there’s a gift fiction writers and memoirists and essayists have that poets don’t. see, despite everyone singing about our use of metaphor and the market leaning increasingly towards lyric language, it turns out that as poets, we talk about things rather obliquely. we can gesture to a change of state in two lines (often metaphorical or broad-stroked) and pretend we’ve bared our souls.
what writing prose has been teaching me is less any kind of craft lesson, and rather the idea that true vulnerability, and true candor, is to offer facts without delivering them in broad strokes. that sometimes, metaphor is true, but often, the lack of metaphor is closer to the bone.
here’s what’s most true: it’s december again.
last december, i sat on my velvet pink couch in my new apartment in clinton hill and watched the first snow of the year. i cried. i burned a candle i had bought from a tiny store called painted swan in cobble hill earlier in the year.
when my bestie Elizabeth and i were at painted swan in october, checking out real estate in cobble hill, an older woman was there checking out at the counter. she said that she lived in the UK, and travelled to brooklyn every year, but due to her health, this was her last trip.
i think about that time now, from october to december 2022, with a kind of nostalgic fondness. i spent a lot of december 2022 really sad. i was crying about someone i won’t talk about but is the reason i can’t listen to fred again.., and i was writing these swervy poems about everything i saw in new york. i think about the poems from this period as suffused with a kind of unplaceable sadness.
that december, i went to the hamptons alone for christmas and was suffused with the same unplaceable sadness and worked the whole time, except for christmas day when i ate at jean-georges and talked for hours with my former student (now friend!) ariel’s partner, saoirse. i marveled at the time, that someone would give up three hours on christmas to talk to me at a fancy ass restaurant, but saoirse later became a part of my extended social circle in new york until i left the city.
in new york, i was never really alone. new york is not a good place to learn how to be alone. it’s a good place if you want to learn basic object permanence - in new york, the only thing that exists is what’s in front of you. whatever you can’t see or perceive is as good as gone. new york is not a good place to be alone because, despite its reputation, most people are actually fairly friendly and open to meeting new people. you won’t hang out, or become real friends without effort, but it’s true that most people are actually quite kind.
i say that it’s december again because i think december is a loaded month. january is bloated with snow and possibility: you haven’t learned anything yet, and only have hope. december is always loaded with a kind of melancholy. in new york, it’s just started snowing. in singapore, the sky opens up into storm after storm every day, and it has for two months. in december, you always know too much. you’re carrying all the lessons that only living through time could have given you.
i’m moving to london in six weeks. everyone has asked, why london? for work or studies? my answer is always: for life. for my life. for a second chance at life.
it’s hard, knowing that i’m moving to london in six weeks, to not think about this period of my life as the closing of a chapter. it’s almost so pristinely timed - to be here in december, ending sentences with periods and crossing all my uncrossed “t”s. but it’s more than that. i finally let go of the person i loved for two years. i hired a moving company to clear out my storage unit in brooklyn. i’m moving out of my teenage bedroom to a new city halfway around the world. i lost 80% of my friends in the last nine months - from attrition, from neglect, from “being busy,” and from the simple fact of distance.
i just finished sphinx by anne garréta, which i’ve talked about on social media. it’s my first novel in a while, and bear in mind that this novel was written in the 1980’s, but when a character died, or something came to a forceful end, i found myself thinking, “that was the only way this arc could have been solved.”
life, unfortunately, is not so novelistic. it’s not so easy to resolve an arc or a plot point. we often don’t see the beginnings and ends of things until much later. if you’d told me, when i met them, that i would have been in love with the same person for two years, i would have probably cried. if you’d told me a year ago that i’d spend the longest i’ve ever spent living in my teenage bedroom this year, surrounded by my possessions from when i was 17, i’d have cried. if you’d told me at my birthday party last year that 80% of these people i wouldn’t talk to a year later, i would have also cried. endings are not so precise and/or neat.
i’ve begun to feel this way, that most of life is just beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings, and if we’re lucky, we enjoy the middle at least a little bit. it’s that aphorism from the sound of music, “where god closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.”
there’s a truth i’ve carried with me for a long time. it become more true over the years. someone Elizabeth and I both know once said, even when times feel impossible and really shitty, one day you’ll look back and miss those times.
this, of course, does not apply to illness and death, but i think about the times i spent walking to Roman’s (mine and Elizabeth’s favorite bar) with Elizabeth. how the things we were scared of, or worried about, or angry about, all reached a kind of resolution, however painful and sad that resolution was at the time. and now, what i remember is us crossing the brownstones on Washington as we move closer to the bar on Dekalb, the days i flirted aggressively with the bartender at Roman’s only to find out she was in a relationship, and the numerous espresso martinis. at the time, i was so scared and anxious about Ninth House and love and my life as a poet, and now, what i miss is instead the long wooden bar, the wine, the four-hour conversations that extended all the way back to our apartments. i don’t remember anything we were anxious about.
this is, of course, a romanticization that only hindsight can bring. i was reading old journal entries from december 2022, and realized that the very thing i had stated was the “worst-case scenario” for my life happened. my company folded. i moved back to singapore. i lost all my friends. i lost all my material things.
the worst-case scenario happened. and i cried, and mourned, and was angry. i started and shuttered another company and spent a summer in Greece where i cried in the saltwater of the Aegean multiple times a week. i spent weeks on end in bed dissociated, shut off to the world except for the people who wouldn’t text me back. i isolated myself from most people because i didn’t want to explain anything to anyone who’d known me as “new york janelle.” i spent most of the year with a bare-bones support system, living with my manipulative and abusive family, with no idea where life was going or who my people were. i tried to kill myself four times this year. i felt completely, totally, and utterly alone in the world.
i cried for a whole year. now, what i mourn more is the year i wasted on crying, mourning, hiding myself away from living. it’s december, and what i mourn more is a year wasted.
and so everyone asks, why london? my answer is always: to get a second chance at really, fully living. to live again. and life - with all its strife, its anxieties, its beauty - i’ve never shied away from. what has always scared me is a writers’ fear: a period of my life that i cannot make meaning of or from. and that’s december: a chance to make meaning of, and meaning from, the last year. while i, personally, can’t make meaning yet of this year, but the december cliché i will be participating in is that this december is all about endings. endings that are not mandated by american consular officers, or USCIS, or former friends. endings that i’m choosing. endings that, as surely as a word appears right next to another word, lead to a new beginning.