tinyletter #003
It is 5:53 pm on the Friday after Christmas and I am walking through a plant nursery in -8 degree weather looking for a Frantoio olive tree. This is how I know I am still unwell.
I was not allowed to watch non-religious films when growing up. Fiddler on the Roof was the farthest my parents ventured from evangelical propaganda media and I would imagine Topol as my papa, begging my actual father to let me, if not convert, at least take Hebrew lessons. When my parents eventually divorced and my father’s nervous breakdown allowed me to have mixed company sleepovers my senior year of high school, my friends fed me only the good stuff. Radiohead and Amelie. Pulp Fiction and Goodbye Lenin and Kids and Conor Oberst and The Clash. As a result, every time I fall in love it is set to the sound of Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros and every time I am sad or lonesome I drive to the market to stick my hands in deep sacks of beans and buy windowsill plants and artichokes. Right now I seek lemons but they are out of season. Olives will do. My Mediterranean blood knows what life looks like even when snow and sorrow threaten to ice me over, freeze me out. It knows yellow brine and bread are a therapy when I forget I need it and so, whenever I find myself standing in the aisle of a greenhouse, velvety endives hanging from a bag in my limp hand, I am reminded “oh yes, this again.”
I am always hesitant to write about anxiety or depression because I doubt the metaphors I conjure for them would seem relatable to others. My anxiety is a soft sweater that is too tight around the neck, itches under my breasts. I got it in college and I cannot throw it out. I altogether refuse to donate it to some unsuspecting soul who might mistakenly think it keeps out the cold. I wear it because it is familiar, like an old boyfriend we continue to sleep with despite the cornucopia of reasons we shouldn’t. My anxiety is regrettable sex and vegan wool.
These confusing metaphors are why I am immeasurably grateful whenever I get emails asking why I write, for to write about writing is to discuss ones various neuroses without having to call them by name.
I write for the same reasons a lot of people do. So I can be one of “them”, a tribe member, have comrades with whom I suffer the war. I want to be numbered among the sick and the disturbed, those whose public displays of depravity means the madness others keep quietly tucked into their coat pockets is a bit more tolerable for them to live with.
I write because it keeps the demons at bay, or rather, it puts them to work, makes them useful if they plan to continue their residence here. Put the kettle on, Delusions of Grandeur, I cannot sleep. Make a bagel Breakup I Cannot Forget, we must spin you into silk somehow.
I write because I am a storyteller, not beholden to the medium but to the plot. Whether paint or sound or word suit it best is of no consequence to me. I am simply the tool and the work moves through me. Artists are lightbenders in this way and it is those moments when the sun rests in slivers on our faces that keep us alive and at the pen. It is this really, that makes me do it. Writing is the bridge I know best how to walk while we suffer alone. And we all suffer alone. Each of us an island, never fully known by another, never fully known by ourselves. We get close sometimes, smell the blood. Let it lead us down dark paths, through the woods, forgetting grandmother on the way to the injured body so like ours. But without good art, strong and stable, there is no way to bridge the gap between our individual anguishes. It is for this catwalk across questionable scaffolding that I write.
With all of that said, a creative mind is a winter of its own, able to blanket over every ugly truth and present the world as a glittering pristine lie. It presents itself this way too, which is why I always forget that, no matter what I am able to produce, I am living in a failed state, crumbling internally like some landlocked country with blue eyes, some South Sudan Sarah but without the willingness to receive aid.
In brief but blinding moments I am reminded of my delicate statehood. When Elton John’s “Hello, Hello” comes on or the gelato girl brushes her knuckles against mine as she hands me a double scoop of pistachio and tears pinprick my eyes and I think, suddenly horrified, how I will never recover. Not from this touch of humanity, not from him, not from anything ever and the crushing possibility of wherever it’s all headed. The smell of evergreen trees in Canada’s blistering cold. The true laugh of my kid as she reads a funny book for the first time. It all makes me weep, will always make me weep, wells up and overflows from my body and mixes with every melancholy memory set to violin music to leave me completely undone. That overwhelming adoration for this wild and wicked world is simultaneously what fuels my creative work and prohibits me from entering that state so enjoyed by the well adjusted masses: happiness.
The only time I feel what I assume happiness is (which I imagine to be a jasmine scented walk through an orchard while sand sticks to your skin and you eat a mango) is when I am running in the woods. A silent aloneness is the nearest one can get to the calm stillness of death without actually dying, though the thought that nature in her ambivalence towards all things would willingly provide me with a lush scenery to stare at while she pulled my cold body through the mist of this world back into hers is poetic enough to have me entertain the thought of death on a run more often than I should.
It is this exactly, which I find most consoling about writing, about nurseries and cooking, about running. That when anxiety and sorrow push me treacherously close to the edge I am able to say “fine, Irrational Fear, we are going to the market.” And then I search for lemons, for olives, for green in the false lie of winter. To find them feels dangerous, to create with them defiant. Sfogliatella seems a miracle, pickling olives a bulwark, a poem the very soul of The Alchemist’s sandstorm harnessed under these conditions. Yes, everything is richer for having been so close to ashes.
And now, unsolicited advice:
Here is my list of things to do when melancholy sets into your marrow:
open a bottle of nebbiolo and turn on Submarine while Sinatra’s “That’s Life” plays on repeat in the background (I actually drink grappa which is essentially grape moonshine, but red wine sounds fancier, eh?)
buy a half crushed plant and nurse it back to health. (I got a broken succulent from my now ex-boyfriend after my car accident. She is still terribly damaged despite living with me for seven months but I like to think we comfort one another as I pass her in the hallway of my house. Her name is Penelope. )
listen to Rufus Wainwright (Complainte de la Butte or Chelsea Hotel No. 2 will do nicely)
go to the Cineplex at Yonge if you’re in Toronto or Angelika if you’re in DC and watch the Bolshoi Ballet (if you go to Angelika you can tell Gabe that Sarah told you his secret, which is that he brings you wine if you ask nicely. Demand he do this.)
find a perfume shop and ask them to make you samples based on how you want to feel right then. (This seems very strange but scents are tied to memory and I promise that you can conjure up a good one and then huff it from a little glass vial like a drug. My grandfather is dying and I went into the place near work and asked the owner to give me something that smells like nonno smoking a cherry pipe in his Italian olive orchard in 1967. If you don’t have a cute perfume shop nearby email me what you want to smell like and I will have Ari, the delightfully odd girl who owns the shop where I go, make you something. I will mail it to you.)
learn untranslatable words in German like schwarmerei, which is unbridled enthusiasm and sentimentality
go to an animal shelter and ask to take a dog on a walk (I have done this in several countries and everyone always says yes and I always feel better after having petted a curly tail.)
take thirty minutes to peel a clementine and look at every tiny vein before you eat it
read the captain’s log of the Chateau de Gudanes restoration and remember that anyone can make something lovely out of something forgotten