July Mournings; On Keeping a Notebook
It is a green July and I sit in a cemetery tearing up fistfuls of grass. A cemetery in summer is a contradiction. Corpse against backdrop of trees, greened and deepened by May, and then June. Seared by heat, steamed by rain. I scan headstones for last names I know, I wince at four-year lifespans. Being surrounded by the ghosts of children feels almost appropriate, because I am seventeen and spending most of the summer feeling like the ghost of a child.
On the train home from D.C., I read half of a Joan Didion essay collection and resist the urge to underline everything. If you are seeking an exercise in discretion and self-control, read Joan Didion and only let yourself underline ten sentences. At 12:12 Gracie texts me and says, “I've been journaling for the past two hours and I still feel like I have more to say.” At 12:47 I read “On Keeping a Notebook” and respond with a picture of a paragraph: “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
When it was February and I was fifteen, I had a broken foot that healed. It took six weeks. Gracie had the same broken foot that I did and I think that was the start of us being sisters. Someone asked us if we were twins once (Are you guys twins? Just like that). I think it unearthed some subliminal truth, it put a name to the force. I think because you know a sister forever. Maybe I trust that I will know Gracie forever.
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I realized last week that Gracie has been in college for most of the time we’ve known each other, which feels wrong but also correct. Because to me our friendship is defined by me missing her. But now the time that I miss is only a fifth of the time we’ve known each other.
(My journal, February, 2024)
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My mom’s first New York Times publication was about my brother. Her second New York Times publication was about my grandfather. I ask why she skipped my dad while scaling my paternal lineage, and she says, “it’s hard to write about someone that is so close to being you, but isn’t you. That’s why my pieces about you aren’t good either.”
So close to being you, but isn’t you, like a book held up to your face, blurred, too close to meaningfully render. On a different day but seemingly in the same breath, my mom says that by trying to write about “the important things,” you lose them in the process of translating them into language. By trying to cut and distill the incommunicable.
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When it is February and I am seventeen, I go to Poughkeepsie for a weekend to visit Gracie. I lay on the floor of my pseudo-big-sister’s dorm while we debrief the six months since we said goodbye in a parking lot, and then we debrief the sixteen years before that, too. It is pink and holy and lamp-lit.
I can feel myself losing this “important thing” by trying to write about it. My notebook keeper’s presentiment of loss is loud. I talk and think like I expect things to end abruptly, constantly eulogizing from the present. In the cemetery I confront ends quietly, by being there, among the death. Like Didion, I’m obsessed with “remembering what it was to be me.” I am constantly capturing the present (photos, writing), and because of that, constantly also missing the present.
The sky in Poughkeepsie in February is deep and clear and cold enough to make my eyes freeze. We’ve exchanged pictures of the moon for years, and sometimes we say “go look at the moon right now” when pictures would fail. There are stars and the real moon above us. I have been so many selves since ninth grade, and every one of them has known Gracie.
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“It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.”
(Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook)
