And the Moon Rose Over an Open Field

 

Me in Florida, 2011

I write words for a living.

No, I'm not a writer, as much as 14-year-old me wanted to believe that I could be. Wanted to publish a fantasy novel, one that, had I published it at 14 or at 20, would have followed me as a flaming embarrassment for the rest of my life. I think that would have been okay, but I kind of like what happened better. That I learned to write for myself. That I spent years writing about Tolkien quotes and solo trips, and occasionally my inner thoughts and once about an aardvark (because I'd committed to writing every day and I had nothing to say), and about love (sort of) and finding myself (sort of) and a bunch of environmental posts that I spent way too long researching, the posts that took me five hours and ten people read, the ones that took me five minutes and got thousands of hits. People still read my instructions for riding a Greyhound bus, and sometimes I still miss riding a Greyhound bus, and sometimes I still think about the Greyhound ride to Florida where I stayed up all night and the nervous businessman sat next to me, the one who was supposed to be on an airplane but an ice storm had grounded the flight and his company switched him to the bus instead, and he bribed me with trail mix to sit next to him because he was terrified of riding the bus and he thought I didn't look like a serial killer, and he asked if I liked the music of Sade and gave me his headphones and I listened to her while looking out the dark window. And now every time I listen to Simon and Garfunkel's "America" and the line says, "And the moon rose over an open field," I burst into tears because I think of the moon on the everglades through the Greyhound bus window.

Where was I? That's right, with the words.

There are words I get paid to write. Words like, "This is two sentences strung together with a comma, called a run-on. You can fix a run-on by replacing the comma with a dash or period," and "Hello Daniel, just checking in to see when you're planning to submit your paper this week. Please let me know as soon as possible, thanks!", and "This is a really intriguing statement, but I encourage you to dig deeper. Why do you think people react this way? What do you think is going through someone's mind when they act this way? What kind of perspective might lead them there?", and "This paragraph is such a big improvement! I can tell you worked hard on clarifying your ideas and adding detail." I'm teaching students how to write, and by that, I mean that I'm trying to teach them how to think. 

I don't care about grammar (although I still correct it). I can't name off verb tenses or explain why the subjunctive participle blahblahblah or whatever is wrong. I'm here to teach my students how to write. Yes, that means the occasional lecture about singular/plural agreement and sentence fragments, but mostly I want to shake them gently on the shoulder and say, "You need to wake up. Look at the world. Actually look at it. Pay attention. Dig into it. Revel in it. Be hurt by it. Dig into that hurt. This is important."

Sometimes the only words I can muster are the words I get paid for. The other words, the words I want to write, roll around in my head and distract me and look grand and beautiful in that fantasy world in my head where I actually write all that I want to write, and it's perfect, and it's beautiful, and it makes people cry the way Simon and Garfunkel make me cry because the words— moon, rose, open field— draw out those memories, those moments of life, that are so hard to capture with words and create the ache that makes remembering so sweet and so difficult.

Lately, my body feels like crying a lot. It feels the tension, the pain, the uncertainty, the monotony. Anxiety runs in the background like tinnitus, and I find myself, as Hemingway's character in "A Day's Wait" "[crying] easily at the little things that were of no importance."

(I might've been able to visit Hemingway's home when I was in Florida, but that was a long trip down to Key West and I volunteered to cover for my co-volunteer Charlotte so she could go instead, and she brought me back pictures and told me about the descendants of Hemingway's six-toed cats who ran around everywhere.)

I don't remember what normal is anymore, but I don't think anyone does. What was normal, anyway? I fought a battle against normal, then embraced it, then rejected it, then embraced it again. I stopped defining myself by how crazy I was, but now I have ten-foot-tall popcorn plants growing in my front yard, and I wonder what normal means and if anyone cares during a pandemic. I will have pumpkins to share soon. The zinnias are blooming, a hedge of zinnias. They are three feet tall and two feet thick, shielding the street from my disasterpiece of a yard, thick with crab grass and carrots and borage and peanuts and sweet potatoes and hardy fig and collards and basil (Thai and Genovese) and garlic and oregano and thyme and whatever else the heck self-seeded. I haven't worked in the garden at all. God waters my garden, and tends it, and makes everything grow. Sometimes I halfheartedly pull some weeds but mostly I'm inside numbing myself with Instagram, and still the garden grows, and still I pick foot-and-a-half-long cucumbers from the vines out front and still the hummingbirds come and visit and pollinate and buzz. There is a squirrel living in our soffit. I can't muster the energy to care. I'm just glad a living creature has found a home and is happy. Sometimes the squirrel sits on the railing outside my bedroom window and very loudly chews on black walnuts while I'm trying to pray. I look at his elongated face, the large eyes that remind me of a little green alien. God expresses something of God's self in a squirrel, which is unnerving to think about and yet somehow a relief. Squirrels must be squirrels, and so they eat nuts. I am Lisa, a human. What am I supposed to be doing?

(I remember walking down an asphalt bike trail at evening, with bland Florida City spreading out around me. I'd met a boy at the hostel, and he'd wanted to make out, and I didn't want to, and so we said goodbye, and I felt bummed about it, but I didn't want to kiss someone if I wasn't going to marry him, and I wondered what life would be like if I didn't feel that way. I was listening to DC Talk, because I was 21 and that's who I listened to, and I watched the pale pink sunset and listened to love songs written to God, swallowed up in Michael Tait's voice, thinking about being in love with God instead of boys who wanted to make out with a stranger at a hostel. I began walking fast, and then skipping, because when I was a little girl I'd skip when I was excited, and I began laughing aloud. The sunset enveloped me, the cool evening air rushing against my skin. I felt alive.)

I feel numb. I feel numb and if I don't feel numb I work very hard to achieve the feeling of numbness. The Internet is great for this, although if you're not careful you'll end up finding that it actually makes you less numb and tears you open and you learn things and you end up crying. I follow activist accounts and learn about racial equity in the food system and about everyday ableist language to change and about the model minority myth. I read a lot, downloading books from the library onto my Kindle. I gobble up the words, rampaging through the new knowledge, learning this as I learn anything else: through devouring words and hoping that some of them stick. 

(The hostel I volunteered at had a little treehouse, woven of ropes in the branches of a strangler fig. I laid on the rope bed and read Well at the World's End, in fits and starts. But the longer I was at the hostel, the less I felt like reading. I wanted to sit around the bonfire at night and talk with the guests— mostly Germans, always Germans. I wanted to introduce Europeans to toasted marshmallows and watch how they freaked out when they saw how sticky and sweet they were. I wanted to watch the moon through the trees, first waning, then waxing. I felt time passing in my bones, seeing the moon each night. I knew my time here was limited, and that soon I'd be going home, to reality.)

What is reality? What is time? What is normal? These are the things I keep thinking about, without any real motivation to find the answers. I don't have the words. All my words are being used for the thing I get paid to do, the thing where I try to teach young teenagers how to use their words to describe, unpack, analyze, and argue. All that's left for myself these days is fever-dream images, and far-off memories of my life, and I count the hours until Zach gets home from work and I can make dinner and chop real vegetables and cook real rice and fry real eggs and have some sort of grounding in reality, and then we watch anime and then it's bedtime, and I feel a sense of relief having gotten through another day. I don't dread the mornings, not exactly, but I want the evenings to last forever.

Sometimes, the words come to me. They come to me in a mess, but that's okay. Words are a gift. Words are my life. I let them flow, and I watch them rise over an open field, and sometimes I begin to breathe again.

~~~