“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.” 

-Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

There has been a pressure to accomplish and create a wealth in myself lately. I am certain that my old ways of thinking are not comfortable with this. I am also certain that it is time to develop new patterns of doing. Of being. I have grown into myself with a fear of monetary value. Placing judgment came easier. I am slowly learning, or rather, unlearning, the notion that having a livable income means compromise.

I am sitting in our garden, a raised bed of raised hope, tiny green sprouts with the promised wink of beets, a row of carrot tuft, spinach leaves and so on. My legs rest on the pine edge, while my postured position sits on our chopping block stump. The sun is already heating up this high desert earth, and I welcome it with greedy slurps of bare skin. Ryker lazily sniffs the air from his nest of mulch a few feet away. E types inside, emails of updates, inquiries and deadlines. I close my eyes and silently send him this heat, this moment of realized calm.

I wonder what the purpose is. Why do I hungrily devour cold essays, Paris review and Vanity fair biographies on Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Hunter S. Thomson?

I think that what I admire and arduously envy in youth is the idea that one can change convictions and still be seen as whole. The unseen and unlearned has time. A consecration of beliefs and molds will not set, for seemingly ever.

I believe this is what I fear in age

that by writing out my thoughts they hold some inane power and also purpose over my steady life.

The days will have added to a completion.

An idea that has stood the harsh winds of actions and progress, of stages and sins, of chance and choice.