A story about Seth’s nose

We all have our Things. 

They emerge when we’re bored. When we’re waiting. When we’re procrastinating. When we’re tired. It’s a mental itch that wants to be scratched. It’s like Thing from the Addams Family, a blind, feeling hand, flailing around, looking for something to grasp. 

Your Thing might be snacks, or Fruit Ninja (is that still a thing?), or CNN news alerts. For me, it’s Twitter. For my partner Seth, it’s picking the skin off his nose. 

What?

Seth likes to pick his scabs, and in theory I understand. It’s satisfying to remove that layer of deadness and let the pink, healed skin be free. But he tended to pick them before they were ready to be picked, before the skin had rebuilt itself underneath, leading to even bigger wounds and even bigger scabs, which, of course, made him wild. So I got mad at him, but that didn’t stop him. So I offered to buy him two gallons of ice cream if he let his wounds heal, and that worked. 

And now he likes to pick the skin off his nose. 

It’s not a scab, just dead skin that flakes up. And when he sees one flake, he pulls it, and the skin is raw and pink underneath, and that requires healing, with new layers of skin, and the dead layers on top always have an edge, because you can’t exactly pull off an entire layer all at once cleanly, thus, as his nose got pinker and more irritated, the cycle continued.

We had a Very Serious Conversation about this. We decided he needed something else to satisfy his hands. A new Thing. So we went to Target. 

Yes, a real store. It’s nice to be in the real world. To see physical objects in 3D. The goal was to get a stress ball, a squish toy, something. We would go to the toy section and figure it out.

It was a weekday night, and Target’s closing hour approached. Of course we procrastinated until it was nearly too late. But his nose was pink and swollen, we had to go. 

We arrived eight minutes to closing. Every Target worker gave us evil eyes, eyes somehow more evil when their bearer is masked, for eyes are all you can see. But we sprinted, and besides, there were plenty of other people in the store, and Seth’s poor pink nose, it was an emergency, sorry! We speedwalked up to the second floor. We asked someone in a red shirt about stress balls and he pointed us to the toy section. He followed us and hovered in the aisle, speaking into his walkie-talkie: 

Yeah, I’ve got two new guests in toys. 

They were watching us. They were waiting for us. We were running out of time. 

And the options were… dire. 

There were no stress balls.

They did have silly putty, though. And round squishy stuffed animals. Okay, so we had two options, and thirty seconds of rushed deliberation. Would you rather squish an animal’s brains out? Or rub planet putty in your palms? Which one will look you in the eyes? Which one has more resistance?

We chose the planet-themed silly putty. Mars, Saturn, Venus, and Uranus. He would squish the life out of these planets and let his nose heal. And we weren’t even last in the checkout line. 

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Seth and I both spend a lot of time at home. This is not unique these days. Seth reads a million books and thinks very hard about economics and physics. I sit for hours a day writing, editing, and reading. 

Hours of sitting. Not all of this time is productive. The brain wanders. It needs a break… then another, and another, and why am I sitting here again?

I’ve deactivated my Twitter. I have nothing against Twitter or social media, specifically. But it’s killed my concentration, and I need a big break. I have nothing against picking scabs or peeling dead skin, either, but after a certain point, it becomes destructive. 

I’m trying to notice the Twitter cravings, to look them in the eye and say STOP. But it’s still hard. The habit is embedded. I find myself checking my email too often instead, and feeling disappointed. I need to replace it with something else. Now I’m trying instead to pet my cat when my brain hurts. It’s nice to move around.

Or maybe I’ll steal Seth’s silly putty. 

-Denise

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Elliephant of the week: She is furniture now

It was clearly hurt. 

The pigeon’s wings were stretched across the sidewalk in a position that was almost graceful. It didn’t move as we approached. It stared at us and its little breast started pulsing in and out quickly. Terrified. 

It was a sunny day, sixty degrees, after a beautiful afternoon playing hooky in a park. Who am I kidding, I have nothing to play hooky from, except my own ambitions. I convinced a friend to play hooky on a Wednesday afternoon, so I felt the hookiness through her. But she had to get back to work, so we left. Then we came across the pigeon by the busiest intersection in Adams Morgan. 

With a closer look we could see it had a broken wing and leg. The wing was jagged and the foot was sticking sideways. We couldn’t leave it. I called animal rescue. My friend ignored work and stayed with me as we waited for the pigeon saviors to show.

