39. I love being places with people

Field notes on truth, goodness, and beauty

Dearest inbox intimates, 

Thank you for your patience with this missive, which is as much a recap of the month of May as it is a vibe check for the first part of June. 

I am settling into summer, or something like a summer. The transition into this season makes my ears pop. The kind of vertigo that comes from hitting cruising altitude. The slick silence after much ascension. It can easily be mistaken for stagnancy. Going very fast sometimes can feel like standing still. 

This morning, I woke up with the desire to rearrange my furniture. A beautiful prerogative that should always be attended to. 

Today is St. Anthony Day in Portugal. St. Anthony of Padua, saint of lost things and reconciled lovers. 

The past week has been marked with loss, live music, dense throngs of people, the smell of smoked sardines and chouriço. 

In recent years I’ve felt myself returning, full circle, to an ambivalent folk Catholicism. I am trying to practice devotion to the mundane, the small, and the secret.  The good, the true, the beautiful. Here are some field notes— small vignettes towards each pillar. I hope you have a lovely June, and I hope everything lost comes back to you, transformed. <3 

the good

Give me the poetics of loss– what you bring to the altar of you when there is nothing left but void. The letters I wrote might as well have been prayers because of their absent referent. But prayers can meet you where you stand. They can sometimes even talk back. They can ripen. Can be revisited. 

I knit meaning from signs, symbols. But these signs and symbols were not pointing to any variety of “meant” to be, but rather a laugh from the universe in my direction. What do you make of a half-life, an afterlife? I can't help but be a poet, even when it’s inconvenient.  

The “you” I addressed was inconsequential. “You” could have been anyone. Anyone who has read and been moved by many of the same things as I have. The signs are my own affinities reflecting and revealing themselves– the tide of the cosmos spitting my own subconscious back to me. Laying sediment at my feet. Shells to be collected or tossed back. Each sign is only significant as the attention it is given. My rippling heart, as constant and chaotic as the sea, my own discipline. 

the true

I missed the meteor (that even the ducks saw!). When it happened, I was under another kind of sky. Well into my luteal phase and two drinks deep I was indoors swaying to electronic music when the meteor made its appearance. I opened my phone notes to write “I love being places with people,” perhaps at the moment it was visible. This kind of prosocial feeling is very uncommon during the 7-14 days before my period. Usually, I want to hide and am beleaguered by intense paranoia.  

The wordless catharsis of live music helps. I made a note to remember this for the next time despair encroaches. 

I am 0/3 in terms of natural phenomena this year. Wrong hemisphere for the eclipse. A little too south for the northern lights. Indoors when the meteor lit up the night sky. 

I need a patron saint who is a heat sink. A guardian who can take away my ideation without using words. 

Speak to me in signs. 

the beautiful 

This beautiful season. 

This wonderful season of salt and electricity and meat and mouthfuls of wine. 

~

Creative things: 

• I’m working on a novella! I will be posting some tiny excerpts over on my paid tier. <3 If you’d like to follow along. 

• I have a poem forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine in a couple of days! Excited to share with all of you. 

• I participated in Feira do Livro thanks to dear collaborator in translation and poetry, Ana Claudia. It was a joy to read a poem of mine from the anthology Fábrica de Novas Almas alongside other contributors!

• In honor of St. Anthony, here is a poem of mine published last year in Scrawl Place, inspired by Miradouro de Santa Catarina. Grateful for all the things that have come back to me even when I am scattered or neglectful.

lots of love. x