I’m sitting at Drip in 5 Points, Columbia SC. This little coffee spot used to be, years ago, the closest thing to home I’d ever found.
Even during a decade of on-again-off-again homelessness, the times in between, when I had a place of residence, a lease with my name on it, it was the perfect blend of exposed-enough-to feel-familiar, yet a respite nonetheless.
I’m disheartened at the fact that it has lost its warmth, though, no, of course I am not surprised. I’m glad that I knew it and loved it in its prime. Was devoted.
This used to be a bustling place of inspired conversation, twinkling chance encounters, a home-away-from-home for many besides myself.
Recounting often feels like the place to start, but it rarely is.
It’s both a miracle and a simple fact of inevitability that I sit here so irrevocably changed since the last time I stepped foot in this city.
It frightens me slightly, the blunt recognition as of late of the gradual cessation of sentimentality that has taken place over the past few years.
I guess I assumed, naively, that motherhood would intensify what leanings I had towards it.
I write about this in my journal, this kind of feeling at home nowhere and everywhere— which was always evolving and alive in my core, but now feels decidedly permanent—
and also this scritch-scratch, what will eventually be converted into ‘copy’ for le renouveau, about how writing, like everything else, cannot be separated from life, is merged with it—it’s hilarious and disturbing that these things be stated or written, that they’re not understood to the degree that der Sonne scheint— unless you sustain the effort to delude yourself otherwise; suffer.
Go out for a smoke, open Lindsay Lerman’s
to read her recent essay-in-lists and experience the gentle and the-just-heavy-enough blowbacking breeze of harmonious living. Pause, inhale. Same tunnel, different kaleidoscope with ’s exhalation of Summer.My life, abounding with women who are settling in.
Oh, in spite of.
Life gets better without sentimentality, honest. Thank you for the tag. <3