I didn’t want to name it because I thought it would die. I didn’t want to get attached. But my friend named it Stu, so I named it Sir Pigeon.  We stood close to it so others wouldn’t step on Sir Stu Pigeon. In fact, many passersby nearly walked into us for having the audacity to stand in the middle of a busy sidewalk. Then they would look confused, look down, and gape. I wrote WE CALLED ANIMAL RESCUE on a piece of paper so everyone wouldn’t look so sad. 

It had three sets of eyelids, clear, orange, and gray, and each set blinked one by one in pain. It took quick breaths that shifted the damaged wing in and out. When I leaned forward for a closer look, its breathing increased into a panic. It was completely vulnerable to the nearness of me. 

The pigeon savior showed up after fifteen minutes. She wore a khaki shirt and tattooed arms and told us she had just saved a squirrel down the street. She placed Sir Pigeon into a blanket-filled cage and told us they would take him to a wildlife rehabilitation center. That he would be okay. That he might never fly again, but he would live. 

All of this doesn’t make me feel that great. Earlier that afternoon, someone on the street asked if I could buy them a sandwich. I smiled and said “not today.” But a freaking pigeon is hurt? Stop everything. It was selfish. I wanted to feel better. I saw something that was hurt and I, too, was hurt. I watched its blinking eyes and was reminded that I, too, had eyes that blink. I wanted the pain to go away. For both of us. And, for a moment, it did. The broken pigeon would live. 

-Denise

Ellie of the Week: Bought her a bed. It’s a little too big.

Today is the best day of the year. Today we all decide at once to say: down with the clocks, give us the sun. 

The first day of Daylight Savings Time is one of my favorite days of the year. But maybe I’m just in a good mood. Because a warm sun puts me in a good mood. All I have to do is go outside, stick my face up, and frown into the light. Just go to a park and you’ll see it. That solar infection: joy. 

On Wednesday, I sat on a bench at a park until my butt got sore. I watched people walk from one end of the park to the other. People. I soaked in the energy of other human beings without speaking to them. And dogs. And cats on leashes. Three of them. 

One of the leashed-cats was a small orange creature. His owner let him ramble forward, stop and sniff, then keep rambling around. I watched this beautiful cat from afar. He was the perfect combination of curious and nervous. When people shouted nearby he would shrink back, then when the danger was gone, keep moving forward. 

The cat approached me. I tried to hide my excitement. But the cat’s owner saw me smiling, and we struck up a conversation. 

“Do you lead the cat, or let the cat lead you?” 

“I let him lead me. Is that right?” 

She asked me as if I were a leashed-cat expert. I didn’t tell her my own cat would sooner crawl underneath our sink than ever go on a walk in the real world.  

She told me how nice it was to see the world through her cat’s eyes. When he picks a path to prowl, it’s never straightforward. Whenever he stops to examine something, that means there’s something worth examining. Out here, the owner is completely at the will of her cat. The cat doesn’t know that cats aren’t supposed to be on leashes. The cat doesn’t care where sidewalks go. 

---

It’s nice that we can just decide for time to move forward so we get more sun. A “real day” has solar noon at noon. We get equal amounts of sun before and after solar noon. A “daylight savings” day makes solar noon happen at one o’clock instead. The sun shifts into the evening. 

This makes me wonder: why don’t we just have life start one hour earlier? 

The workday starts at nine o’clock and ends at five. More sun shines before our day starts than after it ends. 

We like our evening events. They start late and end late. But what about morning events, which would be in better symmetry with solar noon? Why does the thought of that make my lungs shrivel? 

Is there something about staying up past midnight that people like? To live until the next day? To get two days for the price of one?

I’ve been trying to wake up earlier so I can have more sun in my day. I’m trying to create a morning ritual. Alarm clock on the other side of the room. Read a poem or a short story from bed to avoid getting up. Wash my face. Gargle mouthwash. Put on coffee and go outside while it brews. Look at birds and stretch.

But it’s hard. Evening events — even Zoom events — don’t want me to go to bed early. And I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with a weird three AM energy. By the time this energy goes away, sometimes at five, my six o’clock alarm approaches and it scares me.

