ON THE HOSPICING OF OBJECTS, POP STAR WISDOM, AND PRYING EYES
Friday December 5 and Saturday December 6, 2025
Dear Sarah,
I wasn’t sure that I had a letter in me this week, but I am finding, as always, that the letters act as a kind of portal, a room of need (is this a Harry Potter reference?) or a kind of chameleon of a process, such that what I needed in the moment when I wasn’t sure if I could write a letter was to write a letter, and to invite the process to help me sort out what is going on inside my mind.
If I had sent you, yesterday, the letter I drafted yesterday, it would have been very raw. Nothing that I wouldn’t still say in a letter, but with the overnight time to reflect and integrate what I was writing about, and the relocation of myself into the next day, I feel differently about all the things. The things are the same, and some new things have happened, as they always do, and things are just different today. I’m leaving the things in, overall, but just know that I feel differently about them today than I did yesterday.
Also: if you will allow me to be a bit astro on you here, the full moon was on Thursday, and yesterday we were still within its fullness, and today we are in the waning gibbous phase of the moon, also known as the disseminating moon: the time that comes after a full moon and before the last quarter moon, a time for review and integration.
We are well outside our weekly exchange of letters at the moment, and still I will comment that the last week has been a trying one, or an interesting one. I realized for myself this week that something interesting doesn’t inherently have to mean good. It was a week full of energies and happenings and learnings flying about, and a lot of those learnings were interesting. I think it may be a word that I’ve been considering to be positive but now I think it strikes a more neutral pose: in a non-exhaustive list of interesting there is interesting good, interesting curious, interesting dark, interesting awful, interesting not actually interesting at all, but I’m looking for a word to say about something someone has just said to me when it would feel awkward to remain completely silent.
As of now, with the week mostly wrapped, I am fine, I think; nothing substantial has changed in my body, I think. I am taking vitamins and probiotics. I am running mostly every other day, even though every run features some walking, and my mileage this year over last is clocking in at 200 fewer miles.
Some of what happened this week: Yesterday I learned that a good friend with whom I’ve recently fallen out of touch has been diagnosed with breast cancer. This week I told a crush that I had feelings for them and received the response that they don’t feel the same way (delivered kindly, but still a bit of a blow). Smaller yet still distinctive things that happened this week: I got my eyes checked and ordered glasses. I texted with a friend about the possibility of starting a band in the new year (this could be a very fleeting impulse). I picked up a tomato costume to wear at a clown-rock show this weekend. I made an appointment to get my bangs trimmed. I roasted potatoes, carrots, garlic. I pulled from my cupboards a dramatic collection of sweets I have been casually snacking on, because I think the sugar is bothering my gut. I clowned with fire-sign friends in a slice of light pouring through a window like we were three cats.
I am feeling completely removed from the spirit of the holiday season. This is partly because of the weather here, partly because I am not traveling for the upcoming holiday… actually, this is not entirely true. I am traveling to dog-sit for a friend. But I am not traveling to a holiday celebration. I am traveling among spaces in which the holiday is not being distinctly celebrated. Saturday note: I have just today begun to feel more holiday-esque, specifically because I imagined myself walking my friend’s dog while drinking a minty hot chocolate.
Lately, the pace of time seems to accelerate every day, or, every day the prior day’s activities and actions seem to fall away like I am zooming ahead at warp speed. And yet not that much is actually happening; there is just the feeling of time dropping away behind me. Perhaps the happenings are largely emotional, or otherwise unfolding inside my head and on the page. Today is a Friday but there is little I’ve done today or this week to distinguish it as such. Every day in my world of late is its own distinct shape, and the day before does not indicate the shape of the day after. Each day is a day. This feeling coupled with the warm weather means I am simply living; it feels almost context-free.
A new year will begin shortly and that gives me something to think about; I am not precisely thinking of new year’s resolutions, but I am pondering how I want my life to look by the time another year has passed. It feels clearer to me that Los Angeles is a chapter, and that my next chapter could happen somewhere else; it could happen somewhere else in this city, or in a different city altogether. I am uninterested in work at this time, and so I am interested in making the dollars I have stretch as far as they can go.
