Tonight I ran into an old friend and confessed to her that I haven’t been writing because my kind of writing – memoirish—seems so insignificant in the face of the maginificent catastrophe we are facing.
This is, of course, the voice of the oppressor in my head. My internal critic. I have named her Edith, for the sake of recognition. This has helped.
Tonight, before that, I walked down to the creek, and the ground in the meadow was bone dry, a hard brown scape with tufts of pale beige grass. Thirsty ground. It is so hard to feel nothing for a long long time.
It seems like that’s what’s asked, now. To feel it all, or feel nothing. The one, impossible. The other, a killing lack.
When I saw that old friend, she said that she reads this. When I confessed this fear that what I have to say is too small, she said no, it reflects what I feel, what I don’t say. She said it helps.
She also said “I haven’t known what happened since you knocked on your boyfriend’s door. I was like… she put herself out there, did they get back together? Didn’t they?”
But by that point in the evening, by the time I had worked up the will to ask her—well, the tarot cards were out and the bartender had invented a drink for our other friend, and it was hot pink, which is my new favorite color. (I want EVERTHING to be pink. Every morning, when I wake up, I make my coffee and I get on Craigslist and I type in “pink.” Just to see.)
Anyway, by that point in the evening, we were all a couple of pink drinks in and also my sweetheart had called and I had put him on speaker so that Nash could tease him, which she loves to do, and my other friend said, “but I figured you are together, since he called…”
Yes. And it’s important to be passionate about something other than that man. (Though, I still am. About him.)
But I am also passionate about freeing women’s voices. The painful and widening relief for us of speaking. The relief for men of not having to... The settling by all of us into the easy give and take that could happen if women were just a little more high voltage.
A little more hot pink.
It’s funny how I can be passionate about the importance of unsilencing other people and not be writing because Edith says I have to hold forth on the 25th amendment or shut the fuck up.
This is not true. This is the whole point. It’s all needed now. This is what we have, when the antics of the magnificent catastrophe try to erase us. We have the whole self, the whole of humanity, the whole of the earth, parched and soaking, in all her seasons, still breathing, still speaking for life.