before i get started i would like to bring the jury’s attention to a new feature added to my newsletter (debuting a new name alert) for this month, the “did a boy make rachel sad this month?” counter:
Yes.
moving on.
february as a whole was an introspective-ass month. i think it’s my second-least favourite month (second of course to november.) but february feels more insidious because it’s past the new year’s hump so it feels like things are getting better. you’re inching closer and closer to spring — our favourite season here at shitstorm proof — days are warmer and longer and brighter and then? bam. record-setting snowfall.
this february went by fast but also slow. it felt like i blinked and it was february 15th but then the rest of the month dragged on. maybe because of how much i have on the docket for march so i was pre-stressing.
note to self: re-add live in the moment to my to-do list.
for starters, mankind once again let me down. after a promising picnic and a sparkle in both our eyes — mine literal, his the reflection (which is its own metaphor i could wax poetic on for paragraphs but i’ll save that for another essay for another time) of mine — i got, say it with me: GHOSTED.
whatever.
despite trying to shed it over and over, i romanticize the notion of being a starving artist. of the grind and the slog and the drudgery and all subsequent synonyms herein. but sometimes, a girl needs a hug and a day off.
and it sucks because words are my security blanket but they’re also my passion and i, um, am hoping planning to monetize them one day. so writing is an escape but it’s also a reminder and return to all my problems. but none of my problems are really that bad. oh the bus is late. oh i stepped in a puddle. oh i forgot my tea in the microwave where i was heating it up after already forgetting it once. oh well. i guess the beauty of writing is when i remember before it’s for anyone else, it’s for myself. fuck man. we love to overcomplicate life, don’t we? sorry i didn’t mean to implicate you, dear reader. *i* love to overcomplicate life.
…
i’m trying to embrace spontaneity more. i’ve never not been a spontaneous person but recently life has been so busy i have found myself literally scheduling things to the minute. meticulously entering addresses into google maps, doing mental math as to whether i can physically be in two places at once when they are a 40-minute bus ride apart. my answer always lands on, well maybe. if the one thing ends early and the other starts late and no one else gets on the bus so it doesn’t have to make a single stop until mine, then i could feasibly make both. one night in february i went to see the play the wolves at ubc and ended up sleeping over at my friend’s house who lives near ubc. i didn’t freak out about the 17 things i had to do the next day. i had to sleep regardless. who cares if it was in my bed or my friend’s lazyboy. that’s what your twenties and yoga is for, right? sometimes i think i try too hard to be spontaneous. i walk by a series of coffee shops, trying to open my heart and mind to some secret compulsion from the right one, beckoning me inside where i will fall in love with the barista as i order my london fog with regular milk haha no i know i’m like the only person in this city i’ll say, despite the fact that i have used this line before. i’ll playfully say hmmm should i do a croissant? let’s do it. let’s be little crazy today. he’ll be charmed. i’ll ask the wifi password before hunkering down and then a healthy amount of time later so it doesn’t seem like i planned it, i’ll run up and ask for the bathroom key that’s attached to some fun but strange item so no one steals it. what use would a random cafe’s bathroom key be out in the wild streets of downtown vancouver, anyway? but that’s not important to this imagined meetcute. i’m the last one there at 4:30 which is when cafes seem to close which makes no sense to me. he walks over and i am so intensely consumed by my Work that i don’t notice him until he taps my shoulder, careful not to do so in a creepy way. i jump nonetheless because i startle easily because my older brother liked to scare me as a child and some wounds never heal. he tells me they’re technically closed, but not to rush. i look around and realize i’m the only one left because as you’ll recall i was so intensely consumed by my Work the world around me fell away. oh my god i don’t want to be a pain! i say as a hurriedly pack my stuff. no really, no rush at all. here, let me top up your tea. and here — take a croissant for the road. i look up, enchanted, like the taylor swift song. are you sure? yeah he says, today is a day for being a little crazy, right? the rest, as they say is history. but when you write those stories in your mind, you don’t exactly attract spontaneity. so i’m working on it.
…
i have lived 26 springs. and winters and summers and falls. but springs are my favourite. but i have only lived 26 of them. malcolm gladwell said it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. so by that logic i’m but a neophyte in my affections for spring. but affection and expertise are not the same. 26 beginnings. 26 cycles of days slowly getting longer. and really the days aren’t getting longer. the daylight is. synecdoche. or metonymy. i always get those two confused. on feb 10 i could feel spring. and again on feb 13. but then i overcompensated and underdressed and was absolutely freezing as i showed my friend scott around vancouver. we walked down davie toward the water and the wind practically blew me over several times. it was still beautiful. the friendship and the weather. scott is one of those people who i don’t talk to often, but when we see each other, we know each other all over again. his face is warmth.
every time i talk to someone who isn’t a local i remember how unique vancouver is, as they marvel at the natural landscape that surrounds us. the mountains and the sea are part of the dna of the city i call home. yeah it has the usual city sights and sounds and smells: nightclubs and garbage and the hockey rink full of ever-disappointed fans drunkenly spilling out of bars post-game. overpriced coffee and unaffordable housing and complicated social issues, or at least that’s the way we refer to them to diffuse their magnitude. it has all those stalwart city pillars. but it also has the magic of the mountains. the majesty of the pacific ocean. gateway to the world. but my world is here. at least for now.
i feel lonely a lot.
i pride myself on my independence and my hustle and my penchant for doing things alone but sometimes it wears on a person. i think the wounds of two years inside still have yet to heal.
