fermata

When you come across a fermata on a score, you are supposed to pause. There is supposed to be silence, or when you play piano, the dissipation of the last notes, the damper up, that small creak. There’s no guidance on when to start again.

I told a friend the other day, the meaning of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.

So despite me thinking it is wildly maudlin and awful and self-absorbed, I know if I make a claim to it, I will live by it. Over the past years I did this newsletter, I’d pause for long stretches, because I always wanted to come back. I’d tried to hit a cadence, lately. But when words fail you, it is the most painful thing.

Three years ago I got some news about a writing opportunity I desperately wanted. I called someone, abjectly sobbing. I just want to quit. They gently said, if the thing is this painful, you can quit.

T. told me once that if I ever got into an MFA, not to let them take what I made beautiful away from me. You can try and try, and it will still be taken from you. If I had known the magic spell to stave off everything that tied notions of success to writing, if I could get back the scarce when it is right, when it is good, when it is me, I would do anything.

I do not know why social media feels so bad. I do not know how to keep paying to get rejections like your prose is very convoluted and hard to parse. The grammatical mis-steps, jumps from idea to idea, switching POV, and confusing phrasing make clarity almost impossible to find when really, “no” suffices. My batting average is .003. The rejections, on many fronts, aren’t worth it.

All of which is to say: I’m quitting this newsletter, for now, forever, I don’t know. To make things was good, and then to have made them because audience or growth or presence, I don’t know. I’m sorry if you just signed up and you have no idea how much I appreciate it. You can read the archive, and it matters to me.

Maybe it will be something good, again, someday. For now: I am done here. Maybe I am simply done. Maybe not. But I kept trying to hold onto something, and I am bitter and tired.

it tastes like dirt and smells like metal, this feeling of not being known. 

there are worse things than waiting to be seen.*

There are. So see you sometime. This is done now, out of my head. Thank you, very sincerely, anyway. Here’s a song that has been good forever:

_{but as of late has been on repeat bc of the scene that lives rent free in my head from FAM S:1. so guess I better finish it}

*didn’t write this and wish I could remember who did!