Before electricity, people used to sleep in two “shifts.” It’s called biphasic sleep. They would sleep for four hours, wake for two to three hours, then go back to sleep for four. They had no evening events in the dark. When it got dark, they went to bed. This historical fact makes me feel better about waking up in the middle of the night. I read and I feel like a woman in a Jane Austen novel. But it makes mornings hard! 

When you set your own schedule, you need to choose time. To decide what makes a morning and what makes an evening. To decide that three o’clock is going to be a good time for reading and that eight o’clock is a fine wake-up time. 

In the end, the best mornings are the ones when I feel well-rested and ready for the day. The time it begins doesn’t matter so much. 

---

Seven thousand feet above our heads, a particle of dust hovers. Let’s name him Fred. Water vapor clings to Fred and condenses into a liquid droplet. Fred then freezes in the cold. More water droplets form around Fred and cling and create crystal patterns. Fred has become a snowflake, and he’s heavy, so he falls from the sky. 

It’s a light, breezy tumble, with winds pushing him this way and that. It’s cold but he likes that. For one thousand feet, two thousand now, he drifts as if in a dream. Nearby, a thousand of his friends are falling in a similar dream. They woop and cheer when they pass by one another. They wonder who will cling to someone’s mitten, who will melt on someone’s nose. Who will become a Bernie-shaped snowman. Who will be scraped by the bottom of a sled. 

Then, at five thousand feet above the ground, the cheers stop. They turn into screams. His friends are melting. They’ve hit a patch of warm air and their crystalline arms and legs are falling away. They’re liquid again. Their speed picks up. 

Two thousand feet above ground now. Falling faster. Too fast. Back to the cold. The warm air was just a fluke. But it’s different. There are no crystals here. They become hard, thick pellets. Fred and his friends are sleet. 

Fred hits the ground and it’s hard. He bounces and it hurts. And he has no time to think before the rest of his friends crash down. Shocked and afraid, they cling together on the ground, forming a thick sheet of ice.

---

On Thursday in DC, what was supposed to be a nice snowy day became an ice storm, thanks to a sole patch of warm air nearly a mile above ground. Where did the warm air come from? Why was it there? Does it matter? My driveway is pure ice and I have no shovel, that’s what matters. I have to take extra care in walking, that’s what matters. 

Sometimes, bad things happen that change your life. Sometimes, bad things happen and nothing happens after that. I think about this a lot. I am a human being, so bad things have happened to me and to people I love. Everything that has happened to me is now part of who I am. But I hate to think the bad things were necessary for me to become me. Because I like me. Does that make sense? 

On Thursday, we were supposed to get a snow storm, but we got an ice storm instead, and it encased tree twigs in ice, which was beautiful. On Friday night, I was supposed to have a boring night, but something bad happened instead, something that was almost very very bad but instead was only bad because of what it could have been, and now I will never again walk in the alley behind my house alone at night. I don’t know how else this event is going to change me. I hope that the me-ness of me will become stronger as a result. But I wish it didn’t have to. 

-Denise

But gray isn’t real – and that’s not as depressing as it sounds

A red-tailed hawk with a dead squirrel limp in its claws flew up from the ground two feet away, passing just by my head. A moment earlier, I hadn’t noticed a thing, running through Rock Creek Park with my head in the clouds, which, today, were gray.  

That’s the point, right? The coloring of hawks and squirrels is made for them to blend in with the fallen leaves, dirt, tree trunks, and scattered empty bushes of the park. The squirrel wants to hide from the hawk. The hawk wants to sneak up on its prey. Both want to avoid the grasping hands of human children. Together they can sit on a forest slope clear as day. 

The days lately have been gray, gray, gray. The grayness has helped the hawk; the colors detract from the park, blending everything to gray. It hasn’t helped me, or many others now hitting the pandemic wall (or still living in it). The days all blend in with one another. We have a supposed end date to all this but it somehow feels farther away every day. Some nights I just want to go to bed so it can be morning again. I’d really like to wake up in the middle of summer with a vaccine needle in my arm. But in the meantime I wake up because my cat is vomiting so I clean it up so that she doesn’t eat it and go back to bed and eventually I wake up because it’s time to wake up, and what then? 

It seems the sun agrees we should all be depressed because it’s turning everything gray. So I thought a lot about the color gray this week. I’ve come to the conclusion that gray isn’t real.

