Public/Private/Past/Present

On The Things My Toddler Eats And The Opening Up A Private Instagram Account

A Collection Of Couch Portraits From 2010-2021

The morning comes
no dreams.
The morning comes smelling of citrus.
The squirrels already out for my peaches.
The days heating up again.
Spring in Los Angeles is mostly a feeling, like fall. A brief scent.
The skin dimpling.

Because a new poet friend writes me about an old poem I wrote one International Women’s Day and says that it knocked the breathe out of her and she had wanted to share it but couldn’t, I start thinking about making my social media public again. (Oh! The irony! I wrote her.) Thinking myself chic for this one stop gap of intimacy. And I go through and start deleting things and I go all the way to the end of my Instagram roll and realize not much has changed except that I have stopped seeking the moon. There I am in my early twenties, reading and writing, and photographing myself in clothes. My hair so painfully long. Such a tease to see. Going through papers in an old box next to my desk, trying to assemble some for publishing, I find a note from my old boyfriend about the self portraits I used to take and would send to him in batches before he also came online. I’m getting a feeling from them that’s better not to try to describe. He says. In the best of them you’re posing effortlessly. In the worst, not so effortlessly. But I like that. In some of them you are being honest with yourself, while in others, you’re lying to yourself. And where and what you have in your living room is perfect. You could design the interiors of people’s homes. Also aesthetically you should try toning the red and yellows out of the brighter photographs and tone the blue down in the darker ones. What are you going to do with this project? He wrote. And it made me laugh. Because I had forgotten about our old easy intimacy, before the friendship frayed and the lives we chose made us strangers. And it is funny that I always forget he is a director. Though I was mad at him for years for not casting me in a short film of his, choosing our beautiful friend instead. And it was nice for a moment to be thrown back into 2010. To remember being so new in sobriety and Los Angeles again. And I ended up doing this self portrait practice for 11 years and then through 7 months of my pregnancy, ending it without any sort of farewell, and that truly the best of them were the first ones, when I was trying to figure out what I was doing with them, in my place on Bay Street and then the two apartments on Hyperion, and then the house on Morton Avenue. How the project changed. And how I miss doing it. Now I just take pictures of myself in the morning in the bedroom mirror.

We’ve had Meyer lemons on the counter for days and every day I have thought that after writing and before my daughter comes home, or after writing and with my daughter I would mix the ingredients and make lemon bars. And each day finding the end barreling towards us. Everyone exhausted, our nights shot through with worry. The cat on a hunt.

I used to cook, putting carrots and potatoes into a pan with apricots and onion and letting them caramelize and char before roasting chicken over them. I used to lay out white fish with butter and lemons and capers, I used to make scallops and cut up avocado and cucumbers and sprinkle sesame seeds over them, I used to make a kale salad with quinoa and almonds, tart dried cherries, massaging the kale, and making salad dressing. I used to slice and roast beets and toss them with farro and feta. Pepper and salt over everything.

I used to write poems daily as if being called to prayer.

Most nights we have pasta now with butter and cheese and whatever vegetable I can still get my daughter to eat, edamame, crispy kale, avocado, green beans, broccoli. Last night I sliced her a pear.

The beans I made on Monday night were older than I thought and don’t soften even after the 2 hour mark. My daughter spitting them out while I eat bowl after bowl. I think of a woman I love who says I have no shame, if it’s bad I throw it out! Granting me permission to begin again.

P.S. I have been more scattershot in this writing, as I turn the corner on my film writing, and I regret the holes in these essays, I regret leaving them before they are fully done. I will be making more of an effort to add in a little more meat. (Perhaps this only bothers me.)