a reminder for hard times

a piece from write club, rip

hi, how have all 90 of you been? or maybe just how have the 40 of you been that will open this email? good? bad? what do we think of the new chicago / peruvian pope? hot? uggo?

before it unceremoniously disbanded 2 weeks after i joined, i had been going to a write club hosted by Dani Beutell, which met in a vintage furniture and decor shop in hollywood and the experience was really re-igniting. we sat around in groups with a prompt, free wrote for a half hour, and read our pieces, filled with mistakes and imperfections. it felt really gratifying, community building, and i’m sad that it’s over. here’s one of the two pieces i wrote before it officially ended! if you want me to publish the 2nd one, lmk.

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a reminder for hard times.

In between the warehouse filled with puzzles piled high and the municipal building sitting forgotten in the corner of town, there was an empty plot of land you called your meadow. No windows faced the plot, and a thick pine tree-line kept it guarded from garbage trucks going by. It was there you were safe again to rest in whimsy. trembling yellow dandelions and tall marigolds danced with you,

You were never alone.

Everyday at lunch you clocked in to greet the nervous geese, sorrowful pines and sympathetic North Carolinian sky. No one there asked you how you got to Durham, who you were, or where you were going.

You could believe in God, or in nothing at all.

A peal of joy would clamber out from your chest to your finger tips. No one had told you about the meadow. or showed it to you on a map-No one had said “go there, you can cry, you can laugh, you can flap your arms to a gospel choir!”

You just went.

You took a few videos on your phone to celebrate. You can make anywhere lovely. You are part of it all. You can make a forgotten field your dance hall. Like the one where your grandma met your grandpa, above a post office, before the war.

The phone which contained the photos of you dancing fell into the toilet. You remember you wore a crown braid. You remember you wore a shattered heart. You remember being so far from home.

Remembering the meadow makes me want to say atrocious things like “hope is never that far out of reach!” That would be the worst tattoo ever.

When I think about hard times I think about a Vacant Lot sign.