Gray is a combination of two things (black and white) or many things (color). Clouds are gray because they scatter all the colors equally and thickly, turning white to dark. A red-tailed hawk is not gray. It has many colors. Its head and tail are burgundy, its back and wings are white speckled with brown, its stomach is snow-white. No, that’s not accurate, either. Each individual feather has many colors and distinct patterns; in various assortments, many are white at the bottom, with brown stripes along its length, with a band of black at the tip. Eastern gray squirrels are similarly variant. They have warm orange fur on their sides and tail fur that goes from brown to dark to white. DC has its fair share of black squirrels and albino squirrels; these stick out. Solid coloring is a killer. Variation is key. Variation leads everything to blend. 

Some animals are colorful, though. Cardinals and blue jays thrive in it. Cardinals have feathers that are almost (but not quite) entirely one color. Blue jay feathers have crazy variations, none of which are intended to camouflage. They have color despite the risk. Because of the risk. They have color so they can show off to the ladies and say hey, I must be fast and strong because I can live with color. 

Other things are colorful too, like chalky Valentine’s candy hearts that say UR COOL and DREAM BIG. Their colors are solid, minus the letters.

Gray isn’t real. Close your eyes when you look at something gray. What do you see? Red eyelids and yellow lights.

Ever turn the lights down low and wonder how everything turns to gray? When lights are dim, colors go away. But colors aren’t real, either. A thing is not inherently colorful. A thing gives off color due to the way it interacts with waves of light. 

Apparently there is a kind of mite that lives on your face and never poops. Instead of pooping, it bursts when it dies. It bursts and all its organs and poop explode on your face. It’s too tiny to see or feel. Face mites are our most intimate friends. They have been closer to us than anything else. Face mites are not gray. They’re too small to have any color at all.

If a gray-bark tree falls in a forest and no one is there to look upon it, was it ever gray?

Color isn’t real and gray isn’t real. The plus side to this is that days are never gray. They are never exactly the same. One day a red-tailed hawk will nearly drop a dead squirrel on your face. One day you will only dream of that happening.

But colored light waves are real. So turn up the light and take in the waves. Every gray day has its variations. I’m looking harder to see them. I’m really trying.

Happy Valentine’s Day. You’re cool. Dream big. 

❤ Denise

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Ellie(s) of the week: Ellie tried to melt underneath the door to reach me in my office. She did not succeed. Photo from the outside taken by Seth; terrifying photo from inside taken by me. 

Also, there’s a book recommendation list in this one

Saturday night: I walked on a busy street, a street that in the initial stages of quarantine got pretty unbusy, pretty bare, but now it’s busy again, filled with honking cars, but who, who’s busy, why are they honking and where are they going? 

Sunday morning: I was staring at the wood-paneled walls in my office but looking at something else, the brightness that bounced behind my open eyes, post-exposed lights, visual noise, patterns on the panels. 

Monday morning: I was upset with a stranger because I had checked out a book from the library so obscure I was sure I would have plenty of time to read it, that no one else would want it, but I couldn’t renew it, I had to return it, someone else had put it on hold. 

Every day, there are a zillion things surrounding you that your mind has to sort through and sort out. We simply can’t pay attention to everything at once. But some things you try to sort out rudely make their way back in.

Those small things that protrude into the periphery can be a great source of annoyance. All those cars were loud, honking, disrupting my walk. The strange patterns my eyes played on wood-paneled surfaces made me want to blink them away so I could concentrate on writing. And the person who put a hold on my library book, how dare they!

I’m trying to pay more attention to these things. The things that annoy me, the things in my periphery.

It started when I was walking, with the cars. Rather than become irritated at imaginary quarantine-breakers, I decided to wonder who was in those cars and what they were doing. Driving home after a day in the park. Going to Target to buy a new swimsuit so they can dream of a beach while they lay on their bed. Finishing up a day’s work at said Target and thinking about what to make of their night. Bringing hotdog soup to their ailing mother. Driving around listening to music, driving around to avoid another black hole of a Saturday night. What about me? I was walking for the sake of walking, wearing too many layers, a bundle of moving fabric with a peek of cheek and glasses.

The light patterns. I’ve always been intrigued by the patterns that dance on the back of my eyelids whenever I close my eyes. This is the first time I’ve realized they are there when my eyes are open, too. That it’s not just light making its way through the blood vessels of my lids, but visual noise that always exists, memories of lights that the eyes can’t forget. I hope it doesn’t mean I’m going blind (I’m pretty sure it doesn’t). If nothing else, it makes for a nice distraction to replace Twitter when I am stuck between sentences. I can simply watch my visual noise patterns dance. 

