Every year around this time, I return to Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. I find it has the same effect as a weighted blanket, grounding me in its humanity. And its true that if you walk around New York at dusk in early July, the crystal blue sky fills the mirrored windows of high rise buildings and everything takes on a painstaking clarity that is easy to lose in colder months. It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived in the city after some time away.
In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. -Joan Didion
Two months in France comes and goes like the passing of a week. The emotional equivalent of a Sunday arrived in early May, some combination of dread and impatience. Late in June, the rain had mostly subsided like the drudgery of a Thursday. And in the early summer sun, things took on the air of Saturday, suspended in the hope that some days will last a little longer than others. By then the field around which I would often run had sprouted with corn and crop, new seasons taking shape. I returned to New York laden with illness.
I caught the bug in France. A vocational parasite that a lot of people get when they work in food and wine. It’s possible that I caught it on a Saturday morning in Beaune, from one or another market vendor or perhaps from the couple who ran the cafe I frequented. It’s also possible that I inherited it from one of the winemakers I spoke to, most of whom had also come to their work after a long period of drudgery. One vigneron had worked as an insurance broker for more than thirty years before committing to his passion for wine. Another had left the wine business, only to return to it 15 years later when he decided to start a negocé. One artist turned coffee roaster had mentioned starting in restaurants in his native Boston and never leaving the industry. I myself have found that it’s a hard field to leave and an easy one to slip back into. Over the better part of the last five years, I have worked in coffee, in kitchens, and in wine. It’s illness. It’s chronic. It’s incurable. (Watch season 3 of The Bear and you’ll understand what I mean.) But seasons of illness beget seasons of change. And so it’s no wonder I have, of late, experienced a series of several springs.
In France, I drank a lot of wine and I lingered in the doorways of boulangeries. I spoke to elderly women in line for cherries and I spoke to the people who worked at the local coffee shop. I felt my grip loosen on all of the things I was afraid of losing. I decided, as if for the first time, that I liked my body. I realized, for the first time, that I liked my life. And suddenly it occurred to me, as if it never had, that I could. Because I have a job I love and friends I love and for a few moments over coffee and a cigarette at Le Doyenné, I had what I believed to be peace. I have a degree of happiness and a certain optimism that I once found in other people revolting and now I send my friends articles like this one and write about the virtues of patience (barf). But then why do I feel like this isn’t enough? And I know I don’t make much money and I know that I have moved more times this year than any previous year although I’ve always moved often. And I’ve moved away from my friends and they, too, have moved away from me. And sometimes the gap between us has been too big to bridge. I know there is loss in change. But some losses, I’m learning, are bigger than others.
Because there was that long and dreadful summer when I worked at a bank. When every morning for eight long weeks, I would wake up with swollen eyes, step into the ill-fitting legs of a pinstripe pantsuit, and take the train into the city where I was raised, riding next to some version of myself that was thirty years older and miserable. And there was that period, some months altogether, when I moved to New York and stopped working in hospitality. I had taken a job in marketing and was living in a small apartment on the Lower East Side whose only redeeming quality was its proximity to the wine bar downstairs. The kitchen was too small to cook anything remarkable and I often found myself tossing salads and mixing batters on the radiator. These were the seasons I lost myself. These were the seasons of gloaming. And in their wake, I have, time and time again confronted my own relationship with illness. I can see now, with the painstaking clarity of twilight, that some are more sufferable than others.
So I am trying to accept the life that is of my own making. It’s one echoes with illness, although one I have found to be of the less life threatening kind and surprisingly more life affirming. Like, it’s not lost on me that hospitality and hospital share the same root. It’s a life that's riddled with irony and contradiction and the kind of tension that has been known to cause headaches. Because ultimately I am choosing to settle into a life that’s remarkably and unrelentingly unstable. There will be no getting comfortable. Everything tremors with the notion of all-good-things-come-to-an-end.
Even in trying to write this essay, which has taken me at least weeks, I am forced to examine if this particular rut is reflective of the natural cycle of things, the way creativity and conviction waiver, or if it is attributed to the myriad other ways my life has recently taken on a new form. And so here I am, in my third apartment in two weeks trying to unlearn that stability is the source from which success springs. Trying to unlearn the idea of success that I was supposed to want. And trying to accept that what I have might be as close to success as I’ll ever come. I think I’m okay with that.
Every time I read your work I am in awe - thank you, thank you. This was beautiful <3
This was so beautiful.