Dead Letter Department #35
trigger warning: brief mention of suicidality towards the end—if that’s likely to be bad for you to read, just hit that beautiful delete button & catch the next Dead Letter when it comes around.
(did you miss Dead Letter Department #34? read about sea glass & the Disappointed House here!)
weather report
I got carded the day before I turned 41, buying beer at Trader Joe’s, & I can only assume that it was the mask since I feel about 130 on most days, at least the ones where I don’t feel about 14. Summer is finally here—true summer in Bellingham starts only after our rather late Pride & is heralded by the arrival of the first peaches from Eastern Washington at the produce stands. I bought five last week & it took a few days for them to ripen, but they were perfect.
Two of my neighbors put out big plastic buckets full of daisies yesterday—the tall, sturdy ones that are all over this time of year. I took a double handful for myself, trimmed back the lavender by the front steps to fill out the bouquet & woke up this morning dreaming of making double-layered daisy crowns. I soaked the garden last night, giving it a little boost before this week’s heatwave. The lilies are budding now, and the miniature hydrangea I accidentally bought (next time I’ll pay closer attention to the difference between feet & inches, okay?) is filling out beautifully.
This will be my first summer with proper air conditioning in about twelve years—I’ve muddled through for a long time with window fans & very occasional use of one of those big, bulky portable units that really only keeps the area right around it cool. It was only worth it to use when the wildfire smoke coated the sky and forced all the windows closed.
It feels insanely luxurious to walk up the stairs into cool air & not already be dreading spending the entire month of August with sweat pooling in the small of my back. It’s amazing how much more manageable the season feels already.
Every morning off lately I’ve woken up determined to go swimming & found that the weather is equally determined to stay lovely & cool. By evening, I’m sure it would be warm enough but by then there are a million other people all with the same idea, & I really can only tolerate it before the crowd. I’m holding out hope for the end of this week, & in the meantime I’ve just been splashing through the shallow water at the shoreline.
My birthday gift to myself was three days off & three new books. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m some super impressive grinder working away at all times, but I have found that one of the oddities of setting my own schedule is feeling like absolute garbage if I try to take time off that isn’t specifically scheduled for something. Sometimes the anxiety just isn’t worth it. For out of town friends visiting or doctor’s appointments, sure, but something like a birthday or the impending feeling of burnout casting beady eyes at me over the horizon feels harder to justify.
One of the things about C-PTSD that’s hard to explain is the sense of a foreshortened future. When I say I never expected to make it to 41, it’s not that I specifically had plans not to. It’s different, I think, than explicit suicidality, but the impossibility of imagining a functional future may be similar. I didn’t expect to still be here, or anywhere. It is a consistent surprise, every time that personal calendar page flips over & tells me I’ve crested the hill of another year. Sometimes it does feel like I’ve beat something back—fuck you, I’m still here—but the past couple of years have been devoid of that sense of triumph. I don’t know if it’s the constant pandemic slog or my own increasingly shoddy mental health, but it’s felt more like reaching an anticipated destination only to realize that the landscape looks exactly the same.
J & I once drove to the top of a mountain on Kauai, hoping to see a famous view of the island, but the day was so heavily hung with fog we could barely glimpse a foot off the edge. The view as we stood there was exactly the same as it had been most of the way up, only sweatier. I guess that’s how I feel about the close of my personal year—the same, only sweatier.
It occurred to me while writing this that long fiction is an utterly bizarre career goal to have chosen for someone who kind of fundamentally doesn’t believe in the future—there are the months and years of drafting, re-drafting, sending it to your readers, waiting & waiting to hear from them. There’s the querying, and the waiting & waiting to hear from agents. If you’re lucky enough to sign with a good agent, then you start the next round which is even more opaque, even longer spans of time in between any news.
Maybe that’s why, though—that thing about writing being like putting another plank out over the abyss every day, slowly building that bridge out over the darkness. If I want to get my characters & stories across, I have to go too.
one good thing
Summer is for ice cream. In Bellingham we have Mallards, which is probably the gold standard for local ice cream around here, & the Selkie Scoop, which is fantastic, plus a ton of frozen yogurt places that I don’t really fuck with (they always make me think of Michael’s line in the Good Place about taking something great & ruining it a little bit so you can have more of it) but there is a special place in my heart that reserved for the one & only Dairy Queen Blizzard. I’m not sure if this is the dim specter of childhood or the slightly more robust shade of occasionally getting DQ at work with my very beloved old boss, but last time I got the caramel fudge cheesecake & it might have been the only good decision I made all day.
If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, when you get to the top of that hill may the view be utterly, unexpectedly clear.