Somebody That I Used To Know

On past lives, letting go, and holding hands in a honky-tonk bar.

”Hard Drive” by Hettie Jones:

“Saturday the stuffed bears were up again
over the Major Deegan
dancing in plastic along the bridge rail
under a sky half misty, half blue
and there were white clouds
blowing in from the west

which would have been enough
for one used to pleasure
in small doses

But then later, at sunset,
driving north along the Saw Mill
in a high wind, with clouds big and drifting
above the road like animals
proud of their pink underbellies,
in a moment of intense light
I saw an Edward Hopper house,
at once so exquisitely light and dark
that I cried, all the way up Route 22
those uncontrollable tears
“as though the body were crying”

and so young women
here’s the dilemma

itself the solution:

I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction.”

---

Press play to listen to me read this letter:

Dear reader,

I didn’t plan to drive across the country last week, but I didn’t plan to take away my mother’s car on the heels of my 34th birthday either. Of all the shit-piss-fuck moments in my life, making and subsequently enforcing this decision against my still-lucid parent was fraught with unprecedented resistance, fear, and guilt on both sides. In America, our cars mean so much, even if we don’t really drive.

My brother didn’t want the car. It’s from 2005 and doesn’t have much value left. It also has a boulder-sized dent in it from the time I backed into a mountain in Vermont when I was 24. On its bumper are layers of clear packing tape that my mother placed there to keep the rear valance from falling off. The part didn’t make it but the tape still sticks.

The car used to be my car. I drove it around Martha’s Vineyard, Vermont, Maine, and New York for years before I got a van big enough to hold me and all of my schemes. It made sense for me to reclaim it, but because I’ve driven cross-country three times since 2019, I questioned if I had it in me.

I never doubted if I could get myself home — clearly I can — but I was afraid of who I’d be at the end of the journey if I didn’t ask for help. And so I called T. and he met me halfway, in Texas.

My last week on the east coast went like this: On Monday, I held my mother’s hand up against my face in Massachusetts and I kissed it goodbye. On Friday in Rockaway, I spent hours playing Tetris with her leftover things and my leftover things to get them to fit into the car. A beautiful man interrupted me and stood on the opposite side of the car to tell me that I was the most beautiful woman leaving New York. I asked him if he was serious and he said that he was. On Saturday, I left New York, and for the first time since I moved there eight years ago, I left nothing behind.

Dear reader, for a while I couldn’t make up my mind about what man to be near or which coast to part with. Sometimes I tried not to choose by evading the question altogether, like when I stalled in Mexico until my vehicle permit expired.

Even when I was away from New York on and off, I always left a trail of things to hold my place. I didn’t have a lot of things, just irreplaceable physical burdens I think all artists carry. Big pieces of paper. Mid-century bookshelves. Dozens of books. Oversized lithograph plates. Piles of drawings. Two hand-made lamps. A box of ceramics made by a beloved friend. An expensive vacuum. A calfskin rug found on the side of the road in Brooklyn. I kept it all there, perhaps so that I could go back and feel something from another time, despite how impossible that sounds now.

I’ve been thinking about how long it took me to leave New York. I think it is the same amount of time it took me to let go. I think it is the same amount of time it took me to realize I can’t relive the past. I think it is the same amount of time it took me to embrace commitment and to move forward.

In Texas, I picked T. up at the airport. We had sex on a leather sofa in a wood-paneled trailer, and afterwards I slept soundly next to his body. In the morning we did the crossword in the local newspaper and decided to give the car a rest.

In the afternoon, my friend Lauren took us to the springs. T. swam on the free side of the pool while she and I sat with the dogs and talked about moving to California for love. Back at her house, she poured us wine and told us to go dancing. “You haven’t lived until you’ve been twirled by a cowboy,” she said.

Though I was terribly unprepared to dance in Texas, we listened. Much to my chagrin, I waltzed around the bar until midnight in rubber garden clogs and an overflowing tote bag. But I mean no exaggeration when I say that two-stepping with T. dredged our relationship out of a two-month long swamp. We know that dancing is our great equalizer, and yet often weeks go by between him and I without any invitation to do it.

The next day, I suggested we take a detour in the desert to go somewhere we’ve both been before, but never together. I was reminded of going to San Francisco together in September. For reasons beyond the city’s culpability, our days there were disorienting and flat, haunting even.

