But Wait-- I Want to Feel This A Little Longer
I woke this morning a little before 6AM, my body waking up on its own seven minutes before my set alarm. At the time I started the car—6:30—- the windshield needed ten seconds of defrosting; one of those Los Angeles rarities that now presents itself as a little joy for me. On Saturday and Sunday mornings the major roads of this city empty, Melrose a comfortable cruise of 45mph, Hillhurst a fun wind that you can cruise for maybe miles without stopping. It took me fifteen minutes to drive to the Silverlake Resevoir, a drive that typically takes thirty. I love Los Angeles maybe the most in its early morning hours, but I think the morning is where I find myself in any city; it’s where I find my nostalgia already crawling to after a return.
I prioritized ‘reflection’ this Sunday morning because two days ago, mid-workday, I realized I had been home, ‘back to normal’ after two weeks elsewhere, for almost a full week. Eight days home now. Married almost two weeks. Those facts panic me. Reality, which had begun to feel special while we were gone, felt, suddenly, cloying. Two weeks abroad is just long enough for you to wish for the comforts of home, be that good weed, ice cubes, a blanket, cats; for my husband(!!!) and I, our last two days in Paris felt long. I had cystic acne crater my jawline, Hans had tired of the gout-inducing European breakfast choices; both of us longed for our couch and Winston. But we still hadn’t seen the Eiffel Tower, still had tickets to Musee D’Orsay. The last two days of the trip: tired, hopeful, proud, annoyed, sad?, missing the wedding day already, dread, anxiety, utter fucking happiness, fear of the moment becoming memory.
While abroad I didn’t journal. This wasn’t necessarily intentional; I brought a journal hoping I’d use it to write, to catch inspired glimpses of ideas for new fiction (I’ll also take nonfiction, lol). I thought maybe I’d journal as we got closer to our wedding day, thought I’d have anxiety spirals or love bursts, both of which are commonplace in my journals. But trying to reflect on the moment as it was happening, trying to write about how special Amsterdam felt to my union as I sat next to the city’s canals sipping an Americano and listening to ducks quack, it felt impossible. The joys were so evident and immediate—there, in the shade of a specific red lipstick or here, in the movement of a smoke cloud from someone’s lit cigarette— that I felt no real desire to document. I was in a place freed from any and all expectations of the self, freed from my usual constraints; to render them in a journal as they were happening in order to preserve them felt inaccurate. And I’d tried to do that before, all summer in Bulgaria, 2015, hadn’t I? Tried to write every day down so the memory could transport me, tried to photograph and videograph the routes of my life there, tried to make the present tense bulletproof. But still the future came and what was sacred reality turned to past.
I fear forgetting our laughter on the Paris metro after that one woman shoved me. I fear the memory of my husband sleeping next to me on the morning before we marry will blur into reality.
Actually, I don’t just fear it, I know it.
What is it about the morning? I’ve never really needed an alarm, my body’s internal waking typically attuned, somehow, to the hour I need to be awake (anxiety??). During the first COVID lockdown, to help me form a sanity-inducing structure, I developed a ‘morning routine,’ in which I’d spend 10 minutes moving my body (typically dancing or yoga), 10 minutes writing in my journal, 10 minutes making coffee/drinking water/podcast listening, 30 minutes reading. I tried to do each activity in a different place in order to trick my brain into thinking the small apartment was bigger than it was. I don’t have that same rigidness with my mornings now, but I do rise early. I think my body craves the silence of Los Angeles in the morning, craves the sunlight when it first greets the hills. Witnessing the morning feels like reflecting. It feels like a kind of reflection freed from the pressure of a pen, a camera.
Paris seems to me a morning city. There’s a lot of bustle on the sidewalks, the streets, starting early. But still, even with the shuffling hustle of Parisians, their mornings felt sacred. The repetition of croissant with espresso, inhaled while walking to work; the hour spent sipping espressos at a cafe on weekends. In Amsterdam I found a subculture of morning smokers, locals who preferred the coffee shops at 7AM on Saturdays and Sundays. One friend I made told me that his 7-9AM smoke and coffee sessions in the shop every Saturday was his ‘religion,’ and as corny as it sounded then and as it sounds now, it also felt real. We noted that often in Amsterdam, Hans and I, how kitsch everything could be (our hotel room’s wall was decorated with an artist-drawn map of Amsterdam) but how the joy, the enthusiasm, actually felt real. Honest.
Maybe that’s it about mornings— how honest they feel. Or how honest I feel? How close to myself I feel. Perhaps the only reflection available to me right now after so much joy, so much utter delight, are mornings. I am grateful.
Hans Rainier Velasquez & Erika Gallion, 9/13/2022