Are you good?” My friend asks, still holding the camera.
“Yeah,” I smile. “I’m fine.”