Everything

Is enough.

Exploring the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959) by Remedios Varo

A few weeks ago, we drove to a farm a few miles away from our house to pick strawberries. My oldest daughter dresses for every occasion like she’s an extra on the set of a movie about that activity, and this day was no different. She wore oversized jeans, a white peasant blouse, and a red bandana tied around her head: Wholesome Farm Girl #3. My youngest daughter dressed as herself, a skeptical seventh grader. But after a few minutes of filling our baskets with ripe red strawberries under dark gray clouds threatening rain, both girls were cracking jokes and maybe even savoring our new proximity to this old-timey scene, these cousins selling homemade pound cake and honey from the family bees. I bought a jar of honey and two pound cakes even though Bill was certain that one was enough.

A few days later I felt a sore throat coming on right before dinner with my family — mother, sister, husband, kids, cousins. My sister said she had a test. I sat at the kitchen table alone and stared at it for fifteen minutes, sure that it would be positive this time, and it was. Then I put on a mask and walked out the front door and got in the car and rolled down the windows and the kids got into the car, already yelling about how they couldn’t miss school during finals or the planet would tumble out of orbit and into the dark void of space. When we got home I grabbed the electric kettle and the black tea and the good jar of honey from the strawberry farm and I climbed the stairs to our bedroom and closed the door behind me.

Every morning when I made my tea on the bathroom sink, even when I felt stuffy and sick, I thought, This honey is nothing like regular honey. It’s so much more complex, so much more satisfying. It transforms my ordinary tea into a garden full of flowers. But there are also these strange hints of spice, hard to put my finger on, like a faint whiff of ginger, not quite a taste, a sweet temporary breeze from a magnolia tree, an echo of a childhood memory, a sensation of falling, but it’s fine, you’re home, it’s good, you’re safe.

Yesterday, I used the last drops of the honey from the jar and then came out of quarantine.

This morning I woke up at 4 am feeling sad. I finally gave up on sleep at 5 am and came downstairs and turned on the light and found a millipede in the bathroom sink. I crushed it with a tissue and felt a little guilty as I threw it in the trash. I always feel a little guilty.

Then I made my tea with normal honey from a bear-shaped bottle. When I had a spoonful to see if the tea was sweet enough, it tasted like water. No flavor at all. No drift of ginger and magnolia. More like licking a mud puddle.

Today is my birthday.

***

Everything you have is all I want: every random thought, every strand of feeling, carefully categorized hopes, indexed and cross-referenced for easy access, each little undercurrent of  despair. I want all of your oldest stories, your favorite bear, your ugliest shoes, your hardest day, your longest goodbye. I need each of your love letters, in one big box, to unfold and read and fold again. I require every soggy mood and each extended monologue, digressing and drifting, every musty corner of each damp basement, this fearless introduction, this regretful explanation, this hesitant request, this buoyant updraft of honeysuckle, this conquest, this absence, this loss.

Anything less won’t be nearly enough. I woke up this morning and I could feel the truth of it. You will bring me a small sack of things – a hammer, a notebook, a bruised apple — and I’ll look past your shoulder and see a palace made of gold and I won’t know what to say.

Anything I say won’t be nearly enough.

And everything I bring you will never add up to much of anything at all. I guess that’s romance: knowing in your heart that you’ll never be good enough, never bring enough to the table, never have enough to show for yourself, never prove yourself worthy, destined to be buried in the plot of the unknown. Romance is showing up with your favorite books and your worst poems, your darkest hours and your prettiest dress, and knowing that it’s too much. Somehow, your too much turns you into nothing at all, an unfinished story, an unknown plot.

Romance is joining Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition down the Orinoco, knowing that El Dorado doesn’t exist. Romance is opening your mouth to say something pure and real and realizing that it’s all a big mistake, no gold or lost city was ever found and now you’re just exaggerating, you had power once but now you’re just an insect with too many legs, crawling out of the drain pipe and into the light.  

But an insect is never content with some dark corner of the room. An insect wants its cousins to move in down the hall, it wants its grandmother in the attic, it wants a million of its ugly babies in the cupboards. An insect says Anything less than everything will crush me eventually.

So go ahead and crush me now. Your something is the same thing as nothing to me. I need everything. So go ahead. Get it over with.

***

This is how my new favorite friend becomes an extra, dressed to fit the part, poised to mouth the right words while slowly backing out of the scene.

But dude. Listen to me. I don’t fucking care. Do you understand? I cannot care. I’ve spent my whole life backing away from passion, crushing my most faithful allies, fleeing every awkward question mark, or cosplaying devotion until I was too numb to try anymore, telling myself that a sack with a rusty butter knife and a tattered paperback in it was better than a palace made of gold.

I’m not living that way anymore. Now I feel everything. Now I sprout a thousand legs and crawl back into the pipe to hide until it’s safe to come out again. And look, I hate to tell you this, but my cousins moved in down the hall on the first of the month. My grandmother has already settled into the attic, and she’s selling homemade pound cake every Saturday and most Sundays. I just set up my millions of babies in the dorm rooms behind your broom closet. You can set out cookies for us or just call an exterminator. Either way, we’re here for good.

And even if you try, you’ll never forget the sense memory of meeting your perfect friend, a glorious nightmare made of magnolia blossoms, a rotten dream building a city of gold out of thin air, quivering antennae always searching for more, always feeling around for everything. It feels creepy because it is creepy.

Less than everything isn’t nothing, but that’s how it feels sometimes. And once you stop praying at the temple of nothing with everyone else, that’s how it’ll feel for you, too.

***

If you want to write about passion, you have to risk sounding insane. Real passion makes you sound like Kafka, Roth, Miller, Dickinson, Bowles. You know, except stupider. But every now and then, you sound almost as smart and twice as insane and that’s when everything comes together.

If you want to feel your passions intensely, you have to risk feeling insane. You have to wear the ugly shoes to get the box of love letters. You have to drive to the muddy farm, under steel gray clouds, to find another jar full of liquid blossoms. You have to tolerate a million tiny legs, scampering through your broom closet, to understand how it might feel to navigate this cold world with a heart that’s wide open to the chaos of nature.

You can’t just wear the costume, stand on this gray X of duct tape, engage in heated silent conversation with another costumed extra, gesturing enthusiastically but feeling nothing, always prepared to ooo and ahhh on cue. You have to miss your mark, forget your lines, drag your sad ass to the center of the stage, and pull on a stray thread of what you want, what you need, what you’ve always craved but you’ve never really had, not really, never really, and you have to look out into the darkness, beyond the stage, and say

This isn’t enough for me. It might be enough for you but it’s not for me. I need more than this.

You can feel your legs start to multiply, your antennae start to twitch. You can hear them muttering in the front row, Don’t do this, no one does this. The darkness of the drain pipe is calling.

Stand your ground.

Today is my birthday. I’m not stooping to lick mud puddles anymore. I worship at the temple of everything now, updrafts of wet oak tree and bruised lip and salty oyster shell, hints of sheer rock cliff and band director and broken typewriter and my dad’s sad stories about the Great Flood, the one that swept everything away, the one that took everything, the kitchen table and the chicken coop and the tattered books, the crocheted blankets and the boxes of love letters, the pickled cabbage, the black rosary beads, the love worn chair, the long exhale of smoke across the garden at twilight, the years of waiting, of saying too little, of backing away slowly, of disappearing for good, everything.

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