Tag: rk

What is productivity?

“What is productivity?” I thought to myself as I put in my contacts after being awake for 3 hours.

I’ve been shaken into consciousness during the drifting end of sad dreams for three nights in a row. I have this candle next to my bed that I frantically light so that I can write down my dreams in really bad handwriting before I close my eyes again.

I never actually make it back towards sleep.

This morning by 8am I had made mango green tea, completed sun salutations, taken a portrait of how the sun paints my front door orange, made sweet potato hash for breakfast, recorded poems in voice memos to send to several friends, watched the sun rise, written not only the version of love letters that I do send to him, but also the version of love letters that I keep to myself.

“What is productivity?” I asked myself, fighting the feeling that I hadn’t done anything “useful” or checked anything off my to-do list. I received a response back about one of my recorded poem voice memos. “This is my favorite one yet. It’s so simply executed by you, so deceptively subtle. I love it, I’m going to let it inspire me to write this morning.”

I pull the covers over my bare legs and watch the sky work quietly to paint itself another color as day breaks. As it does every day without record or restraint.

Watching the sunrise(!)

New candle burning. Toes warm under the covers. Like I said yesterday, that thing about autumn.

Listening to Natalia Lafourcade describe her music in Spanish. Thinking of how similar she sounds to my favorite, Julieta Venegas. How similarity of another never actually becomes the thing itself.

Feeling like I’m floating above something with too much distance.

“There has to be a place for risk and restlessness in any kind of fully lived life.”

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

— Eleanor Catton

It was a spectacular weekend. Sunlight, the perfect kind of weather, long walks in the park, so much deliciousness, and finally, the serene sleep that has evaded me for weeks.

***

We were discussing manicures for some reason, and why I don’t get them done. I asked her why she thinks my nails break easily. She reached over and hovered her hand close to my heart. “It indicates what’s going on inside of you,” she said. “The breaking, the cracking. There’s something you haven’t taken care of, you know, internally.”

Similarly — the startling experience of the splitting and sudden chill of the first nights of autumn. A moonlight that was so clear and tangible I could have plucked it from the sky. Feasting on fiery sunsets (usually reserved for Texas skies) during my runs.

I slept for 8 hours every night, my too-stubborn heart finally losing the battle with exhaustion. I spent a lot of time with Maggie Nelson and other types of blue (much more about this later).

I try to stay true to my love for autumn. People tell me how wonderful it is, how happy they are that autumn has arrived. The truth is, I adore everything about autumn. The warm days and chilly nights, the upstate apple-picking, the urgency of wearing all your skirts before you put them away, the beginning of scarf weather, the mooncakes, the vegetables that come in season, the appropriate kinds of mornings that make you crave tea & evenings that make you crave live jazz while in someone’s embrace.

But often all I can think of is how winter inevitably follows it. My attitude towards this probably says quite a bit about the things I need to work on.