And the library book. Instead of being annoyed I decided to be glad for the person who found this book. It’s called Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction by Grace Dillon. It’s a compilation of science fiction short stories and novel excerpts by indigenous authors. Before each story there is a discussion of how each one fits into indigenous scifi canon, what themes it carries on. It’s really cool. I (naively, stupidly) thought I was the only one in the world who was interested in this, or at least in DC, but there is at least one other. So I wrote a note for this mysterious other person, on a separate piece of paper, and stuck it in the back of the book. The note asks them to email me with thoughts on the book. I want to know who this person is! I really want to know. 

The thing is this: Those things on the edge of your vision, on edge of your mind, to me, those are the things worth looking at. If you don’t look, your mind tends to fill in your peripheral vision with what you expect to see. Literally, according to science or whatever. (I believe it. Sometimes I still see a bug crawling in my peripheral vision because I’m so traumatized by bed bugs, then I am grateful to find it’s just an unmoving speck of dirt). Your brain does this because peripheral vision isn’t all that accurate, left with incomplete information that the brain fills in. Normally, this is fine. The wall to the left of you will still be the same wall thirty seconds from now. Probably. The cars driving past you will be just cars you don’t need to think about. Probably.  

When I was writing with pen and paper the other day, I noticed something funny. While writing a sentence, I would already be thinking about the next sentence; but by the time I finished writing that first sentence, slowly, with the pen, I had forgotten my next thought. It took too long.

For the most part, I think in full sentences. When I begin a sentence, I usually know how it will end. (Except for sentences like first sentences in this piece, and in this one, where I intentionally decide to see how far a single sentence can go; even in that case, however, I still think in complete clauses, it’s simply a matter of finding out which clause will be the final one, maybe it’ll be this one, no, this one.) What writing does for me is open up the edge of what comes next. It allows me to chase a thought from one to the next. When it’s going well I can barely keep up. I’ll stick with pen and paper when I need to think over one thing slowly, but in order to discover a story, I need my keyboard, I need to type as quickly as I can so I can follow what shows up on the periphery. 

The librarian will probably remove my note from Walking the Clouds before it gets to the next reader. But maybe they won’t. Maybe the next person will receive the note and immediately throw it away. Maybe they won’t. 

Either way, I finished the book. Thank you, mysterious person, for giving me a deadline. 

-Denise

PS: It occurred to me when thinking about my reading list that people generally like lists. If you’re curious and/or looking for a book rec, here are all the books I’m reading, enjoying, and have promised to myself I must finish before starting a new one — nobody let me start reading anything else!

• Luster – Raven Leilani (fiction)
• The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson (fiction)
• Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos (fiction)
• Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind – Shunryū Suzuki (nonfiction)
• The Artful Edit – Susan Bell (nonfiction)
• Dialogue – Robert Mckee (nonfiction)
• Indian Mounds of Wisconsin – Robert Birmingham (nonfiction)
• When the Hills are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community – Thomas W. Pearson (nonfiction)
• A draft novel by my talented friend Jeremie (sorry, no link, it’s not published yet but it definitely will be soon)

PPS: No Ellie of the week (she’s fine), but I did make this long-nosed snowman with a couple friends (yes it took three of us (masked) to make this tiny thing). I checked on it the next day and most of its lower body had disappeared but the nose stayed true:

My complicated relationship with names

Once upon a time, I hated my name.

I hated that the name was so uncommon. I never met another Denise, I would never see my name in gift shops on novelty magnets. I hated the fact that the stress is on the second syllable, when most names stress the first. Like you have to ease into it. DeeeeNISE. I hated the morphemes that comprise it. Duh. Niece. Duh! I once had a French soccer coach, and every time he shouted my name during a game, I thought he was saying Deh knees, the knees, so I would bend my knees awkwardly and keep playing. I hated the jokes people used to make, Where’s de-nephew? HA. HA. HA. Or worse, the unavoidable error that teachers would make once a year,  the dreaded DENNIS. I can still hear the sixth grade bully in my ear singing Dehhhh-nnis the meeeeenace. 

The name didn’t feel like me. So at one point, after graduating from college, I considered going by Robin instead. Because my last name is Robbins, so… close enough?

