a soft place to land

Jan 31, 2024

*Photo by Rodolfo Sanches Carvalho on Unsplash*

I wrote an entire essay about paint and then deleted it. In all the words on the page, I couldn’t find the point, couldn’t figure out what I was trying to say. It’s been a beautiful start to the year, which feels strange and unfamiliar after 2023. I’ve been so scared to move forward, to see what the future holds. And yet, January has been soft to me. I believe I’ve lost an entire inch simply from relaxing my shoulders. Winter light accompanies the hours I spend at my desk dreaming and writing. It filters through the blinds and barren trees, promising future warmth while also offering it now. If I stand still long enough on the sidewalk and close my eyes, I can taste this light like sweet butter.

In the past few weeks, something has shifted both in my body and in the air around me, though I can’t take credit for either. In November, I was at a very dark low. This was likely apparent in my writing. I met a different side of myself, a much sadder version. She scared me. I didn’t know how to handle her thoughts or her feelings. They were heavier than I’d ever experienced. I suppose we all have these versions of ourselves, whether we’ve yet to meet them. In November, after our failed IVF cycle tipped the scale of what was already an impossibly hard year, I met mine.

I’m not sure what pulled me out, though I have some suspicions. I did not arrive at this new place, this soft January place, because of willpower or resilience. “You are more okay than you know,” a friend recently told me. But it has not been by my own strength that I have made it to the other side.

Rather, it has been community and zoloft and Damien Rice on a December night. It has been tequila shots with the owner of a thrift store in Culver City, Pacific waters numbing my skin, an owl tattoo on my right forearm. It has been church after a decade away, tears falling to old hymns. It has been hearing God again, hearing my inner voice again, and trusting both.

It has also been yoga in a dark room and three-mile walks in the cold. It has been shared bottles of cheap wine and my husband’s chocolate chip cookies, perfectly salty and sweet. It has been literary fiction and cheesy holiday movies and string lights on my fireplace left up for all of winter. It has been my niece and nephew on Facetime, calls from my parents, text messages from my siblings.

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These are the things that have pulled me through: places, people, and moments I could not have orchestrated on my own, which gives me so much hope that there is a greater power waiting to swoop in and scoop us up when our legs finally give out. We fight and fight and fight, learning how to be resilient, but at some point, we can’t keep going on our own. We discover our limits and learn to surrender. We need others to carry us, and like angels sent from above, they do. They lift us and carry us to the beach, place our tired bodies in the ocean, let the waves lull us. Only then, while on our backs, do we discover the sky is both sad and beautiful. It doesn’t end. It reaches and reaches and circles back in on itself. Maybe I can be like the sky, we think. Maybe I can be and feel all of the things and continue expanding, continue existing.

And so I wrote an essay about paint and how, after three years in our apartment, I began to feel squeezed by my space. I needed to do something with my hands, something that felt raw and real. Blasting Maggie Rogers and painting my hallway a deep and moody green seemed like the best medicine.

I painted the living room next, which was a bandaid color pink. I loved it when we moved in—it felt quirky and romantic; I liked watching the shadows dance on the wall when I lay on the couch after work, unable to muster any effort to move. Eventually, though, the paint began to feel like a bruise. The walls became faded and brown. Cracks widened. Fingerprints from my past selves stained door trims. I noticed the sloppiness of the paint job, the patchiness where more coats were required.

I couldn’t choose a new shade because how do you make decisions when you’re drowning, and so I googled best paint colors of 2023 and picked one called Blank Canvas. The website described it as a “hopeful and welcoming warm white with limitless possibilities to help transform any vision into a reality.” That sounded nice.

I bought a can at Home Depot on the last Friday night of the year. The sky was a deep purple dotted with a few early stars. My husband was working overtime shifts at the fire station, so it was just me. When I returned to an empty apartment, I rolled out the plastic cloth, popped the aluminum lid. The liquid swirled like soft serve as I poured it onto the tray, not minding the splatters on my skin. Later, I didn’t scrub them away in the shower. I wanted the dried paint on my hands to be a reminder, though I’m not sure of what.

The paint washed my home in ways I craved. I made a bundle from the herbs wilting in my fridge, leftover from the maple-roasted carrots dish I baked for Christmas—rosemary, sage, thyme. I bundled them tight, wrapped them with twine, and hung them by the kitchen window. Days later, I burned them, not knowing what I was doing but feeling purposeful in my attempt to reclaim my space, my life.

“If this is all there ever is, I will be okay.” I said to my husband, my head fuzzy on wine but my words clear just before the turning of the year. And I meant it. I was talking about never having children but also about me. If this is it, if this is who I am and where I end, I’m at peace with that. Something has healed.

Maybe it was the paint. Maybe it was the new year. Maybe I have finally expanded enough that the sadness can settle into a corner of my body rather than filling every crevice. Maybe I just needed time. Whatever the cause, January has offered a soft landing place. And that’s enough for now, no matter what comes next.

Feelings Not Aside

a soft place to land

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