i’ve been doing the artist’s way, which, for those unfamiliar is a sort of spiritual workbook to heal your inner artist. it sounds sort of cryptic and mystical because it is. embarking on the artist’s way is referred to by the author, julia cameron, as creative recovery. a lot of how i’ve been feeling this month is consistent with the weekly themes of the book. a little lost, a little overwhelmed. so i guess i’m doing it right. but maybe it’s wrong to think one can do something called creative recovery right. maybe that’s a sign i need to go back to chapter one. but hey it’s about the journey not the destination, right?
i’m afraid of dying.
i know that for sure.
i don’t like getting sick as an adult.
and not just in the i’m-more-aware-of-my-own-mortality kind of way.
although probably that too.
but in the oh-now-i-have-to-call-in-sick kind of way and it’s not just one job i’m calling in sick for it’s the 13 different meetings i was supposed to have that day that i now have to call or text or instagram dm 17 different people to make sure i’ve covered my bases before i have to make my own tea with lemon and wet my own cold compress and half-way through finally drifting to sleep i am jolted awake by the one email i forgot to send so i roll over and grab my phone because despite the experts’ urgings, i still sleep with my phone next to me and i send off a curtly written “i have fallen ill and won’t make it tonight. r” because signing off my emails with a single “r” makes me feel cool and poised and sophisticated. all things i am trying to be but don’t quite fall in the centre of the venn diagram of “girls who wear sparkles and quote when harry met sally on the daily.”
i have a complex when it comes to being forgotten.
i don’t deal with endings well as a result.
i like to know that i mattered to someone.
which really isn’t novel. or unique to me, even. and realizing how paralyzingly un-unique you are is pretty bleak.
but all we have is our own experience of the world. and all we can do is our best. and sometimes, i’ll be frank, our best is pretty shitty. but each day’s best is not created equal. for example i spent the last few days of february in bed with a bad head cold. i changed my clothes one day. i made myself the aforementioned tea. i wrote. i sent the emails i had to. i tidied my room. tidy is such a silly word. i rolled my coins. $30 in quarters. well-timed with my “you are approaching your credit limit” notification. yeah yeah yeah.
i have these two friends. well we were, at least. once upon a time. they were two of my best friends in the world. my people. my “ride or dies” to sound like the instagram caption of a bachelorette party in nashville. i find, for one reason or another, myself talking about them often on dates. not that i go on dates often. only sometimes. but who cares anyway. dating is not a crime. well, i guess it depends on who’s doing it but we’ve veered off course, as i am wont to do. but in the sometimes that i go on dates, these friends often come up. i talk about them with affection and regret. full of questions and few answers. the end of our friendship wasn’t a period but an ellipsis. and those are the hardest endings. no real goodbye. i’ve heard it said closure is a myth we tell ourselves. when my dad died it was sudden. it wasn’t a long, drawn-out cancer diagnosis with a clear deterioration where we got a “last good day.” but what’s better or worse? to know the end is coming and so it is prepared for and yet ever clouding the present? or to merely live and one day…it’s over.
these friends mattered to me. they matter to me still. our memories were real and beautiful and important. but my ego wants to know that i mattered to them too. that i matter to them still. that the memories i treasure they do too. that they remember the 45-minute conversations we’d have at the street corner halfway between our apartments before parting ways for the night. each time the crosswalk-sign changed remarking that we’d once again missed our window of opportunity to retreat to our respective homes. we’d natter on about who-knows-what. but that’s the magical stuff. when you can natter on about who-knows-what.
and so too in dating. with the boys to whom i tell the stories of my former best friends. with boys whose names would unfortunately make my mouth curl into a smile when i saw it light up my phone. the ones who i never really got to know. because they decided not to get to know me. i’m worth getting to know. and i know life is complicated because we complicate it and sometimes i have been the one who cared less and forgot to text back for two weeks and then sent a half-assed sorry, life got sooooo crazy. i don’t really have time for anything rn tbh, hope things are good with you! only to be meanwhile waiting for a different boy to text me back. we want what we can’t have. we want to be wanted. we want to be summers but we are toms. because summers don’t know they are summers, because they don’t care enough to notice.
sometimes we grow apart from people for a reason. sometimes things have run their course. it still hurts. sometimes things haven’t run a course at all. it still hurts. but what’s the alternative? walking through life a numb vessel, hardened and jaded and unwilling to connect or open themselves up to anything or anyone? or all of the potential for beautiful things to come? oh god i sound like that john green quote “it hurt because it mattered.” listen. the man had a point. i wouldn’t be sad about my friends if they didn’t matter. or the boys who told me they liked me and then never texted me again. or my dad dying. sometimes we can’t know why things ended. and i am still learning to be okay with that. because we can only ever live in our own heads. edward couldn’t even read bella’s mind.
i just want to be the princess of my own fairytale. i already wear the sparkles and the dresses.
in the meantime i’ll romanticize my nightly bus home (though march rachel would like the people to know that she got her learner’s permit. for the 6th time.) as best i can even though that’s probably where i caught the cold that knocked me out for february’s epilogue. i’ll survive. and march is the birthday of my favourite season. also that one boy that ghosted me. different boy. similar circumstances. but maybe that’s the lesson. there will be other boys. there will be other things. there will always something to look forward to. but we still have to live in the present. or else we might miss out on something so magical we couldn’t possibly have fathomed looking forward to it. but now it’s here. and it’s beautiful.
xoxo,
rach