The space between breaking and remaking

Letters from the in-between

Photo by Balazs Busznyak on Unsplash

Hey friend, howaya?

I’ve been swimming in a strange, liminal space. (That word is overused, I realize.)

It’s the last week of school, and because my children thrive on routine and don’t get along, I’m unsure if I should be excited or terrified. Also, it’s spring, that season teetering between light and dark.

Recently, I listened to an episode from the Ezra Klein podcast titled “Is Trump losing? A debate.” But it might as well have been called “What timeline are we on?” As in, the timeline that steers to competitive authoritarianism or that grips the yoke and pulls up before the plane hits the mountain, a.k.a. every Hollywood action movie.

I feel like I’m in the part where things could go either way. The pivotal moment that will determine future history books. Like the pandemic pre-vaccine, unsure if my Swiss cheese lungs would render me another statistic.

I, for one, will not sink hopes. I spent too long at the bottom of the ocean.

Having only recently surfaced, now I float. Untethered, gravity-less. Not entirely dry either. More like treading water between hope and fear.

I dream of flowers and my sister calling me out for not being feminist enough because I enjoy “living upstairs from a flower shop.” Maybe because flowers are weak, serving only beauty.

Fleeting, like joy. Neither fire nor water. Flowers do not shatter or remake civilizations.

In reality, I’ve been filling my home with them. I’ve spent long enough breaking and remaking.

I am tired. I want easy, pretty, and normalcy. I don’t want ghosts of past and future. I want complacency and cowardice. I want to be awake and delusional. I want someone else to sing and hold the note so I can take a breath.

Photo by Zoe Richardson on Unsplash

The thing about hardship: when it occurs for a long time, you wonder if perhaps you don’t deserve the flowers. The darkness becomes its own comfort, a home. You turn away from all things light, bright, and colorful because they don’t reflect your truth.

You see other people with their flowers and friends and their joy; flesh loved by the sun, worth loving. Not like yours that burns like your lungs, exiling you to the shadows.

There must be a reason, you think. Maybe the sun is not for people like you. And by extension, for your children.

The bottom of the ocean becomes your home until you see your children existing in their own abyss, and you realize I have to surface for them.

One day, you decide you are no longer going to live in that space. You tell your therapist you’re going to surface, where it’s easy and you can ignore the monsters lurking in the deep. Even though that means your country might slide into competitive authoritarianism and your son might eventually fight another man’s war. But there is only now, and your children deserve to breathe.

So you’re going to fill your home with flowers and music — well, maybe not music, because your daughter hates music and screams for you to turn it off. But still, you swim to the surface, to the light, to save your kids, if not yourself.

You don’t judge yourself for floating on the surface, where it’s easy and complacent and cowardly. You don’t judge yourself; you are saving your children.

Float. Tread water. Feel the water on the skin.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

In water, there is neither scarcity nor abundance. No searching for the podcast that will give all the answers. No questions. No children screaming. No starving babies.

This is how democracies crumble.

And yet. I’m swimming with ease. Lightness.

Now I get off the computer when they come into the room. We laugh. Cook dessert. Play music if my daughter isn’t around. Sit on the couch in the sun. Trade massages. My son does this ASMR thing that makes me laugh and feel all tickly. Walk in the woods. Cuddle the puppy. Liquid sunshine on a Southeast Alaskan day.

And you, friend? Where on the soil do you find yourself? Digging, planting, blooming, burrowing?

Wherever you are, I see you.

In the not-knowing.

In the in-between.

In the flux.

Drop a line. Xo.

~Summer