I've been known to strike like disaster

wintry mix

Sometimes it gets so cold in Pittsburgh that when you go to start your car, you think it might just explode—the thought of an engine going from bone-solid cold to ignition feels like an impossible contrast. Sometimes the cold feels like a thing with a will and a grip on your spine. When I lived in Iowa, I would dream that the wall of my house on South Governor Street would crack and fly apart when it was -25 or whatever. I would typically tell myself that of course my car isn’t going to explode, of course the wall isn’t going to sheer off, winter isn’t so violent as that, and then:

This week the bridge from Forbes Avenue to Braddock Avenue collapsed a hundred feet in the air. For days there was still a bus on it, a car that hung vertical. They had to form a human chain to get the people out of the bus, and somehow nobody is dead.

Something about this feels sad and important to me, and I don’t know why except that bridges are everywhere in Pittsburgh, and we trust them the same way you would trust a hill to just keep existing. I don’t think a bridge has failed in this way during my lifetime. J agreed, so did other friends I asked. I was incredibly angry when memes started popping up a few hours after the collapse. Have a little respect, I thought. Respect for what? Respect for the bridge that held me up so many times, without thanks or consideration, when I turned off it cursing because the parking lot was already full at my Al-Anon meeting, when I raced to the red light at the bottom because I was meeting J at the tennis courts for our second date, a hike through Frick Park to Chengdu Gourmet, and I didn’t want to be late; when I walked under it a few days ago cackling with my friend as we passed a man who, it turned out, was the father of one of her high school friends, and who had made a pass at her, and who now looked at us without any sense of recognition whatsoever, throwing a bag of his borzoi’s shit in the garbage can and wondering, maybe, what we were laughing about.

I think it is cruel to see the demise of something as an instant punch line or a bolstering fact for a political argument. Eventually, yes. Diverting funding from public works to policing is, well, how we got here, it has to be said. But at first, can’t we just mourn something that is broken?

Maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if it happened someplace with less of my personal history, although I’m not sure. I have always had a capacity to feel heartache for things, like lost hairbrushes and abandoned stuffed animals, anything that seems a little bit lonely or overlooked. Maybe this is because I’m an only child who grew up in an isolated rural place, maybe it’s because I have a bipolar brain, maybe it’s because something is right or wrong with me, who can say. The world feels alive to me, and in that sense I rarely feel alone. I wouldn’t trade it away, whatever this animist awareness is, even though I feel out of step with others as a result.

But then again! Then again. I sometimes think that the metabolic pace at which we digest cultural events, in which the take becomes the subtake becomes the discourse about the discourse becomes the shitpost, prevents the possibility of sinking into grief, any kind of grief. There’s always some rhetoric to triangulate—whither West End Caleb? Want to see my kidneys? And maybe that’s why I was so indignant about the meme-ification of a bridge I trusted, too—it feels like when somebody tries to get you to joke about something that still hurts.

Lately, I have been emptying out. I am doing the things that need to be done: shoveling snow, cleaning the Airbnb between guests, where I write a fresh thank-you note for each new person and say a small prayer in my head that I hope they find rest from something while they’re here. I put on my new roller-skates and go from kitchen to front door and back, over and over, listening to “Groove Is in the Heart” and trying to figure out that loose sideways movement that clicks. I make soup, oatmeal, feed cats, correspond, visit friends’ classrooms, breathe, exercise, attend to obligations and appointments, buy birthday presents, pick up salt crystals that we’ve tracked inside. I air up my tires and talk to the neighbors who are also airing up their tires (aka the Baum Boulevard GetGo Air Pump Social Club). And while I do those things, the sound in my head is like this: oooooooooooooooooo. That’s emptying out.

I spent a few weeks thinking very hard about how to fix my novel, and while I think that will eventually reveal itself to be productive, for the moment it just feels like: stop. I could keep pushing relentlessly and probably finish a new draft in two weeks, but it wouldn’t be the right draft. I wouldn’t have the right words yet. The right words will come when I’ve emptied out enough to make space for them. A lot of the writing process is emptying out. And emptying out is hard because it’s such a diss to the ego. It’s the opposite of feeling important and productive, and to willingly cultivate that state feels weird even when you know that it’s actually quite courageous.

So it’s winter, in other words. All the seeds are somewhere. The ground twists in the cold and heaves the sidewalk up and makes the floorboards shrink—but seeds are so small that nothing can break them. There is work to do, but it is humbling and not very sexy. And eventually it all goes somewhere. (Into the ravine counts as somewhere!) Tchuss!

// randomly: the title is from my favorite unreleased Charli XCX song, which exists only as a Spanish karaoke video on YouTube. Like all precious things.