I am beginning to go through the boxes in my closet in greater earnest, and today the idea floated up into my mind of the hospicing of objects. I have things in my possession that I do not want; if I saw them out in the world today I would leave them be. If I turn my back to them in the course of the day I forget that they are part of my life. But when I see them again they register as my objects. They are here and in my possession; perhaps when I see a particular object in my possession, some part of me tries to reconnect with the original impulse that led me to pick it up and take it home. Today I can recognize that impulse while I am out in the world, and choose instead to leave an object behind. The objects that are in my possession require me to think of how to move them along and out of my life. Some things are garbage: worn socks, ancient t-shirts, pillowcases ruined by the oils I apply to my face at night. Other things represent aspirations that time has not proven to be practical or useful or likely: mildly interesting frames with old works inside that I imagined removing so that I could creatively frame up some of the artwork I own. A padded glass frame intended for the preparation and development of cyanotype prints. A telescope that I have been “holding” for my father since he moved into assisted living, which I am now largely confident he will neither be needing or asking after. (His health hasn’t substantially changed, it’s just that enough years have passed on this telescope that I believe it has exited the orbit of practicality to retain.) It appears that, among other things, I am hoarding frames and lenses.
Today I found and began reading through a document I exported almost ten years ago out of a tool that was then called Google Keep, a note-taking app that I enjoyed for its aesthetic presentation of my words. An export out of Keep removes the aesthetic presentation; it is simply an arrangement of sentences, the newest one at the start of the doc and the oldest one at the end. I have looked at these documents before (there is more than one; today I peeked into just one) but it has been a while, and today I realized that the document seemed like it could be something. Note upon note upon note suddenly seemed interesting. Not a huge surprise, since my own words clearly interested me enough to take down in the first place. But something about reading them now is like seeing myself again, through a slightly different lens. I observed things in succinct notes and fragments of sentences. I was watching the people around me and thinking about them. I was working through my feelings about my family. It wasn’t verbose — it seems I have become more verbose as time has passed — and the brevity is, I think, a pleasure. Multiple fragments made me laugh. It was not assembled as a story, but perhaps it has become a story because it is the world seen through my eyes. I am reading it and I am not sure exactly what I’ll do with it next. I’m reluctant to edit it heavily — I am currently reviewing a copy of the doc and deleting notes that are essentially empty, a puff of air that didn’t keep — but I am not at this moment interested in substantially reordering the text. Maybe it will be something. I like to think words, write them down, and let them slip between my fingers like sand, until I reach for another handful.
Yesterday I thought this letter felt gloomy, and I wondered in yesterday’s sign-off if it felt gloomy to you. Today I think the tone has shifted. Still, what felt like a pall of gloom was, I think, part hormonal, part end-of-the-year, part seasonless wonder, part reverberation of the week’s learnings through my body.
After writing my whole letter to you, I am going back to read our letters from last time, about six weeks ago. I thought I was just going to acknowledge that this letter is not a response to that letter; we’ve talked with each other in the interim; and the time and happenings that have passed since then have accrued like snow in the cold — but now I’ve found a couple things I want to note in this moment.
1. Reflecting on a note in your last letter — It sickens me to think my kids’ entire childhoods will have been primarily governed by Donald Trump. — I am observing that I don’t recall politics being as much a part of my life as a child as they are today, perhaps for better and for worse. Some of this is the media cycle and social media; some of this is the level of badness to which we have ascended / descended of late. (Is the cumulative badness now actually worse than it was then? Or has it been the same badness all along? I think it is worse…?) I do remember making a poster in fifth (?) (fourth? sixth?) grade suggesting that people should vote for “Bill Cliton,” awkwardly amended and serving for me as an eternal reminder that when you are working in large bubble lettering you need to be careful about your spelling.
2. Even if we don’t respond in full every time to each one of our letters (it would be an impossible practice to maintain), I am struck again by how much they are a document of the moments we are passing through. I’m still thinking about J’s homeroom teacher. I am also thinking about how we wrote these letters right into and through the pandemic, and all that has emerged from that time.
I’m looking forward to reading your words soon and talking soon too, I hope. Much love to you!
Yours,
Eva
December 6, 2025
Dear Eva,
It has been many weeks since our last letter exchange, but my curiosity (horror?) has not ebbed – what was the context in which you ate raw horse? Were you once marooned on a horseback journey and had to resort to eating your poor equine companion in order to survive? What the heck, Eva?! Aside from that little bomb, I adored reading your varied list of life experiences. It has indeed been a rich life, and I imagine many more multi-textured happenings await. (So many animals left to munch on, amirite?)
