Dead Letter Department #57
20 things i’ve loved since last we met
- the little pocket dance/glance back over the shoulder people do when they’re getting up from a seat they’ve been in for a long time—wallet, keys, phone, okay, I’m leaving now.
- how groups at the airport establish a hundred little countries at the gate, with snacks & phones & turned in body language, dissolving & reforming every time another plane takes off.
- curry udon noodles with a gekikara fireball & onsen egg on top
- teaching myself how to find the green anemones in the tidepools even when the tide is out, & then seeing them everywhere
- bitter melon & shrimp dumplings
- the way everything is different in California: palms just growing casually in traffic medians, poppies on the hillsides, great blooms of unfamiliar flowers everywhere i looked. the water tasted bad but the light was incredible, & it seemed like every hill we crested was a prettier view than the one before.
- mango vanilla popsicles, the cure for whatever ails me
- the moment when the plane lets go of the earth & everything lightens
- accidentally parking at a very fancy gym in downtown san francisco & getting to watch people who valet park to work out
- going to H Mart for the first time & buying absolutely every snack & produce item i fancied
- watching the parasailers come down off the hills & over the city from our rented apartment, little shapes sailing out over the tight-packed rainbow of townhouses, the velvet green spreads of the parks, the sheer silk of Lake Merced (even if I did, in a painkiller haze, refer to them as ‘the jumpy boys & those things they fly.’)
- tylenol, my best friend
- watching my friend get reunited with her dog after their longest ever separation—20 straight minutes of husky screaming in high pitched joy. i tried to film it & only got a random still shot of someone’s ankle which serves me right for not living in the moment
- getting the surgical drains out
- taking the compression vest off for good, after three full weeks of having it on for 23 hours and 45 minutes a day.
- wearing a t-shirt
- wearing a hoodie but not for covering up purposes, just because it’s cold out
- walking down the street to put magazines in the tiny free library & for the first time in years, in decades, not being debilitatingly aware of my tits
- starting to sit up straight again (this one will be a process)
- watching it go from a wound to an incision to the beginnings of a scar, except of course for those gnarly drain sites that will take their own sweet time healing up
more soon, dear readers, & in the meantime, you can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com