I’ve been meaning to write this for ages. Since December! But I haven’t really known what to say – specifically, I think I have things I’d like to say but I can’t pin them down because I have been so absent. Not absent on purpose but absent maybe because my life was too much changed and I wasn’t at home in it, or maybe because it was a place that was hard to be.
I don’t know if I will recognize it, when I come back to myself. Maybe I already have and I’m too much changed to know it’s me.
In the weeks after my cat Molly died (last October), I stopped listening to music. I’d drive my car in silence because I didn’t want to be there and a song, any song but especially any song I liked, was a reminder that I was.
Around Thanksgiving I went to a contemporary art museum with some family, which is usually something I love! I can really take my sweet time in a museum.
(side story: last summer I was in Amsterdam and went to the Rijksmuseum with some friends. It’s an incredible, enormous art museum and I really just couldn’t help myself! At one point I caught up with my friend Carolyn, who asked if I had seen the other people we’d come with. I said no, maybe they’re behind me, to which she replied “Meghan, I am sure there’s no one behind you.”)
Anyways, I’m at this museum a few months later and I just can’t settle. I can look, but I never drop into the place of being quiet with the art because I can’t be quiet with myself anymore. It is a kind of being present that I just couldn’t stand in that moment. I was not comfortable enough with myself to look at art.
In December, as I was driving to pick up a friend at the airport, I had a moment where I saw everything that had disappeared from my life since the previous December. My relationship, my home, my cat. I was a stranger in my life, which had been erased by circumstance and redrawn by me while I was sleepwalking through the aftermath. I was worried my friend wouldn’t recognize me.
Even now, I am constantly restless and exhausted, lonely and craving time alone. Imagine balancing in the center of a see-saw and now instead imagine someone running ceaselessly from one side to the other, rising and dropping and rising and dropping and rising. I would like to be still but I hate it, I need to move.
I’ve gotten a few new tattoos recently, which is great first just because I love tattoos, and second because it is a time when I have to be present with myself.
After you get a tattoo they put this lovely clear sticky wrap on it called saniderm, and your tattoo is safe under there while it heals. It looks pretty gross as ink and blood collect under the bandage, but it’s actually fine and it keeps out dirt and bacteria and it just makes it feel okay that you essentially have a giant open wound on your body. Saniderm is a little bit of a magic trick.
But at some point, the saniderm has to come off for the healing to finish. Your tattoo needs air and to be washed and dried and moisturized and it needs to peel and then one day, after days and days where you swore it would never be done, you look down and it’s been fine for a week, you’ve been back to treating that spot like it was never hurt at all.
I, in my entirety, am under my wrap. I’m under here! But right now the healing never feels like enough. Or I am not bold enough. I’m so afraid of everything that might hurt, of the grime of life that might slow my healing process. But I won’t be healed until I’m out from under here. Ugh, I know.
There is no wrap-up to this. The time I’m describing hasn’t closed yet, though I’m hoping that telling you about it might help it along.
So before I go: some of this is to say that I’ve missed you. In all the time spent being absent, the one thing that brought me back was my friends. Thank you for being with me while I am absent or waiting for me while I am not showing up. Thank you for being here as I have been sleepwalking through the aftermath. I am trying to wake up.