Bury the dead bodies; hop on the rower
My writing's been feeling bumpy as of late.
Is a blog even the right place for any of this? My thoughts too heavy, morose, mired in memory requiring dense exposition. Feels impossibly difficult to write deeply about real people who aren't just in my past, but in my present. Am constantly worried about lengthiness, and yet it feels wrong to censor myself. These 'posts' feel truncated, so much pressure for neat endings, when for me this was supposed to be a project about integration. Why write, if I am so worried about such things?
There is an inscription at the beginning of one of my journals, the largest and darkest of them, which reads:
The most we can do is write – intelligently, creatively, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.
It's a quote from Oliver Sacks, who I have never actually read (oops).
When I feel disenchanted, I think about Ferrante, Ernaux, Lessing. Their demonstrations of pouring forth, rather than shutting down. But they published when they were more or less at a very mature age (although, I think the actual age of Ferrante has never been established).
My mother often tells me I cannot truly write, not now, when I am so young. There is some truth in this, even though it stings.
I'm trying to slip back into the present. This past weekend, a serendipitous beach-side chat with some local moms about their exercise routines. A spontaneous dip in the tiny community pool while my mom watched the kids for the briefest of mornings. My husband has been aggressively nagging me about the rower that I purchased1 in February that I've scarcely used.
So I hopped on the machine. Music blasting, I thought about the friend who rowed for all of college at Davis. The German ex who went on to row at Cambridge. Frank and Claire in their dusty basement.
I felt a tightness that I couldn't shake. An inflection point for this time-scarce, energy-scarce body I've been trapped in these past few years. All the countless times I've yearned for sleep, I hadn't been dreaming about the chance to move – I'd been dreaming about a notebook and a pen at a quiet desk somewhere.
And yet, I felt some of my worries about writing melt away. Fuck it, I thought. My memories are safely tucked away in my notebooks. I have the rest of my life to write whatever I wish.
Last year it was him who wanted to get a rower, as a low-impact alternative to cycling. As with most large purchases, he quickly abandoned the idea. He's definitely a cardio junkie; I also prefer cardio over anything else. This year, in a renewed effort to find an enjoyable way to tackle my severe diastasis, I tried and failed to get some gym time at the local Y which has a rudimentary 'childwatch' which baby flat-out rejected. So all in one go I abandoned my gym experiment, sold our (only) couch and replaced it with the gigantic machine. Nicolas has logged some 200k meters on it in two months.↩