Olivia,
I began this email in what felt like the fifth month of winter, a March train ride to Nice where I spent 5 days alone, walking around ports and climbing a thousand stairs to get a good view. Now in what feels like the first spring that ever was, it is 70 degrees more frequently, but some days, it doesn't matter how warm it is because the sky is covered and I don't leave my apartment until the afternoon. Sometimes, I believe seeing beautiful things with no one to share them with is more isolating than staying in bed.
When you sent your last email, it was December, and I never told you how jealous I was that you got to see our home in a snowfall. You and your aunt saw my dad in Little Bear, and the thought of it still makes me sparkle.
When you sent your last email, it was December, and I never told you how jealous I was that you got to see our home in a snowfall. You and your aunt saw my dad in Little Bear, and the thought of it still makes me sparkle.
Winter has never been for me, which is a difficult idea to separate from the one that ties me to a season. My brain thinks winter me is worse than summer me. But they are seasons, and I am a human girl. If summer Jane and winter Jane were in a room together, I would like to think summer would give winter a hug, and winter would feel the embrace without too much jealousy.
Though I am not a season, I do feel new as spring chimes louder and louder. I like my hair better, I like seeing the people outside, I like that the bluntness of French people is like a pitbull dressed in barbie clothes.
I have been having some crazy dreams. Lots that I am screaming, but never loud enough. Once was at a man who took my charger at the airport, the other at linguist man turned skate-park cult leader, and another at my dad, because he scared away a fawn in our yard.
I had a dream that my friends here and I were to throw a party in a place outside of town. Now I recognize the landscape to be some open space just east of my parents house, where my mom would pull over to look for arrowheads and tell me Oprah had a property nearby. Though I turn them over in my head, I don't know what most of my dreams mean, but this one gave hints.
The other night I was walking home from the bar with two friends I've made here recently, Ismail and Lincoln. I put one arm around each of them – younger me would never believe I touched a boy without him squirming away. We giggled at the mischief we got up to at the bar, I picked up my legs and poof! I was off the ground. They carried me to my door, and I said goodbye. I am really starting to understand that people like me.
I like you so much,
Jane
October 7
Olivia,
Your apartment seems like a special space, I am so glad for all the developments since your email. I know you’re breaking her in with all the lovely ways you know how – the one that comes to mind as my favorite is the spread you & Meggy & Nicole made for Livia’s 21st.
Among many titles, you are an expert hostess, and I’ve been indulging on those memories of you: in July, you asked me which sandwich I wanted out of the two you had made. Caprese on homemade focaccia. I sat in your backyard, de-pruning from the pool and hiding my un-pedicured toes under the ottoman. The air smelled like rosemary and chlorine. You sat up in front of the creations, holding your mozzarella-water hands open to the sky, awaiting my response. I told you I wanted the one you didnt want, your second choice, and we ate them.
I see you like this, after you’ve made something delicious, or know you’re going to. The way you speak to your little brother, kindly, with boundless patience. You ask me questions, like which sandwich I want, what breakfast food I would be, the color of my day, how the rain made me feel. For a moment, I can see the words you’re reading written all over me, like instructions for a plant: needs plenty of light, favorite color light blue but also pink, water everyday, but on Sundays go to the cafe on the corner of Silver Street and get a hot americano with an inch of almond milk.
“Take up space!” you tell me, after I admit I’ve had to use the bathroom for the past hour, but didn’t want to interrupt. When I told you my toenail was falling off, you insisted I make a doctor's appointment. I tell you about my family, more honest than I’ve been with anyone, and when my sentences begin to end in, “but, i don't know,” you tell me, “Spell it out! How do you really feel?”
I’ve been hearing your voice now, so often, in this colossally mysterious reality.
Lately, I haven't felt like myself. I know it's because so much of who I am is a friend, a daughter, and my bedroom at the home I grew up in, with the eggshell wire headboard. Ophelia, the growers market, my path in the woods, long conversations with my dad. Here, I am a white room with tile floors, and an ugly-green metal table. I’m not Jane, or the ‘Jane’ you read that as, with a soft ‘a’ and ‘n’. Here, it sounds more like “Jenn”, with the j-sound only a shadow. Here, I really am just a human girl.
This is not the first time in my life I’ve been so naked. Or maybe not naked, maybe covered in so many coats, I hardly recognize myself. Things fall apart and come back together in a rhythm I know well. You run a load of whites with oxyclean, then do it again, and again. You write until the story is done, then open another empty google doc. There's skill in knowing where to end things, and when to start new ones, but it doesn't come so naturally to me. Now, I am here, wearing a life I haven't broken in yet, and I'm back to sophomore year, after I’d bought brand new doc martin boots and extra-strength bandaids. I’m back to my first day in braces, and my mouth tastes like cherry-flavored numbing cream.
When I finally become a butterfly I won't tell anyone, but there will be hints.
These turbulent feelings are not without their respective honeyed-remedies. I take plenty of walks, and have revisited my yoga practices. I’ve been eating lots of figs and jammy persimmons. I’ve been lighting candles, just for me, and I got a haircut last week. Life wants to be so kind to me, and I’ve been trying my best to let it.
Last week, I went to Cassis, a little beach town an hour south of Aix by train. I went by myself, and told you later how it felt like a honeymoon with the woman I’m becoming. We found a spot in the pleat of a rock, pushed up against an even bigger rock. She marched me towards the ocean, this unfamiliar woman, over the pebbles and it felt like stepping on overgrown legos. We swam out to the billow of its belly, and I smiled like I'd discovered the last piece of the matrix. And in a way, I had -- this feeling of wholeness, in all of its deconstructed glory, and my ability to hold all of that unknowing without being devoured by it. I had a secret no one else knew, only her, who was slowly disappearing into the blue, and the blue itself, holding us in its swell, and maybe the bathers who now dried at the shore.
Olivia, it is a weird feeling to trust the bottomless ocean, but sometimes I am brave enough to stop treading and let the salt hold me.
Love,
Jane Riley
August 3
When I was a little girl, I wanted to die as if it were a way to pass time during summer vacation. Heaven, a place like the yard of my grandparents house.
Dear Grandpa, I would draft a letter in my mind before bed.
How are you up there?
The house is all noisy and hot, and I was wondering if I could come up for a couple weeks, and maybe hear the rest of your story about working at Pepsi. I can also pull the weeds in the backyard if you need. I’ll bring fudge.
Sincerely (a correspondence I had just learned apart of the 2nd grade curriculum),
Jane Riley
Off it went to heaven, and off I went to sleep.
I never heard back from my old man, and when I got older, I started to get sleep paralysis. Awful, considering sleeping a rare thing I’m good at. Sleep paralysis is like being a ghost without all the fun. It’s like being reincarnated as your bed after you’d dreamed you could fly, or that you were Britney Spears.
It always goes the same. Bloop! I’m back in the place I was blinking a hundred times to get tired a few hours ago. I try to move my hands first, fondling the air like crumpling newspaper. I figured out early on that the best way out is to fall back asleep, so I calmly try to be as still as I can and pretend my way there. This works well, and is the best advice I could give to someone struggling with the same thing.
The trouble is that I notice my throat feels thick, I’m in a mildly suffocating position, and it’s time to press the panic button. Dad, dad, dad, dad!!!!!!
Until finally, there’s someone in the forest to hear the tree fall, and I’ve made a physical sound wave.
It’s hard to talk about sleep paralysis with someone who’s never experienced it. It’s the hellish equivalent to explaining your favorite book to someone who’s never read it. Playing charades when all they guess is “nightmare?”, “sleep?”, “drowning?” And google is no better. There's not a clear explanation to what this is, or why it happens.
Sleep has come to carry a lot of meaning in my life. I used to sleep into the afternoon, because the day felt too long if I woke up too early. Sometimes I sleep through banging alarms and thunderstorms. I once slept in my dad’s arms at an Russian electric-cello concert among a crowd of unfathomably long and blond hair. If I’m with my friends late at night, there’s a chance I'll pass out on the nearest couch or carpet – there is no better sound to lul one to sleep than the laughter and chatter of her dearest friends.
Sometimes while everyone is asleep, I am awake, lying on a bathroom floor. The fluorescent blaze makes me feel like I'm in a Grimes music video, the whole world neutrally sterile. At my worst, I feel broken, and that my hibernations are another piece wedging myself away from normalcy. The bizarreness and torment I carry get mixed together into an alienating doom.
Sometimes, it's as if that wedge leans me to my spot, one away from eyes where I am not a creature of bones and skin, but a plasmatic coat scaling where I used to have those things. That when I am sleepy, I am off picking weeds at my grandparents house, and when I’m wide awake on the bathroom linoleum, I’m walking the soundless woods behind it.
July 24
I dreamt of a future where I am driving through canyons in a giant SUV, with a book on tape playing, little giggles in the backseat, and someone with a pretty voice reading directions to me. I dreamt that I was in a spaceship thousands of miles from earth, but still watching and wondering what all of you were up to. In another, I was running down a giant hill with my best friends, and it is my favorite thing to happen this July
I dreamt of a future where I am driving through canyons in a giant SUV, with a book on tape playing, little giggles in the backseat, and someone with a pretty voice reading directions to me. I dreamt that I was in a spaceship thousands of miles from earth, but still watching and wondering what all of you were up to. In another, I was running down a giant hill with my best friends, and it is my favorite thing to happen this July
My dad and I went to the farmers market this morning. We sat under a big tree in the middle of all the babies and bread and long linen skirts, by the Tom Petty tribute band and a slobbery dog. He pulled a croissant out of its butter stained bag and I couldn't stop telling him I love him.
I do this often. I see my father, wearing one of his three identical pairs of Levis and FBI coded sunglasses. Him, taking off his shoes anytime there's even a patch of grass to walk on. Him, telling a stranger they look like a character from his favorite show, him pointing to planets far away when the sky is dark enough to see them. I say “I love you,” between most breaths until the words don’t sound like words anymore.
I love you, I wouldn't have gotten out of bed today if you didn’t wake me up with the latest sports news. I love you, you master of loving me. I love you, tell me every life you lived before this one, the one before I’m tall enough to lay my head on your shoulder and never let go. I love you, and will look for you in every one after this, I’ll see you in every lemonade stand child and the walls of the orchestra.
We sat there under the tree listening to the overgrown boy band playing a song you used to hear at the bar, and all I heard is how much I love you, more than I could ever love someone.
Philosopher Betsy Carroll wrote, “If they are countable, they are not stars.”
