see scrapbook 2022 for all the other stories from 2022
this is a day late—year after year, i compulsively rank the best of what i’ve watched in a year. but i spent a lot of this year looking backwards and inwards, and nothing i name here can quite capture all that time spent elsewhere.
A return to the still-annual series of the seasons. Seasons are synecdoche, a part meant to stand for a whole. Extant vignettes of an elapsed year. I like to imagine my seasons as containers, though they are borderless. They spill over in my desperation to contain my experiences within demarcations.
My recollections of the seasons are always intertwined with the sensory details of weather and climate, the background to which the foreground of my memories are allowed to exist. I don’t read weather reports aside from the daily highs/lows boasted on my phone lockscreen, but I do enjoy reading other writing about the weather. Weather is a fundamental exercise in describing the natural world, as we have all once experienced it, as it becomes wholly individual to our lives.
In the false spring, I read this about the weather—weather at the center of how we mean anything to ourselves: “to acknowledge how absurd it is that time passes and yet here we are, standing in the middle of it, mixing memory and desire.”
seasons as a sort of symphonic poem.
My favorite guilty pleasure is the cult of TikToks that boast exclusive Amazon finds. For a few minutes of my time and under $30, I can have clearer skin, a nicer bathroom, a spotless kitchen. I am optimized. These short videos, slice of life, sing siren songs of attainment. At the bottom of the shopping cart is a better life, home, and self. I want to be better; if I spend the money, this genre says I can have something that looks like it all. Life gives lemons, and then I can be made.
Marie Kondo has never inspected a credit card statement. Nothing has been so compelling to the modern sphere of commerce as a material girl with a credit card bearing her name. And nothing has so wholly transformed the solid edges of my existence as a few of my favorite things—the things my fingers reach for, in the day and in the dark, grasping toward something greater. Everything within reach of my senses has a contour, an outline of my life rendered in shapes.
Precipitation coaxed me back inside: I saw some snow (soft, loose, fluffy), then some rain (hydrologic overlook, as an imminent meteorological disaster; more dour showers over a groggy city), then clouds bloomed over the pre-solstice skies. I haven’t written one of these in a while, but the end of the year looms menacingly and I’m keen to churn out a few writing projects in the remaining time.
This collection is the care diaries.
When some techno-futurist cracks my skull open to examine the makings that have moulded me into a full person (a retroactive vision board for the neural net, perhaps), they will find a fleeting glimpse of the second episode of Love Life, season 01. I love this scene so much. I’ve tried describing this scene in words many times before, but I come up short. Words are frail; this is visual synecdoche. What happens before or after in the story doesn’t matter as much as the emotional cinema of the moment. The details don’t quite capture the weight of it, the heaviness of what’s happening.
scene: The National’s “This is the Last Time” croons overhead (oh, when i lift you up, you feel—). Anna Kendrick sits in a near-empty subway car, slumped over a small box of her worldly possessions. She feels the tears coming before they show; she blinks, doesn’t want the tears to fall any faster. Bites her lip, but her mouth betrays a quiver. Her chin sinks into the palm of her right hand, and all is lost. Opens her eyes wide, reveals the flare of wet lashes. (and i said i wouldn’t cry about it.) She looks back, to the side, as if an audience is watching her little meltdown; but nobody is, everyone has their own problems in this city. There’s nowhere to hide.