day off

As the last of you shut the door to leave, the house produces an eery, buzzing quiet. I still can’t believe I’ve been gifted a day totally to myself—something that hasn’t happened in nearly a year. I wander gently from one room to the next, wondering what to do first. There is an endless list of household chores, but I have told myself to start with self-care, which for me, starts with paying attention. I stand at the kitchen sink and glance at the cardinal who sits on our bird feeder. I miss you already—I miss you even when I sleep, I tell you—and yet, I also miss myself.

I take the kettle off and pour myself a cup of Irish breakfast tea. I use a mug given to me by a dear work mentor and my mind wanders to my first days in the working world, all shaky self-consciousness. I would park at First Ave and make the cold trek to my desk downtown, not realizing there was an entire constellation of connecting tunnels and passageways to use that comprised the skyway. The first few weeks as an intern, I relished the 50 cent coffee in the break room, until I was wise enough to know that it was shit.

I begin a journal entry—when was the last time I had the space to write freely about my thoughts?—and, penning the date, realize it’s my high school boyfriend’s birthday. I have forgotten many things, but for some reason birthdays stick around. I’m plunged back into another time, drinking boxed wine and pretending I liked cigarettes, making constant compromises of who I was to fit the mold of somebody else. Not wise enough to know all the many risks I was taking.

The box of take-and-bake miniature chocolate croissants calls my name. Scanning the nutrition information I wince, tell myself I will only eat one. While they bake I patter to the living room and out the front stoop to get a breath of fresh air. I love this time of year. Before it’s snowed, even. Fresh pine and cinder-smoke and the last of the burnt, crispy leaves wilting into the earth. When the croissants are done baking I take them into bed and devour all three instantly. Worrying about saturated fats is not very French, I decide. Small flakes of pastry dough scatter about the duvet cover. This is the kind of luxury I crave—the freedom to make a mess.

Each day involves cleaning up so many messes, from sun up to sun down. Cereal attempting to congeal itself to our dining room table, discarded bits of syrupy waffles adhering to paper plates, lunch boxes that need washing, dirty diapers piling up every few hours. If someone were to ask me what I wanted out of this one specific day, I would say this: I want the freedom to make a mess; to have my messiness go unseen.

I crack open a new book, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue and marvel at how the author crafts each sentence, each carefully chosen word. I tell the Disney songs glued into my brain to kindly leave. I wonder what you are doing now, if your tiny voices are laughing at something or protesting the approach of nap-time. I say a silent prayer of gratitude for grandparents. I spend too much time browsing for Christmas gifts for you online, worrying over what size to buy you.

I feel time slipping through my fingers, but that’s how it is every day, isn’t it? Marveling at the sheer impossibility of fully embodying each moment, to be at home in my own collection of atoms and molecules—to let still the rushing energy pulling me from one room to the next, from task to task to task, settle itself and just be.

I know I need to write, but first I’m called to do everything else: Unpaid bills, sandwich making, the laundry, clipping my toenails. What is it about the creative pull that must always involve some tension, some defiant no! from within me?

Finally, words. A few of them. I question whether or not to change my story from past to present tense. Everything that happens to our heroine I want you to feel is happening now. There is urgency. A humbling undertaking, to say the least, to switch 60,000 words of text from one tense to another. For now, I write her out of one scene and to the next, from one scene of mischief to another.

I think of how our characters are often different parts of their author, the good, the bad, the ugly dressed up in different faces and strewn about a new cast of characters. How I have tried not to make the main character too much like me, and instead view each of the book’s characters as possessing some trait that’s familiar to my bones. There is seclusion, and anger, and isolation—but also boldness and joy and compassion.

Perhaps, I think, on days when I have forgotten all the different parts of who I am—the years of being foolhardy and bold, the mistakes and leaps of faith, the changes of scenery and the beliefs I’ve clung to that have slowly been replaced—writing lets me hold tight to those small fragments, even if they end up being scattered across a full cast of people.

I take a walk around my neighborhood, letting the birch trees stare back at me with their bark so full of wide open eyes, and the bluebird sky mirroring back to me my own contentedness.

A bubble bath is next; I sink into the froth, letting my skin go pruny and putting my iTunes on shuffle—a dangerous game, always. I’m greeted with Metric, who I saw in concert with some friends in my twenties. I bought a ticket last minute so had to sit by myself. It was one of the most fun concerts I’ve ever been to. I danced like no one was watching (because they weren’t). I wore a top that may or may not have been see-through, not yet wise enough to know there were specific types of bras you could purchase that would eliminate this problem.

I sing along, the words coming back to me easily. “You’re gonna make mistakes, you’re young. Come on baby play me something like ‘Here comes the sun.” They slowly edge out Frozen, though it’s a fierce competition. I stare at the stubborn grime between the shower tiles that I have not been able to get out. I wonder what you are doing.

I crawl in bed, let my body be used purely for the purpose of rest. There is still the laundry, still the dishes in the sink, the house remains unchanged—messier, even—but a new layer of myself has been dusted off and put back together.

When I think of God I think of your laughter; your endearing smiles looking up at me like I am your safe place—the privilege of a lifetime to be held to such a standard. As we grow, we realize our mothers are just mortals, with heartaches and scars and messy pasts and memories they keep stored in the corners of their hearts, unpacking them every so often in those rare moments they are alone. I don’t yearn for the person I was before I met you; instead, I look at those years as preparation for who I am now.

What are these years preparing me for?

I sit in silence, fighting the urge to get up out of bed and chase after something that isn’t there, fighting the phantom cries and laughter I thought I’ve heard all day, wondering at all the things I’m not yet wise enough to know.