april, again

how many feints does it take to write a newsletter? the world may never know. i am almost done being sick from being crazy run down and over a major work thing and who knows what is possible. that said, this is probably the eye of the fever dream hurricane from last week, so ymmv. april almost gone!

I got so sick this month that I didn’t really know what hit me. A shame, because around this time last week I had scritched up what I sort of liked as the concept of a newsletter and finally felt like writing one, but on the otherside, with this window of painkillers and five days of something, it’s not what I want either. I was getting somewhere, maybe, trying to write about what it was like when I went to Oaxaca earlier this year. I still must want that to stay close to the chest, though, because that’s not this.

Mostly I just haven’t felt up to very much and certainly not very much writing, in this vein of personal reflection, or whatever. I’m tired of myself most days and I just don’t know if I’m the vessel with which I distill, you know, fucking everything that just keeps happening. Even that makes me vaguely furious. I’m not really distilling shit, and who cares. I’d like to find my way back to writing as the instrument you just do, but I think I’m not alone nor crazy when I say that whatever else The Internet has done in the past decade or so, it has curdled so much of what once felt to me this very earnest and open-eyed way of reading, engaging, finding things. I find myself frustrated that I start to read things and can’t finish them. There’s no way to go back to interacting with the world I used to, because of The Internet, and if I think about it too much I start to lose my mind. (Yes, I certainly DID just finish the Sam Altman/Open AI is a balrog that needs to be sent to fucking hell article.)

I fear I do some version of this each time, but it’s been a few months without a newsletter, and despite of everything, I mean, we went to the damn Moon!³ The weather snapped, sort of, out of bitter cold and wind. Sprung. It’s better to be sick because I’m sure I’d be sneezing everywhere, all the trees blown out and peaked. All the rivers are so high and I carefully follow the water district’s instructions to knock it the fuck off, could you? Currently stuck on sponge cities. Being sick and last minute train commutes finally helped me catch up, slightly, on The New Yorker.

April felt as good a time as any to tell myself it was okay to write one of these. It’s one of those months that unlocks a million doors for me. I wrote it down better once than I will now, and my apologies for repeating it:

Something startling happened which was that I had playing on my phone a specific playlist that’s called Sprung, which I pull out around April, generally. Part of my brain thought about the song Tidal pulled out (You Could Make a Killing by Aimee Mann, made famous by the Cruel Intentions soundtrack, made famous via limewire in my college dorm), and admired my past self’s taste. Except that’s where I remembered I did not discover that particular song until college, and had somehow invented a world in which I could’ve made this playlist in the world I was patiently copying library CDs or waiting until someone made me copies of things.

Which is why this playlist is April, and I made it when I was 25, trying to remember what being 18 felt like, and where I guess right now those numbers are now so spread out they feel arbitrary. It was the playlist I pulled together about the time I scritched that down in some notebook somewhere and then saved it onto the internet somewhere else.

What is on the playlist? Quite a bit of Elton John (“Daniel” - I’m not going to make you click through all of these, Christ.) A lot of Modest Mouse (“Custom Concern”, basically all of The Moon and Antarctica which blew my mind when a burned copy ended up in my hands). Al Green’s “Love and Happiness”. Some Snow Patrol. The Grateful Dead, because they have some good songs, okay? Whatever pride I had at younger Carmen evaporates when any Guster song shows up. I remember that 25 year old me remembered 17 year old me had a thing for about five of their songs, but I don’t have that thing anymore, I don’t think. I think a girl named Avery I had my first-ever “Are we flirting? Are we friends?”¹ thing with really liked them - why she liked them, I won’t know. I’m going to assume a 2004-era boyfriend with a hemp choker. But then some Santo and Johnny flows through followed by excerpts from Air’s “The Virgin Suicides” soundtrack (very good!) and I’m reimpressed with myself.

There is a surprising amount of Chicago (come on) and Bob Dylan which comes from the fact I had a lot of hand me down records when I was younger, and then Nick Drake because he came along with one of those Modest Mouse CDs, because everyone found indie rock on car commercials, then.² Then Cake shows up (“End of the Movie”) and I’m back in my car trying to make the best of what is an impossible situation and twenty years later what I can tell you is the deep seated protective and helpless ache in you never actually goes away.

April had me thinking about writing a lot of things, because April is almost always California, and when Google did that thing where it shows you the past, so many things of the springs before felt farther away this year. As someone using the flimsy excuse of writing as a way to huff nostalgia forever, I can tell you that realization is abrupt. There’s some points of the age you shift into: you start to feel pretty sure about some things, and so hope and optimism is scary and vulnerable and tenuous, the fool’s journey that seems so specific to you but if we believe it all of this time around resets as we circle our world’s and our fortunes. April was the month my Grandma was born, the day before the Oklahoma City Bombing, which feels like we lived in another country, then.