It was not fun to walk around with my ghosts, despite what my positive memories wanted me to believe. I think this is because inherent in “revisiting” is the palpable reality that everything ends, the reminder that soon the way you are experiencing your present moment will be the past; it too will end.

That weekend, I began to realize how useless and obnoxiously saccharine and nostalgic it is to try and relive the past, but I guess old habits die hard. Flash-forward one month and there I was, going for it again.

T. agreed the town was a good place to stop, but at heart, I had deeper expectations than that. As we pulled up to town, I knew immediately that I had led us into an attempt to recreate something special, and I knew the moment was gone. We didn’t say much while we were there. At one point, T. asked me quizzically what I liked about it.

“I like the air and the sky and the clouds,” I said. I didn’t know how to tell him that I liked me back then about it.

At sunrise, I poured myself a cup of coffee in the campground lobby and went outside to see if the photo booth was working before I dragged T. in to take a picture. It was broken. Instead, I asked if he would take a photo of me with my camera, but the buttons have fallen off and it is so temperamental that only I seem to know how to work it. It belonged to my mother, and I’ll have to replace it soon. I settled for a picture on my phone, but it’s not the same thing, is it?

We drove all day and when we settled in Arizona for a slice of pizza and motel TV, I said was happy that we always had dancing in Austin to fall back on when things get dicey.

“I had fun that night too,” he said, “but we’re not going to fly to Austin to dance.”

“Why not?” I said.

Then he turned to me and said, “Because nights like that can’t be recreated.”

I guess he’s right.

white clouds
blowing in from the west

which would have been enough
for one used to pleasure
in small doses

Love,

Anna

• My Instagram and Substack are personal places where I share my day-to-day life as an artist, friend, partner, daughter, and landmate. My personal experiences are all I wish to share with the people outside of my immediate community. This is how I protect my sanity and privacy while existing in parasocial relationships online. This is for levity. This is for safety. This is for professional sustainability. I think Instagram creates a psycho-social culture of virtue signaling that perpetuates harm and confusion, and is often futile. The personal may be political, but for me it is not so simple on digital platforms. People write to me and tell me how to use my social media for politically charged and polarizing issues that I usually feel I have no grounds to speak on. The language in their messages (lack of common start-ups, immediate demands, threats to withdraw support) tells me they have dehumanized me based on the size of my audience and think of me as something other than what I am, a single human being with my own capacities, limitations, beliefs, and heartbreaks. These messages cause me stress and induce fear. They also confuse me and deny me the right to my own important feeling-and-response process while witnessing world events. I want to lead with love. I want to gather data. I want to live in a world where my peace is not at the expense of other people’s peace. I want to remember that coercion, shame, and guilt are not pre-requisites to promoting or modeling peace. I want to stay in touch with my emotions as I witness collective pain. I want to move and speak with non-harming at the forefront of everything I do. I pray for a ceasefire in Gaza.

What else…

• A 50-minute flow or a 20-minute flow to nourish the body, mind, and breath.

• Lauren’s All Purpose Salve, a literal balm for your skin and soul.

• Gil Fronsdal with a meditation and a dharma talk on non-harming and non-violence. “Violence gives birth to fear. Just look at people and their quarrels. I will speak to you of my dismay and the way that I was shaken. Seeing people thrashing about like fish in little water, and seeing them feuding with each other, I became afraid. The world is completely without a core. Everywhere things are changing. Wanting a place of my own, I saw nothing not already taken. I felt discontent at seeing only conflict to the very end. Then I saw an arrow here, hard to see, embedded in the heart. Pierced by this arrow, people dash about in all directions. When the arrow is pulled out, they don’t run and they don’t sink.” Read more here.

• Marlee Grace
  with a deeply moving newsletter full of resources and words woven together that are helping me understand my current relationship to self, to others, and to my work during the deep grief of this moment. “May each thing that you bring forth be a benediction of hope for a more just world. No matter if you are quietly caring for your family and learning slowly, or on the front lines of action. Each piece of our offerings create the whole. I am with you.”

  

• Artist Maria Schoettler released her 2024 Eat Local Calendar and 2024 Year in Flowers Calendar for pre-orders and the illustrations are beautiful.

  

• I will be restocking postcard packs in November. Sign up for the waitlists to be notified when they’re back.

• My very limited collaboration of mugs with ceramicist Erin Louise Clancy will be available through her website on Monday November 6th.

Thank you for reading.