Stephanie
9:02am / my bed
Still a little pain this morning from my skinned knee, though the remaining scab is only about the size of a penny now.
The cat isn’t on her perch in the window when I go downstairs, so I don’t greet her or join her to look at birds.
It is hard to write about a day and live it at the same time. Maybe that’s just me, overthinking.
It’s easy to leave out details: unwashed muffin tin on the stove, orange bowl of apples, little stripe of cat vomit on the tile.
Getting back in bed with a French press full of coffee is one of life’s great pleasures, mine anyway.
9:37am / my bed
I needed to find a poem to bring to my writing group, so I went casting around in the piles of unread books on my dresser. One I picked up seemed too conceptual, and another too sad and historic, so I went with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s I Love Artists, which I feel like I’ve already read but have not, actually, not in full anyway. I pick up my phone and try to find out what happens if you cut or scrape an area of skin that was already scarred, if the old scar is scraped away, but this is impossible to google.
11:38am / spruce hill community association
First I walked to the bakery to bring Ashley an apple from the bag we picked at an orchard on Friday, “the eating apple.” The rest are for a pie I want to make later, but I forgot to thaw the pie crusts last night. Suspense enters the day: what will happen with the pie.
It’s about a 20 minute walk from my house to the Spruce Hill Community Association where, for the past four months, I have gone every Sunday morning (except twice) to a writing group I started. Brooke is sitting on a stoop outside in the sun eating a bagel when I arrive.
I considered on the walk here which details to mention, but by the time I arrive and have a moment to write, I find I have forgotten most of them. Right now I’m supposed to be writing a poem but I’m writing this instead. There are six of us at a table, writing, plus Tobey’s son who is eating cheddar bunnies and watching something on an iPad in a sturdy blue case.
2:06pm / clark park
After writing a not very good poem, I walked to the Green Line Cafe where I bought a bagel (raisin, kind of an unusual choice for me) and more coffee. I walked most of the way there with Sam and Brooke, and then just Brooke. After writing and reading together, our little group stood outside in the sun. ebs announced that tomorrow will be my birthday, so everyone wished me a happy early birthday. On the walk, I described to Brooke the tattoo I am getting tomorrow. “It’s like a void wearing a headscarf, like the kind a grandma would wear on a windy day,” I explain. “Maybe it’s windy in the void,” Brooke said. Sam described their new kitten, who was sick when they brought him home from the shelter, his tiny nose full of snot.
In the park, I sit on a bench next to a pair of folded up sweatpants. People, mostly old men, are playing chess. One pair has a speaker from which they play Stevie Wonder, and then War.
I go to message Ashley because a guy in a motorized wheelchair that rattles loudly because it is stashed full of empty cans, who we’d seen on the street the other day, wheels past me in the park. I see they had messaged me: “I love this apple.”
This morning, ebs read a passage from Alice Notley’s Songs and Stories of the Ghouls. I chose the Mei-mei Berssenbrugge poem “Concordance”: “Milkweed I touch floats.”
I call Sampson, my editor and publisher, to catch up and make some plans about a NYC reading to promote my new book. Midway through writing that sentence I pause and turn my head and see a bee land next to a leaf.
I used to be really opposed to routine, on like a philosophical or even political level. But for months now, on Sundays I go to my writing group at 11am, then pass a few hours eating lunch and walking or sitting in the park or reading or running errands in the neighborhood, and then go to a recovery meeting in the yoga studio at 3pm, and I take real pleasure from the consistent shape of this day.
I have lived in West Philly for more than four years, plus for a year a decade ago, and, for better or worse, it feels like home. “The trees—,” everyone says, when they talk about the neighborhood, including me. And I like that so many of my friends live nearby, or how often I walk down a street thinking about when so-and-so lived there, or someone I slept with once, or a show or party I went to, or just a time I walked down that block feeling very sad. A little map, private.
2:45pm / same bench
I spend a little while staring into space and looking up apple pie recipes, though I know I’m just going to improvise.
5:39pm / my bed
When I get home, I feel strangely tired. I never nap. I just usually can’t. Once every year or two it will happen, and I napped one afternoon a few months ago, so I’m not due for a while. But I do take off my pants and get under the covers and turn off the lamp. I look at Twitter and Instagram and then put on a YouTube video where a woman whose cadence I find extremely soothing applies 45 different lip products. I don’t own or wear any lip products. I masturbate and then go downstairs to get a few mini chocolate chip cookies I bought from Target the other day.
