clouds
It's early, rainy, and I'm on someone's couch-bed again. I went to bed late last night and would benefit from some extra zzzs but I'm too restless and excited to snuggle back in! So here I am, three months after the Watson has officially ended, and somehow, magically, on the road again.
Watching clouds from the plane I was overwhelmed by a familiar sense of reflection and struck by how different it felt in this new context. Clouds, man: how can something look so tangible and touchable and actually be just a burst of formless mistiness you can pass right through and never hold in your hands? Is this also the nature of experience? Is all that has happened to me “real?” These days it looks real and delicious from a close distance but seems to pass through me when I go to touch it.
Last year arriving to a place (usually by bus or train although sometimes by plane) was heavy, brilliant, bursting with uncertainty. What would I encounter there? How long would I stay? Who would I meet and how would they shape me and influence my journey? In some cases I wasn't even sure where I would sleep the next day. Time felt so expansive – a year felt utterly endless. And in so many ways, it kind of was. When each day holds that much possibility for uncertainty and change, it feels bigger and longer than one day. Coming and going, I would think about the people I was leaving behind and my goodbyes would fold into all the previous goodbyes and I would feel the weight of loving so many people and not knowing when I'd see them again and having no idea what I was becoming.
Watching Vancouver come into sight, I felt some heaviness but it was of a totally different nature. I thought about losing the key to the trailer I'm living in, hoping I can find it when I get back in two weeks. I thought about how I forgot to fill out my time card at work, and where did my last paycheck go anyway, and how I really should have emailed my boss before leaving. I thought about my papa and chatting with him before I left as he fell asleep and wishing I had spent more time with my grandparents recently, about my parents and how kind and patient they were in the morning as I was scrambling to leave. They made me scrambled eggs and offered me coffee and when I forgot the snacks I had packed for the road they turned the car around and my dad ran back into the house to get them. I felt tenderness, sadness, stress.
Coming in to land, I also felt freaking ALIVE AND EXCITED – alternately stressing about everything I left behind and holding myself back from a high-energy victory-dance in the aisle of the airplane about everything I am going to– because I am arriving in Vancouver to spend two weeks working and clowning with my friend and there is no other way I would rather spend two weeks.
The specificity that my life has acquired in three short months feels totally bizarre: I know fairly specifically what my weeks look like until February. That is un.real. And even after that, I have a few regular commitments in place. Commitments! That readjustment is strange and difficult. On the one hand, it's so helpful and affirming. I am so glad I committed to these two weeks of clown back when I was still on the Watson because I don't know that I would have been brave enough otherwise but now I'm here and thrilled. I just committed to building puppets for my friend's music video. But when it comes to these other commitments, gosh I am struggling: registering my car and scheduling doctors appointments and calling people back and having clean clothes and filling out my time card and making sure I get paid and fixing my headlights and being a responsible grown-up... how do I even …?
Another strange thing is that somehow in the midst of all this brain-swirling chaos and significant anxiety, I manage to get things done now and then. 175 copies of The Coping Calendar are on their way to beloved humans all over the world right now. But even something as seemingly tangible as that feels ephemeral when I go to claim it: it couldn't have been * me * that did that! Maybe it was some alter-ego of me that came in to pull shit together while I was asleep or panicking. I feel entirely detached from it.
I feel similarly about my Watson year. It does not seem possible that the little human finding her way through the world all year was me. Even looking at pictures, I struggle to believe them. Who is that?!
It's strange and a little bit eerie. It helps, though, to open my inbox every few weeks and see a sweet little note from someone I met last year, flinging me back into that huge wave of tenderness. It helps to find myself making choices I never could have made before. To find myself, for example, on someone's couch in Vancouver listening to the rain with a feeling of goodness and anticipation. The ghostly strings of experience tugging me forward into whatever I'm becoming next. Even if I don't quite believe them.
