Long weekend notes

Sometimes it’s just this

1. In one languorous day I finished Somebody’s Daughter, a heart-splitting memoir by Ashley C. Ford. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. “If I’d learned anything being on my own these last few years,” she writes, “it was how much I needed this time away to see myself clearly.”

2. I’ve been thinking a lot about how a day—or a life, if you want to zoom out a bit—can be distilled into two questions:
   Did you take what you needed?
   Did you give what you could?
   I don’t know if this is something I read somewhere, or if it’s an understanding I’d formed all by myself. I don’t know if it matters. If someone somewhere has thought the exact same thing, does it diminish or does it fortify your truth? Does it connect you or isolate you?

3. I spent so much time spinning a version of love, clean and structured, that made sense in my head, when I was still naive enough to believe it had to make sense, all of it, but sometimes it’s just this: a hand on the small of your back, a spoon you’d left in the sink in a hurry but later find washed and dried without fanfare, a space you sweep and scrub knowing you’d have to do it all over again. You’d gladly, gratefully do it all over again.

4. Maybe it’s also this: in the minutiae of my day I remember you and wonder if you’re safe. What you’re listening to. What you see when you look out the window. If it makes you smile. What you had for breakfast, if it comforted and sated you, if it was served by someone who loves you. If you’re happy.

5. Sometimes I catch myself and think, It was just a moment. Then I catch myself again and add, But aren’t moments all we have?

6. Not all nights are easy. Some nights the shadows creep in. But in the morning the sun is shining and the cool breeze feels like a friend and we go for a walk. I look up and the sky seems bluer, more vivid. The clouds glide past, their feathered edges and silver linings brushing through the vivid azure. They only move if I don’t.

7. Did you take what you needed?
   Did you give what you could?