silica, lime, copper, & alkali

Check on your friends who get nervous this time of year, because gardening SZN is approaching.

Not me though. My thumbs are greener than ever.

Let’s get into it:

[little blues]

The permanence lastingness that comes with written language has always fascinated me. By definition, the words we speak must vanish into thin air. We inhale - we expire - our voice disappears.

But even the most primitive of scribbles can outlive the scribe.

I often wonder if that’s why I gravitate towards writing in my free time.

In 2017, when my body started ballooning into someone I no longer recognized, I bought a small, leather book and began writing letters to my future child. With time, the journal became a hodge podge of little anecdotes. Conversations with a person that I had never even met.

These written memories, I knew, would last exponentially longer than my mind’s versions of them. So I wrote.

I was creating a kind of lastingness in the mundane. doing it for me, as much as I was for her. Memorializing a fixed point in time and space, through scribbles on a page.

/

The binding of that little book has begun to stretch these days. Along with words, I’ve collected artifacts, carefully taped between pages.

Forever bound by the chokehold of pre-nostalgia, I’ve saved hospital wristbands from her first set of stitches, “VISITOR” stickers from quick trips to school lunches, the first flower weed she ever picked for me, and other pivotal souvenirs from parenthood.

But tonight’s artifact was different.

After an embarrassingly drawn out (and impatient, on my part) argument over the unlawful nature of cookies before dinner, I decided I should humbly make my amends¹ . So I rummaged through a junk drawer and peeled out a single blue sticky note.

I pressed the gummed part of the paper to the arm of our couch, where our daughter was sitting, and I quietly walked away.

This was new territory.

I’d never written an apology before. And with no expectations of reciprocation, I continued about my evening. But as I cleaned dishes, I heard her over the water, sounding out each word until she’d made sense of the whole damn thing.

Then to my surprise, as she finished reading, she started to skip towards the drawer. She was on a mission to fetch a pen of her own.

She wanted in on this new adventure, too.

And when she finally returned, I just stood still. I stood and stared, over and over again, at her little blue thoughts.

Maybe it was in the way her misshapen “o” didn’t quite close in on itself, or in the way she wrote ‘mom’(she used to call me ‘mama’, but that sound has been lost to the wind). Or maybe it was in the way she expressed herself in a mix of backwards and forwards.

Whatever the source, I suddenly felt like I was holding on to a part of her in that little sticky note. Her age, her innocence, her personality… all of it, right in my hands.

A sort of lastingness, memorialized in BIC ballpoint blue.

The words we speak vanish into thin air. We inhale - we expire - our voice disappears. But ink can travel through time and space.

Handwriting doesn’t follow the rules of the wind.

^{1 These last few years, I’ve tried to model the idea of “righting your wrongs” by apologizing to our kid when the time calls for it. Not for the sake of teaching subservience or guilt, but because far too many adults struggle to extend olive branches these days.2
2 Wait, is this footnote about me?}

Bluets 
by Maggie Nelson

an excerpt 

156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

write more sticky notes.
until next time. -cd