April is shot through with grief as some formative experience (ghosts inside you and like that you keep them alive) and so on the playlist shows up Iron and Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” which I listened to over and over again after everyone called me from the funeral that year. Then again, it switches into some other Iron and Wine song because the band launched a thousand fraught, indie relationships. I thought about putting some of that very old writing here but I couldn’t bear cracking it open, right now. My house is in some version of everything must go! and I know exactly where the hard copies of that work is, but the worst part is that this newsletter is truly just for me, and I really loved what young kid me used to write, and it’s probably the truest thing about those times, and yet. We’ve done too much damage.

Still April is National Poetry Month and too much of it has gone by with not enough poetry. I can work on that. I suppose in that vein I’ll leave some of what I made in April many years ago of mine, and you can skip right on through to the end if you want.

from april 2007

This was it. They railed and no earth split open for them, the earth does not split open for us. No one hears. And here, here I am, not weeping, braiding my hair a million miles away, la madre, needing to fill pans with loaves, bandage foreheads, brew coffee, lay them down to sleep. They are so far away, poisoning, screaming, clinging to each other as boys do, in hidden moments. Me, mother to so many broken brothers, sister with a thousand skinny boys on horseback, full of arrows, ready to save me from the castle. But mostly not a girl, mostly a mother with many arms and ears that never end and wrapped in cloth to stitch and patch and close.

What is this? What are these blue cold children? Our parents do not understand, do not understand how we can flay each other to bits. I have no answers. As though it is not enough that we are destroying each other and trying to burst up as the world destroys us but we destroy ourselves. We let these black hot ruined rivers into our veins and swollen blistering atmosphere into our lungs, we march into deserts and empty cities and kill and are killed, poison our livers, scorch our throats, our skin is ruined from too much sun and too much asphalt. So what now? Now we tear our arms and legs and chests with pins and needles, matches, glass, knives, thumbtacks, razor blades. An entire generation, a children of self-inflicted walking wounded. Skin, split bones. Someday we will be ancient crisscrossed geographies of hurts that started somewhere we don’t know how to explain. Maybe at the birth of big fiery wars. Maybe when your father’s grandfather beat everyone with a magnolia switch and on fire from grain alcohol. Maybe when your grandmother saw the faces of her brothers hanging from trees in the fields. When your mother miscarried. On and on. The body can’t take it. We will say to our children, our friends and comrades, our brothers and sisters went under, drowned and hanged and lost and hazed, and we bled for them.

-

“This one?” I ask. I love my blue boy’s body, a verdant map.

“When the boy had a seizure. When the boy died.” It was a kid at camp, epileptic in the lake. He brought the boy in from the waves, blew life into him. The flesh is brown, a thick triangle on his ribcage. He would lie on the roof of the lifeguard tower and hack with a fishhook.

“And here?” Thin line around his wrists, whitish, like thread. That is why he went to the hospital, like the names that don’t fit in my hands, boys and girls stuck in gray rooms to save them from themselves.

“What was it like?” I ask him. He is naked and lying in the light from the Damen L station. His skin is blue, his eyes are far off. I curl into his side and stroke from ear to jawbone. Later I will fuck him again. I already have once.

His roommate in the hospital was a dick, like we all were. Quiet, but not really quiet, the shifting of a locked hospital wing, pumping fluids, restraints, tan nurse shoes. For years he couldn’t remember it. What happened before it. Talking and emaciated girls. Shitty food, powdered lemonade. He hadn’t enough underwear. His bed was closest to the window.

It was worse at night, he said. Some people crying and scared but most kids just quiet and not sleeping. No one slept.

My fingers climb his ribs. Let my breath collect in the cup of his neck and shoulder. I need to understand girls who refuse food and must survive on clear liquid in tubes, my brother on a payphone, shuffling in the halls. His voice was always caught somewhere, like I was listening to him through a shell. Sometimes I dream I’m running across endless beaches, gathering my shelled boys and girls, curled in conch spirals, bones rattling against the pink salt porcelain.

-

These kinds of things must happen often. On and on through the years. All connected like crazy sprockets moving together, sparking, war, love, death, murder, survival. My part is pretty simply the same. They all are. Only no seven brothers on horseback, siren sisters with soprano warnings, flashes of crescent curved swords. Only me, a house, a brother, a key, and seven doors.

Thanks for reading that, if you did, and nineteen year old me appreciates it too. Here I am many years down the line from those Aprils, and the Aprils of remembering. If you’d have told me there was a fan fiction trope about scars, I would’ve just told you that’s called being very young. There is something about the ouroboros of experience in there that will make me very, very sad if I think about it too much.

Here’s your poem and how the Sprung playlist shuffled itself to its end. Both are good. I’ll try harder next time. I have good reasons this time.

An Epilogue
John Masefield

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

1  ^{Never fear, I didn’t clock this dynamic until WAY too late, nor how I profit from it. In any case it was the same weeks I finally had my first bisexual punch in the card, and it was really quite sweet.}

2  ^{You know what I’m talking about.}

3  ^{It got me and I’m staring at my copy of The Right Stuff as I write this.}