That ran into complications, because then what could I say was my last name? Robin Robbins? NO. Regardless, I tried to get my friends to call me Robin, and some did for a while. I went on a trip to Belize and introduced myself as Robin, but at the end, when the people I met wanted to stay in touch and find me on Facebook, I had to fess up. It was awkward, it felt like lying. When I returned, I had a steady job at an organization with 100 people who varied over the years from acquaintances to work-friends to boyfriends, and who all knew me as Denise, and who was I to tell them they were wrong?

Some people go by their middle names, but I always avoided my middle name as well. Here’s a secret: My middle name is Sylvia. But I used to pretend that it’s Sylvie. It’s in my personal email address (denise.sylvie@gmail.com), so I guess I still do. Sylvia is my dead grandmother’s name. Sylvia is a Latin name. Sylvie sounds French and mysterious, and coalesces better with Denise, also a French name. They both sound better with a French accent. Deh-neez Sylvie, ooh la la. 

I’ve since realized that this was more of an identity crisis than an issue of the name itself. What is a Denise, what does it mean to be a Denise? What does a Denise do once she graduates college, what does a Denise make of her life? I still pose that question frequently. Some days I feel like a completely different person than the day prior. Or the week prior. The month prior.

Eventually, though, I got used to it, stopped worrying about it, and just lived each day like I was the person I said I was. Denise is me, whoever I am.

The reason I’ve been thinking about my name this week is because I suddenly need to use it all the time. Here’s why…

ANNOUNCING: “Denise S. Robbins,” the business! Owned by Denise S. Robbins, managed by Denise S. Robbins. Employing communications consultant Denise S. Robbins. Found at denisesrobbins.com.

(What does the “S” stand for? I’ll never tell. Why do I need the “S,” then? So no one confuses me with the cyber-thriller-romance author of books such as “Killer Bunny Hill” and “Phish Net Stalkings.” Yes, there’s another Denise Robbins author out there, and she is now my nemesis.)

I let a couple people know I was interested in “freelancing” and now here I am, registering a formal business. That means it’s going well. I’ve found myself with one solid long-term client and two potential additions. 

The fact that I am officially a “business owner” with “clients” threatens to bring me through a new identity crisis. I thought I was going to spend this year being an edgy artsy activist, and now I’m writing proposals and thinking about taxes. But it’s been pretty nice to have a work schedule. It’s not too many hours and it keeps me sane. And I still get long mornings and full days to bring my head into worlds of my own creation (right now I’m writing about time travel, mothman, and mining). It’s also nice to know that all this will allow me to extend my non-9-to-5 lifestyle indefinitely.

I did once vaguely dream of exactly this transition. If you had asked eight-year-old Denise what thirty-year-old Denise would be doing with her life, she probably would have said owning a big company, a mansion, and five cars. Or being a veterinarian. If you’d asked twenty-eight-year old me, she’d have said full-time freelance by thirty-five. It’s all just happening sooner than I expected. (Identity crisis averted.)

Not without some frustration. Which brings me to the noticement of the week. Taxes. Taxes! I’ve learned I need to file quarterly taxes. One day I spent hours trying to figure it out. I’m two months early, but I want to get the hard part over with. The confusion. I spent an afternoon clicking around on tax websites. There’s the social security and medicare tax, which self-employers pay twice over, which is set in stone, then there’s the income tax, which I thought I found the rate one day but couldn’t find again this day. I searched through a dozen tax websites and got nowhere, only finding complicated things like schedule SE and schedule ES and things that claimed to be calculators but were more like big worksheets and is my company a “farm” or do I have the wrong sheet ah! 

I didn’t realize I was getting frustrated until I shut my computer down and went for a walk. Not just frustrated. Despondent. Deeply sad that it was already dark and I had already failed. Depression tends to grow in my mind like cobwebs; connecting one thing to another, making everything feel static and stuck. 

But, for me, fresh air has a way of cleaning it out. As I walked, I realized how sad I was. And for no reason. I have a business! I’m figuring things out. I have time. I can ask for help from someone not named Denise. It doesn’t all need to be on my own.

And by the way, I like the name now. I like that my middle name and my last name come from my progenitors. I like Sylvia’s meaning: of the forest. I like being connected to robins, a funny bird with a nice song. I like that Denise derived from Dionysius, the Greek god of wine and good times. I like that my first name is a product of my parents living in Belgium, speaking French, and falling in love with a French name for their only daughter.

One day I’ll move to France and meet all the Denises in the world. We’ll drink wine and have a wonderful time. Maybe I’ll even change my email address to Sylvia. 

Hm… maybe not. 

-DENISE

PS: This a very me-centric post, but for more from me, I had a short little piece published by Neutral Spaces Magazine about cake and awkward goodbyes. You can read it here.

Ellie of the week: making a pillow out of Seth’s foot.

We needed the coldness of the open ocean,

we needed to feel the wind of Narragansett find every part of skin,

we needed to learn the meaning behind the name of the just-fine beer,

we needed to watch the sanderlings poke their beaks into the ground the waves left behind, real quick before the ocean came back, then skitter away as one,

we needed to run through a cemetery,

we needed to find ghosts between leaves,

we needed to learn that H.P. stands for Howard Phillips,

we needed to see that his grave is actually quite small,

we needed to find out that bumper cars on ice are not as exciting as you think they might be,

we needed to show up an hour early for our seven-and-a-half-hour train ride,

we needed to feel our bones cramp even on an empty train, simply from sitting so long,

we needed to learn how to eat dinner on a train in a pandemic,

we needed to shove bites of granola bar beneath our masks as quickly as possible,

we needed to discover that the face shields we bought had plastic peeling stickers we should’ve removed weeks ago,

we needed to see that face shields weren’t so bad once you removed the protective stickers,

we didn’t really need to do any of the above, but we did,

so we needed to come home to a military occupation.

We needed to walk through Union Station with ten police officers per pedestrian and a bomb-sniffing dog every few feet,

we needed to walk a mile to find a bikeshare station that hadn’t been shut down,

to become be too exhausted to celebrate the inauguration in any way,

to listen to the fireworks but not see them,

to remember the last inauguration, when the combat vehicles in our neighborhood imposed a quite different feeling,

we needed to take a long nap,

we needed to turn off our alarm clocks.

Then we needed our friend Jenny to remind us what homemade bread tastes like when done right,

we needed to feel hope again,

this normal feeling, so boring,

the feeling that news could be good news, Paris climate news, Keystone XL news, small things but good ones, things that had nothing to do with us, that we could celebrate all the same, alone,

we needed to recalibrate.

We needed cold, clear skies, brown grass, deep breaths, the dog of a stranger.

Why I’m jealous of smokers

I was walking around, rushing from place to place, to do errands or something like it, something I told myself needed to be done, groceries, other things, things I’m trying to stop buying online, all before a zoom group, my new life. And there was a man on the sidewalk, smoking. Just standing there. Everyone rushing around him, everyone with their eyes on their destination. He just stood there and took it in. He had nowhere to be. 

In that moment I wanted to be him. 

I don’t smoke, never wanted to. But smokers have the smoke break and I want that. I want to stand outside in the cold and be pleased. I want to suck in my breath and feel my body filled with the thing I needed, the thing that was missing, a craving fulfilled. Something that’s been missing lately is a reason to get out the door in the morning. It’s been missing for a long while but particularly lately, particularly in the dark cold, when I’m working from home, and I sometimes don’t need to go outside until it’s dark for the evening. We live in an English basement and don’t have a backyard. We don’t have a place to sit outside and stare. I don’t realize how much this inside-ness hurts until I do. My body craves the wind. 

So this week, I decided to have smoke breaks, but instead of smoking, I would look at birds. Every morning, while the electric tea kettle heated up, I put on my jacket and boots and went outside, down our brick driveway, to the stand of bamboo. And I would look up at the birds and watch. 

Birds are funny creatures. I can tell a few species apart but otherwise don’t know too much about them. I like not knowing things about birds. I like watching a group of house sparrows chirp and bounce from branch to branch of a bush. Why do they move from one branch to another? Why don’t they like to stay put? There was a sparrow on a branch, then another friend out join, landing on the branch and making it sway with the impact, but the first sparrow didn’t leave or get upset about the disturbance, he just chirped a hello, until another sparrow joined, smacking into the branch, and another, and another, until the branch drooped lower and lower to the ground with the weight of all these birds, about to snap — until all the sparrows flew off the branch at once. 

