Today’s journaling / reflection prompt: What are you longing for? What gaps do you want to bridge, and how does it make you feel to stay in this space?
There’s a scene in the pilot of NBC’s Superstore that makes me laugh then pause every time I think of it. Jonah, the “naive, useless” newbie who just joined the staff at a big box store encourages Amy, his manager, a jaded long-time worker, to appreciate the “moments of beauty” of the every day.
I’m probably misquoting, but he says something like, “Remember that scene in American Beauty? Where even a single floating plastic bag in the wind is a thing of beauty?”
He throws up a Cloud Nine plastic bag dramatically, only for it to fall, like a visual whimper, directly to the ground - and the scene carries on, no drifting solitary beautiful plastic bag swirling in the wind for us to land in.
The gag complete, because there is still something missing.
That absence fills up a beat larger than if I had watched the solitary plastic bag beautifully swirling in the wind with a dramatic voiceover, or the lingering moment of the penguin slowly walking into the unknown.
I’ve been drawn to this feeling lately, expecting each day to fill up with gusting, swirling wind, only to get that dull plastic bag that falls flat on the floor, observed and embarrassed by those expecting more of it.
When I start opening my heart to it, I see longing everywhere. I see the gaps between reality and expectation - and I feel my dreams diminishing. Maybe because I myself am longing for something, too. A displaced kind of willpower to “figure my life out” now reflected on all the things in the world that are beyond my control.
I wrote in my journal a month ago, in a flurry, “These days all I can think of, all I can dream up or hold, is small.”
The hairs that have emerged on the back of K’s neck after I give him a haircut. The world’s smallest flower, the size of an earring, in a friend’s bouquet.
My neighbor’s face, appearing as an indecipherable round projection, as I see him dancing, working, living in his flat day in, day out. I wouldn’t be able to recognize him if I passed him on the street, but I know all his habits from seeing him across the way, living his quiet life for the last 3 months - and realize with a sharp static zing that he, too, must make assumptions about me.
That which is small and universe-containing that we carry with us - toothaches, small items, a smile - that one day depart us, with no prelude.
It shocks me whenever life, so secure in its constancy and plainness, can also move forward ferociously, without warning.
It’s a new form of wonder that feels dark, that intimidates and moves me, all at once. Not the beautiful, picturesque sun-kissed moments I used to look for, gush about, but the slow moving dense clouds over an otherwise bleak rainstorm. They, too, are beautiful, in their own way.
It’s the feeling that part of what makes a memory worth holding onto is not just the joy and ecstasy, but a low thrum of lack and want, and powerful yearning whose push and pull lies in always, naively, uselessly, trying to be more sweet than bitter.
What does it mean to live always in the present? My future feels uncertain, and my past seems far away, a distant idea of another life.
I think of conversations with my dear friend who is going through a breakup. We speak of the process itself, how there are good days and bad days, measured by the distance to longing after what was, and the idea of what could be.
Maybe it’s this: discovering that what I’m seeking is a feeling. Small and immense, maybe fleeting. Something I once took for granted; something I can still contain, that has escaped me. It is not happiness - I feel happy most days - but something more expansive I can’t quite put into words. Maybe fulfillment. Something richer I can fill myself up with or fall into. A bottomless, floor-giving-out space.
And as nagging as this longing is - that I am not quite where I need to be - the going feels meaningful. I hope to return to myself, to arrive at a future me that feels whole. Everything I’m writing these days feels vague, and that’s ok. It’s part of the process.
As I keep spelling out in that ratty journal every morning, “the important thing is to begin again.”
Margin Notes
Hello dear friend. What a wonderful time to be alive - started out wanting to write about how funny and subversively clever Superstore was, and ended up drifting into…well, this.
K poked his head in halfway through on my hour-long rampage through my feels and was intimidated by how still and sad I was. This, too - scaring your partner off with biweekly communion with weird late-onset growing pains and emotional maturing - must be part of the process too, haha.
I’m sorry I’ve been away - I started writing #21 a bunch of times, but nothing felt right, until today. Wherever this letter finds you today, I hope you are noticing, and taking care.
Until next time, be well, sending you big hugs, Kerri
Photo by Carlos on Unsplash
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