Archive | Essays

Fall Back, Fall Back

By Lee Krasner

Daylights Saving Time today. Most view it as an extra hour of sleep. I view it as an extra hour of night.

In my head it’s a rhythm, a mantra, a sick, squalid croon. It’s why the Legend and I have fallen into old habits–him coming around only when it suits him, never ushering me into his world. Me swallowing whatever crumbs he offers, blowing up badly when they become indigestible.

Fall back, fall back.

The light is more beautiful, also more precious. There’s so little of it, you see.

Yesterday I met with my eldest goddaughter on the Upper East Side. Both of us live in Brooklyn but make formal friendship dates while getting acquainted as adults. She is in her early 30s and I am in my late 40s, high time we learned to appreciate each other as peers. We met when I was a recent college graduate and she an elementary schooler, so our relationship has undergone serious growing pains over the years. Me relying too heavily on her preternaturally adult wisdom, doing her the same disservice done to me decades before. Continue Reading →

Astro PSA: Venus Retrograde Rage

For two days I dreamed that I caught a man in the act of stealing my wallet, phone, and keys—my identity, essentially— and that he was arrested and forced to return my possessions. These were triumphant, and triumphantly bald, dreams. Last night I dreamed someone stole my wallet—a pleasing, lemony yellow—and replaced it with a neon-green fannypack, neon green being one of the few shades I will never, ever embrace though I do in fact own such a horror. (It’s handy.) In the second part of the dream, I found a pair of denim jeans that elegantly nipped in my waist and made my ass a buttercup dream. I laid them aside for a pair of 90-style mom jeans that made my ass an endlessly flat expanse of Midwestern mall terrain.

Which is to say that, yes, Venus finally went retrograde yesterday. I’ve been whining about its shadow since early September, but only now is the planet really moving backward.  Lasting unofficially until the end of the year (officially it goes direct November 16), the retrograde is taking place in Scorpio, which imparts lessons about old wounds and hidden meanings, and Libra, which is ruled by Venus and thus a hot mess when mommy takes a breather. Continue Reading →

I’m Healing as Fast as I Can (Neon Sadness)

The phrase had been blinking in my head all day like a neon sign. I saw it as I woke, it kept flashing as I wrote.

I think, I think, that you carry heartbreak until it carries you.

Don’t get me wrong. I worked on my book today as promised–1300 words, thank you very much. B even says they pass muster. Then I had therapy–can we say it simply ran its course? But when I came up for air, I felt sad knowing the Legend was back in the neighborhood and we no longer were in contact. Until this week we could just pretend we were just in different places, on different schedules.

Not different frequencies.

Just as I was starting to feel really rudderless, K pinged for coffee, so we met up and ran into a friend and then another and another, and the conversation kept bobbing along, one thread into another like that last luxuriant day of school in Dazed and Confused.

K is a legend in his own right. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy