Roman Holiday (1953)
Dan said I should write this newsletter with the same chaotic energy of Dakota Johnson on a press tour. Let loose, he said, with a little shoulder shimmy. I turned away and poked at my frying eggs on the stove. “It’ll probably be a little sad though, right?” he said, with that shit-eating smirk I love so much about him. Dan’s happier these days, maybe in spite of all of the challenges we’ve endured—or maybe it’s because he’s choosing to be. I like the latter. With his newfound embrace of happiness, of real joy, Dan can be chaotic Dakota Johnson for us both.
I want to get this newsletter out of the way before I go on a plane next week. I booked a ticket several months ago to my favourite place, and then a bunch of new ones I’ve long dreamed of, but somehow can’t muster the energy to be… happy about it. I’ve never felt less excited to leave than I do right now. The way March dragged its soggy ass into April. When February seemed listless, sliding into March, a heavy weighted blanket itself. Only January had some kind of promise, that glint of newness and hope.
For the past five days, I’ve felt literal grey clouds over my head. A pressure headache. A weather event. In my experience describing any sort of head malady, or mysterious aching head that seems more psychological than not to some, saying “pressure headache” gets me nowhere with anyone. They don’t get it. Migraines people get. You had an aura, too? Oh, those are brutal. A pressure headache is more nebulous. I feel into the grooves of a joke about being a witch, saying “Oh, rain’s a-coming. My head hurts,” like it’s something from some farmer’s almanac. Some people laugh, sometimes I get a pity smile. Yet, the pain is very real. A throb behind my eye. I can’t work because I can’t think. There’s only comfort in being horizontal and completely still.
When this ache occurs, I track the pressure in my weather app with the kind of dedication I wish I could apply to other areas of my life (namely, work—maybe living in general.) When the pressure hovers around 100 and the little arrow beside the number points down, I know I’m in trouble. A pressure headache makes me feel woozy. I tried to describe that sensation to my doctor and could only muster something along the lines of my brain feels disconnected from my body. My physio pilates instructor said to me that maybe it was like being wine drunk without having any wine, and it all clicked. You know the anticipation of being so drunk that you might puke everywhere? It feels awful. That’s what a pressure headache is like. When I was 18, I drank a 1.5 litre bottle of Wild Vines at a friend’s house, and then proceeded to puke all over myself in my mom’s car. My pressure headaches are that but just up until the vomit actually leaves my body—a purgatory of my own making.
I watched Singin’ In The Rain for the first time, with my icy gel cap affixed to my head, rain heaving from the clouds outside, my eyes droopy and heavy. It’s unfair how beautiful and slick Gene Kelly is. It was a lovely movie but—and this is perhaps because of everything I’ve just listed above re: head pain—it made me upset. How can anyone be this happy? This joyful? This… bright? I’ve had “Good Mornin’” stuck in my head for days, Debbie Reynolds’ exceedingly beaming face floating around my mind. I liked it a lot, I did, but it’s hard to muster the energy for something dazzling when the world has seemed for a while to be like those two rainy days on loop for months.
I said out loud that I wasn’t happy and I hadn’t been happy for a bit. In March, Dan and I went through some really tough relationship stuff. Even writing these words here will cause him to grimace and maybe he’ll feel a sting, some guilt, but I betray myself by not speaking honestly. Relationships are fucking hard. Being with another person when you’re not totally comfortable with yourself and having another person see that is a mindfuck. Some days I wish for the naivety of 20-something me, longing just to be loved, having the role of Boyfriend filled, a box checked, and that would be that. How sweet and slightly stupid of me. Our darknesses, as Dan likes to say, rubbed up against each other, causing so much friction, we almost started a fire. It’s gone now but the soot is still there, we know that—we honour that.
I didn’t get into the Banff Centre program I applied to. I felt relieved at first (money saved!) and then distraught. I haven’t touched my book in months. There are only three things in my life I am devoting my focus to: work, health, and my book. Unless the task falls into one of those buckets, I am often saying no to it. But once I got the application out, the creative whirl I lived in dissipated, and I haven’t touched those essays since. I haven’t even thought about how to approach the other essays. I’ve been caught up in how a “writer” is “supposed” “to” “be,” more recently working myself up over an interview with a writer I don’t particularly like but her words on style, form, and idea burrowed into me. Like what I do isn’t enough. It’s boring. I wonder what it’s like to feel so confident in what you do, even if it’s an act.
tangled. photo by sarah macdonald.
And then Angus died. He’s a dog, I know, but he was more than a dog. He was this companion to our family. This black lab puppy who jumped on my bed, gave me side-eye, so sick of my shit, but licked my face all the same when my cat of nearly 20 years at the time had died, consoling me. My nose has that prickling sensation now just before tears start to fall. I miss that horse dog so much. He declined so fast. Droopy eyes that led to blindness within a week. He was fully blind when I spent my last few days with him; his heart beating extra fast with another, irregular beat at the end. It felt like his heart was trying to catch up with him. He laid on the floor a lot and I put my hand over his heart hoping the pressure could calm it. Of course it didn’t. It ticked away, faster and faster, a true signal of time as fleeting as it is. It wasn’t until 3:30 p.m. on the last day I’d ever see Angus alive again that I started to feel the weight of it. I sat on my sister’s kitchen floor with him, feeding him cucumber slices, weeping, listening to my nephew upstairs, completely unaware of what death really is, and said thank you to Angus for all of the love he gave. I ran my hand through his rough black fur, thinking about all of the people who crossed the street away from us when we’d walk with him, thinking he might be dangerous, but he was, in fact, a giant sweet baby.
My sister’s pregnant with another boy, and he’s going to be named Luka. His middle name is going to be Angus. Jensen points at the sky and asks if that’s where Angus is, because of course he’s in heaven now.
As I said, shit’s been a lot lately. Perhaps this is why thinking about how I’m going to get from Charles de Gaulle to my hotel in Paris next week is at the very bottom of my list of things to consider. I sleepily recited Italian to Dan the other night, woken up by him coming to bed. “Salve, io sono Sarah. Un cornetto, per favore.” I rolled my r’s better half awake than I ever had fully locked in on my Italian lessons. I’m going to Florence, Verona, and Rome. Places I’ve long dreamed of. I want pasta, wine, cured meat, cheese, chocolate, fresh vegetables, an Aperol spritz, coffee, and a midnight snack of more pasta. I booked my ticket to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. My hotel in Rome overlookd the River Tiber. There’s a lovely natural wine bar a ten minute walk from where I’m staying. I’m going to the Ara Pacis museum to see in real life this monument I wrote an essay about in university that got me an A+. I feel a pang now, missing the art journey I took in that course, Roman Art and Architecture, and how much joy it brought me.
So we return to joy now. It’s there, in living, not lurking—as a podcast host I love said in one recent episode.
I’ve thought a lot about what Jess Dore wrote in a recent newsletter about withdrawal because that’s how this feels to me—these months of whatever these motions are. The world, beyond the minutiae of whatever my life is, is genuinely distressing. Watching murder in real time is genuinely distressing, let alone knowing it’s going to keep happening. Dore perfectly articulated how I’d been feeling this last little while, and perhaps running into the edges of this life or whatever I’ve been feeling, working through it and going through the motions, is perhaps what’s right and good at the moment.
Dore writes:
“When I lose big, I go down to the studs. The scaffolding there is just barely enough and I tend to find there’s some rot in there, too. So when I withdraw—cut ties, relinquish roles, abstain from situations whether in digital or physical life—I’m assessing. I’m walking perimeters, scouting walls, poking edges. And I’m old enough now to know that if I can stand to be patient, the erotic lure toward rebuilding bubbles up on its own. But that if I try to go there too soon, I risk missing integrity…. Yes, I’ve withdrawn. I’ve grown weary of society and my self. This particular self has been forged in connections that I either no longer have, or no longer want. But I feel good about it, actually.”
There’s a solar eclipse next week. I bet we won’t see it’s shadow but what if we feel it instead? This beautiful, dramatic celestial event that lets us, even for a moment, just step back out of the light.
Daffodils have started to open up in the gardens on my street. The snowdrops that seem to be in everyone’s yards were a nice gesture to spring during the warm February days, but now seeing the daffodils, crocuses, some tulips, there’s a familiar sensation bubbling: remember that everything ends and starts again?
buona fortuna
Singin’ In The Rain (1952)
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Maybe the book's essays are having conversations you simply aren't privy to yet. Integration usually looks like nothing's happening at all. Slowly but surely, sister 💖 sending you love.