This is not where I planned to go next in this letter, but I just noticed in myself the distinct sensation of rushing to write before I forget all of the different pieces I wanted to address, like I have gathered up a pile of leaves, heaved it into the air, and then must quickly finish before they hit the ground. Rather than indulging my desire to hastily capture exactly what I loosely planned in my mind’s eye, I want to instead ponder this instinct of mine. It feels like it could be related to themes we have covered over the years, not just a perfectionist quest for ideal words but maybe also things like presence, letting things be. The form of this project – free-form correspondence about our interior lives – lays plain something about relationships that it can be hard to see when it is not captured in written form like this. We are always just sharing little slivers of ourselves, and there is a beautiful arbitrariness to what we share in any given moment. Of course, it does not make sense to think that we could somehow package up everything we wanted to say to another human being that we care about. And in any case, that is just not how human interaction works. The serendipity and improvisation of how we relate to each other are essential parts. So with that, I’m going to metaphorically shake out my limbs and practice just writing the letter that comes out as I type, being comfortable with the fact that a few minutes ago I had different plans of what I wanted to respond to or tell you. (Sidenote: I have the sense that I have undertaken this line of thinking before, and I have probably written about it in our 200+ letters. But I guess if it still hasn’t sunk in for me, it deserves more words here on the page until it does. And, in any case, it feels to me that expecting a lack of recurring themes in these letters is a bit of self improvement dogma; I reject it!)
In your letter, you said you were going to: keep writing and figuring out what I am writing. Following a creative project through requires so much time in the land of not knowing. My god, this is hard. We have to ignore all of the questions. We have to ignore the reality that we could stop at any time and no one would ever know what might have been. Or even worse, the reality that we do not know whether or what will be if we keep going. This past week I saw a quote from Swedish pop star Robyn that says “the person who can be uncomfortable the longest will write the best song.” May you stay fortified in your creative process as long as it takes! This feels like the best act of love we can grant ourselves.
I am secretly talking to myself here, too. I have been working toward an essay throughout the fall months. I had planned to finish it by the end of my writing course. Theoretically it is not too late; the end of next week is my self-imposed deadline to send the final draft to my teacher. But I know that I am not yet there, the alchemy is still underway. As I mentioned to you, I shared an early draft with my class a few weeks ago and got some helpful feedback. It made it clear to me that what I thought I was writing is not actually what I am writing. She is an elusive little one, this particular piece. Even if I cleared my calendar in order to rush to solve her mystery by next Friday I don’t think I could. Instead, I think I will just let it steep.
I am still reveling in the afterglow of my writing course and will be for a while. The course was formally titled Narrative Nonfiction and The Infinite Dignity. In the syllabus, the teacher encourages writers “to take a long, loving look at the real,” to appreciate how there is dignity in each person and place. The idea that writing (and art generally) is about paying attention is not new to me, but there was something about the way she conveyed it that felt fresh and transformative. I have never fully grokked how paying attention is itself a creative force; it creates new. Poems are often the clearest examples of this, especially when the subject is something tiny, like a single icicle stretching down from the neighbor’s eave. By looking deeply, we can generate more texture and depth. We can do this for literally anything we observe. When you think about it this way, it feels almost like a miracle or superpower. Artists can enhance any person, place, or thing, stretching it out like an accordion, sprouting dimensions of experience that are lost if this kind of paying attention is not done. Contrast this to the kind of looking I and so many of my modern brethren do: the broad scan, looking around at everything and nothing. I do this every time I open the New York Times app and spend 2 minutes rapidly ingesting a splatter of news from everywhere. Or when I let my days get so full with tasks that everything other than my todo list becomes background. It is not just the aperture and time spent that matters; it is also the orientation. Am I looking around in order to truly see, or just to gather a bit of information? So often for me, it is the latter. I pluck out facts, ideas, concepts, and I insert them into arguments and mental models. Or I take what I see out there and place it next to my own experience, measuring relative suffering and achievement. This kind of looking has a flattening effect, it deadens and erases. In that way it feels like the true opposite of taking a long, loving look at the real.
I think all of this is leading me toward slowing down. In this spirit, the seasonal change upon us here in the Midwest feels welcome right now. Slick roads that keep us home, the aforementioned icicles that are creating dramatic sculptural art right outside my window, sideways sunlight that makes it always feel like night is near. I am ready to winter!
This season is also the annual cultural moment for a reset, which - let’s be honest - is so alluring to me. You have said it is the Capricorn in me; whatever it is, I love any chance to clear the slate and start anew. There is a tension here. I am trying to eschew self-improvement lore, but I also want to take full advantage of the new year as an impetus for some changes.
Random thought as I wind down this letter – what if we moved these letters behind a password or paywall? This is a thought experiment more than a suggestion. I wonder what, if anything, we would lose? This is sparked by your text about possible AI bots processing our words. We are still in our quiet corner of the public park, but now some prying eyes (the automated kind) have set up a recorder to track what we say. If this is what being in public means, I anticipate more of us will choose to stay inside.
With love,
S.