Earlier at the meeting we discussed the nonlinear nature of “recovery.” I’ve been having kind of a hard time lately. I’ve been looking for a job, and I got in a minor bike accident a couple weeks ago. After deciding I needed to stop adjuncting this summer after UArts closed, I’d been hoping to have found some other job by now, in late October, and to be able to start moving towards the other things I’ve been trying to move towards. Instead, for much of the last month I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos, worrying about money, and feeling quite bleak, to be honest, about the prospect of life in America. The wall to wall billboards and yard signs and ambient election anxiety are surely not helping. It does help to talk about my feelings in a room with semi-strangers at a recovery meeting. I like this particular meeting because it often feels like a convivial group project where the project is just all of us figuring out how to stay alive.
On the way home I stopped at Fu-Wah for two lemons, brown sugar, and an almost $9 box of Cheerios. I know I shouldn’t buy the Cheerios there because they’re so expensive, but I’m out of cereal, which I eat nearly every day. Plus, I am fond of Fu-Wah. People in West Philly love to say they have the best banh mi in Philadelphia, which is a really silly and untrue thing to say, but it is true that they are good, and special, and a mainstay of the neighborhood, and buying a tofu hoagie and a bag of chips and a can of fancy soda and taking it to eat in the park with a friend or someone you love is an especially good way to pass an afternoon.
7:55pm / my kitchen counter
My pie is in the oven. I very rarely bake because my housemate Chris has celiac so I don’t keep flour around. I used a premade pie crust from Trader Joe’s, which I learn from reddit is despised by many, but which I quite like. I don’t know if the pie will be good to those who know things about baking, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy eating it.
8:05 pm / my bed
I decide to get in bed and read while I wait for the pie to bake. I feel a little restless. I had been in the habit lately of biking at least 30 miles per week, but haven’t been able to since my bike accident. I don’t fetishize fitness or wellness like that, but exercise does feel like it hoses out my brain.
I’ve been having a hard time reading as much as I usually do lately, a hard time focusing. But I finally tracked down a copy of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection after hearing him read at Alina’s Liner Notes series last month, and it’s filthy and making me laugh out loud, so if nothing else it’s pierced through the fog.
I usually read in bed. I do a lot of things in bed. I live in a small, narrow row home with a housemate and the downstairs is all one room. Especially since getting sober, I like privacy and to be uninterrupted, so I spend a lot of time when I’m home in my room, which is only a little larger than my bed. I hope to live alone soon, but first I need a job, so for now, I make my bed as nice a place to be in as I can.
I had the thought downstairs that writing all this throughout my day feels a bit like when you have someone over to your house for the first time, and feel exposed to have a stranger survey your shelves, your skincare, your tchotchkes, the strange intimacy, the way you notice things about yourself and your life by considering someone else noticing them. I feel like I haven’t, metaphorically, tidied up my room for a visitor: you, the reader, reading about my day. I must confess that being on the other side of this intimate survey, though, seeing inside someone else’s home and life, is to me another of life’s great pleasures.
9:39pm / my bed
The pie is out of the oven and the whole house smells like pie. Ursula (the cat) was sitting right at the bottom of the stairs each time I went down to check on it, asking to be tripped over. I’m going to eat a slice in a little while after it has more time to cool, and probably again in the morning, with coffee.
I feel a little anxious about tomorrow as a Monday, even though I’m not working. Earlier, I idly checked a few job websites on my phone, as I tend to do, just seeing if anything has been posted I want to apply for. I never know quite what I’m hoping to see. I don’t want to make myself apply for jobs tomorrow, on my birthday, but sometimes it’s the only task that can take the dread down a notch.
Will read a poem at the reading last night that said something about desiring discipline as part of queer poetics. I’ve been turning this over all day in the back of my mind, not sure what I think. I decide to make a to-do list to try and clear some of the worry. It’s just a list of people to email and a reminder to pack a sandwich before I leave the house.
10:23pm / my bed
In an hour and a half it will be my birthday, and I will turn 36. In the shower I realize this is the first full year of my life I have spent sober since I was maybe 16, and also that the one year anniversary of my starting T came and went a few days ago. I am in the midst of rearranging nearly everything in my life. Maybe everyone kind of is all the time, I don’t know. It’s exhausting. But I am now, mostly, glad enough to be here.
11:53pm / my bed
Some final thoughts on the pie: it doesn’t hold together but it does taste good.
Stephanie is a poet in Philadelphia. They got a job offer the morning after writing this entry, so soon they will also be a paralegal. You can find their books and poems at stephaniecawley.com, and you can follow them on instagram @no_moreflowers.
