on the search for something
stability.
Friends,
It’s a Monday evening in November. I’ve done my 71-step skincare routine. I think I smell like hyaluronic and sea buckthorn and strawberry seed and squalane and grapeseed oil.
There’s a chamomile tea in front of me. And a glass of Primitivo. A cactus. Marble coasters. A half opened book. “Blue Sisters” by Coco Mellors. A candle that’s Elderberry and Rose, but it’s never lit because I never have a lighter on hand. That’s one difference between Rome Emily and Toronto Emily. I don’t even know where to buy lighters anymore.
In this hour of my life, at 8:42 pm on November the 4th, I am in the unknown. I took two leaps of faith today. And I don’t know if either will pay off. And as I type that out - I want to tell myself - wait. You took the chance, you took two steps in a major direction. That means it already paid off. Because you chose something. Not knowing the outcome - I mean, do any of us know the outcome? No, but that’s part of the experience.
My mom’s been hanging out around here, I can feel it. I wrote her a letter last week. Sometimes I feel like she reads my newsletters, too. I wear her wedding band around the apartment, in the evenings when I have nothing to do. My dad at dinner told me last night, “I don’t know where you get your love of drama from. I don’t like it, your mom didn’t like being in it -”
“She loved hearing about it though.”
He smiles. “That’s true. She did.”
Rose loved a redemption story. One of her friends told us at her funeral.
Do you notice how everything feels cyclical? I want to ask her. How everything seems to fall away, but then comes back around. But the spray roses I bought last week, they look better dried now than when they did when I first bought them.
How do you navigate the world without a mother? This is something I ask myself often.
Here’s something that I want you to know: every loss you feel after - will take you right back to that hospital elevator ride. The one that you told your boyfriend that you wanted to take alone. You wanted that moment to yourself. You walking into the elevator with strangers. Pressing a button, watching the doors close in front of you. She is not alive anymore, but you will say goodbye anyway.
The goodbye isn’t for her, but it is for you.
The strangers in that elevator - they don’t know what is going on. They’re smiling, they’re laughing. Life seems to move for them. But you keep your eyes locked on that silver, elevator door. Remembering how it feels in this moment. The strangers around you are trivial. This existence isn’t promised, and it isn’t permanent, either. This must be what love feels like now: an empty, empty hole.
A lot of the time, when I am about to make a decision, I feel as though I am sitting on the edge of the universe. My eyes are closed, and my hands are placed firmly on the ground beneath me. It’s pitch black around me. Pitch black with tiny, tiny, tiny stars. I have to shut off my mind, because some false narrative keeps playing on loop to protect me.
Keep running, the narrative tells me. Commitment = stability. Stability = love. Love = the rug being pulled out from under you. Love = loss. Loss = you on the elevator alone. Loss = an empty, empty hole. See what I mean when things feel cyclical?
I am trying so hard to make decisions that feel stable. That feel…rooted in something. And do you know how difficult and out of body and alien that feels, to someone who - has spent years in non-committal bliss? I want to do everything and anything I can to avoid that elevator ride again.
She’s pushing me towards it, though. Stability. Her and my dad both are. I know they’re not together on this physical plane anymore, but I think they’re working together on something. Sometimes, I like to close my eyes and pretend that I am in my childhood bedroom again, and listen to them talk at the kitchen table. I want to hear the pages of their morning newspaper turn. I want to smell the toast, the coffee. I want to hear their soft voices, and pretend to be asleep when I hear my dad gently shakes me and whispers, “Emily, Emily. It’s time to get up for school.”