I’m writing this now from Providence, Rhode Island, where Seth and I are holed up for a weekend away from DC. The town is filled with H.P. Lovecraft paraphernalia and memories; he was born here and lived most of his life here. It’s now well-known that Lovecraft was shockingly racist, and honestly, he wasn’t that good of a writer. Every other horrible sight in his stories are described as “indescribable” or “cannot be described,” or things like “a color that is not red, not blue, not green, not any sane color.” 

But I can appreciate that he was writing from a time of scientific uncertainty, and was on the forefront of writing stories that were beyond the human experience, grappling with humanity’s place in the universe, or lack of place. He wrote about the uncaring cosmos that would never be fully understood, nor did it wish to be. He wrote from a place of fear, but his stories resonated in a way that’s almost romantic. Lovecraft fans delight in the weird, the unknowable, they enjoy it. I wonder how he would feel about his legacy. 

What bothers me so much about his writing is probably a core feature of it. He describes things by what they are not. His fear lies in what he does not understand, and he assumes everyone similarly fears the unknown. To say something is “not sane” or “indescribable” is to say nothing at all; except for Lovecraft, it says everything. 

Either way, Providence is lovely. The buildings are big and gothic, the rivers and canals provide for nice bridges every few steps. It misted with rain in the evening as we walked through a wooded park. We definitely saw at least one ghost.

And the birds here are wonderful. There are mallards and swans and woodpeckers and seagulls. This morning, a group of seagulls flew around in a circle over a bridge, again and again. I had no idea what they were doing. It was a pattern I could probably try to describe, but I don’t understand, nor do I want to.

This week, domestic terrorists launched a failed coup three miles from my house, more than 4,000 people in the US died in one day, and I convinced myself I was dying of a deadly disease. These things are related. 

I don’t need to get too deep into the whole coup thing. The entire country was stressed out about this. We all rubbernecked on social media or CNN. Gaping with our mouths to the floor. It almost seemed funny, if it weren’t so terrible. Six o’clock curfew in DC. I walked around my neighborhood at four in the afternoon, grateful for freedom while it lasted. The next day it really sunk in. The horror, the everything. The people who let it happen. The people who made it happen. 

But the disease thing. For reasons not worth getting into, I worried I might have silicosis. I was mentally planning my funeral. I got a lung x-ray on Thursday, and I don’t have it. But, I found out on Friday, I do have mild scoliosis. Just change one of the i’s to an o and rearrange the letters and there it is. Silicosis means my lungs would degrade until they give out somewhere between two and fifteen years from now. It’s a big deal. Scoliosis means I have a slightly curved spine. It’s a very not-big deal.  

Anyways. To say I was stressed this week is an understatement. 

During the worst of it, though, I had a few moments of relief. The feeling of soon this nightmare will be over. Imagining myself waking up from a dream and shaking the memories from my head, looking over to see Seth sleeping at my side and Ellie snoring at my feet. To feel the nightmare slip away and be replaced by my silk pillow and fraying quilt, the ceiling fan turning gently overhead. To get up and open my window to let in a cool breeze, to hear the birds chirp good morning, or the bats squeal if dawn had not yet born. 

These moments of relief came unexpectedly. They never come when called. They wouldn’t come when I was waiting in line at the library to print my x-ray order, the line that took so long that day. They wouldn’t come when I was sitting in the waiting room, trying to keep my hands from shaking, reading the same paragraph of my book over and over.

But right before I walked into the radiology center on Thursday, when I had a last glimpse of the sun, when I paused before I went in to let it soak into my skin, I felt suddenly safe. And when I got the results on Friday, oh the relief.

I hesitated to write about this because I don’t want anyone to worry. There was never any worry. It’s also… a little embarrassing? I’ve convinced myself I’m dying at least three times since the pandemic began. It’s a side effect of anxiety I never would have predicted for myself. Although maybe I should have. Anxiety, after all, can cause shortness of breath and chest pains. Which then makes me wonder if my lungs are about to give out or my heart about to explode. But it’s a strange thing to tell myself: the best case scenario is that my pain is all in my head — or, more accurately, the pain is real, but it’s all from my head. 

For the most part, I think I’m coping well. But things are crazy and hard and sometimes I’m not.

Yet sometimes, in the middle of all this, I have a moment of relief, and that is the most beautiful feeling of all. 

Be safe and well,

Denise

Ellie, the evil mastermind. She’s started sleeping on my backpack to prevent me from leaving the house