Welcome to Something Out of Nothing, a newsletter about meaning—making it, finding it, offering it. I talk about the writing life, teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, and much more.
I am considering what my forties may be, after my thirties were hard work and hustle. I’m thinking my forties could be an echo of my (late) twenties in some ways. I’m talking about exercise, obviously.
I am hydroplaning on the freeway for several stuttered seconds where time feels uneasy. I am thinking, Slow down. I am thinking, Keep going. I am thinking, Stop trying to catch up.
I am waiting patiently through the silence of my students as they consider the assigned text.
I am holding my hopes in the center of my chest—levitating, patient, alive—waiting for an email or phone call, or however it’ll come when we finally match with an expectant mother and know that our baby is coming.
I am receiving regular kitten updates from my mom, a couple miles down the road in her beach-cottage-inspired one-bedroom apartment overlooking the flowing neon waters of the community pool. Guess who finally got on the bed, she texts of the shy kitten. Yayyyy, I respond.
I am hollering sweet inside-joke nicknames across the house. My husband is hollering back.
I am growing my hair out. Purchasing bras and jeans that actually fit. Doing all the laundry and none of the dishes (unless I feel like showing off or swooping in to give my spouse a clean slate on his preferred chore).
I am walking too fast and too hard from room to room.
I am in the car, listening to the radio and reminiscing about the loved ones in my life, as if they have left it. Slow down for the toll, accelerate like flight on the other side.
I am staring at my calendar several times a day, the puzzle of it. Clearing time, filling time, rearranging. Reconsidering too many planned efforts to catch up.
I am thinking often about my routine negligence around birthdays and special occasions—one of those needling concerns regarding the perception of others—and how I was never like this until I got married and had a family. The irony that creating family could make one less reliably and outwardly thoughtful toward other people.
I am enjoying the moderately-sized boat that is my new-to-me mom car—a white Subaru that dips and swerves, graceful and responsive on rutted pavement—purchased after my oldest stepson’s beater car finally kicked it. We didn’t want him taking on more debt, so we gave him my vibrant and beloved blue Fiat, the blueberry, my go-cart, my rattling tin can, to use until he finishes college. I miss the wild racket of that car, but I love the way my mom car sails like a fucking ship.
Behind the wheel, I am recording voice memos. Sending spontaneous words to the people in my life in lieu of the letters and emails and long texts that I used to write. My earnest words of checking in and thinking of you are punctuated with observational road rage and trailing attempts to rekindle a lost thought.
I am side-eyeing the two apples withering on a shelf in my new office, and I wonder if they are also wondering if the problem is them or me.
I am delayed in understanding what it means to recognize what your body needs. Your mind, too.
I am hauling a backpack, lunchbox, travel coffee mug, and water bottle. Most days, most places. It might be the act I hate the most: hauling stuff on my person. Like I’m a coatrack or pegboard. U-Haul or one of those upright wire laundry baskets on wheels that I used for the laundromat years ago. My body is the hauler now. My body is the apparatus that carries the day.
I am showing up to physical therapy and going about my business—a memorized series of exercises—among a motley crew of injured humans doing the same, privately but in public. When the physical therapist approaches me after forty-five minutes to assess all that I’ve already done, we both know he’s about to call it a day, but the consideration is performed nonetheless, and I am proud of having earned it.
In a night class, my adult student offers a keen observation from our shared reading, and before I can catch myself, I am heartily congratulating, “Good job!” I apologize for the knee-jerk, patronizing response, but they tell me, “I don’t care. I like being told when I do a good job.”
I am closing the door to my new office and loving the click of privacy and space, four walls, a skylight. Putting headphones on to block out the noise of office neighbors. I am playing random records that I thrifted for this very purpose of drowning in privacy. Orchestral. Gershwin, because I thought, If not now, when? The needle runs through grooves decades older than I am. The static is gentle, sticky, a current beneath the music.
I am misting delicious ramen broth across my keyboard with every dripping bite. I don’t care.
I am scrawling handwritten rewrites on a story draft, the pages a wreck of new vision. I am even more in love with the story than before. I am at the place where I think I know so clearly what I’m writing toward that it rings in me like a bell.
I am inordinately proud and braggy about being able to do one-legged squats. I keep doing them, making sure what’s learned hasn’t been forgotten. I do the squats while I’m brushing my teeth. While I’m blowing my hair dry. I pause before crawling into bed, stand on one leg and do the squat, and my husband—who cannot do a one-legged squat—looks up from his book and gives me a fake-exasperated, “Okay, okay.”
I am writing my way through the writing classes I am teaching. I write when they write. Did you know you could do this? Did you know you could discover time for yourself in this way?
I am appreciating the scratch and tap of a roomful of silent thoughts being transferred to the page.
Sometimes I am letting my thoughts drift as people speak to me. I am coming back to them before they’ve stopped talking. I am hearing them, delayed, but hearing them. Insisting I’ve heard them.
I am considering the ache in my right heel upon waking and again at the end of the day, this new thing making itself known. This same body, suddenly new all the time, happening to me all the time.
I am letting the lawn grow and grow. Well over a foot of wispy weeds in some places, before I take out the mower. Sweaty after only a few rows shorn, but so much satisfaction as the electric mower churns through the considerable overgrowth. Afterward—every time—I am sodden and parched and relieved, the accomplishment a clean slate. We get so few clean slates.
I listen in awe of my undergraduates when they return to class after going on experimental field trips—an assignment where I tasked them with exploring outside their frame of reference or personal interest. Smiles and appreciative tones as they explain their efforts, then the quiet declaration of one student: “I learned to ride a bike.” The class applauds.
I am dreading the six steps I have to complete at the end of the night between crossing the threshold of my bedroom and actually crawling into bed: pajamas, bathroom, face, teeth, hair, water glass. Beholden to both the checklist and the dread of it.
I am turning red and warm as I introduce myself to the staff at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, as the writer-in-residence taking up office space for a year. At the end of my intro of myself and my writing, I throw in the highly personal aside that my husband and I are seeking to match with an expectant mother and become adoptive parents. “Telling people is a vulnerable thing,” I say, as I’ve said many times to many people at this point, because it is not an act or a line, but a fact. I am sharing so you know to think of us if you cross paths with someone who can help, who themselves is looking for adoptive parents for their unborn child, who knows someone who is.
I am thinking about going home. Generally speaking, I am always ready to head home for the day.
I am leaning into the safe, soft, evening routine of my husband and I on perpendicular couches, of sometimes pizza and often a weak scoop of ice cream for dessert. Of a sitcom. Of pressing pause to share unrelated random thoughts, the day’s pent-up observations loosening in the night hours. When our baby comes, will we look back at these hours as the waiting time? The before?
I am fighting increasingly heavy blinks at 9:45pm while I watch home tours online. Breaking the rule of no phone in bed for a couple of months now.
I am thinking about the person I have been, all the people, the person I thought I’d be by now, and these ideas are sand. I cannot hold them anymore. I filter down, all the way, incredulous at how my younger selves never had any inkling of the future, though they thought about it constantly: when I grow up, when I graduate high school and move away, when I get to that city I’ve been dreaming of, when I find a better day job, when I publish a book, when I find someone to love again, when I go back to school and finally finish, when I walk away from the remnants of old losses, when I accept the unexpected, when I move in and marry and have a baby, when I stop feeling behind, when I never catch up, I never will, it’s propulsive and endless, the seeking and what’s sought, the way growing past certain dreams is another way of saying I was alive, am still alive.
Love these words so much ❤️
Beautiful!