Dear Mariam,
Today is the anniversary of my first message to you. You texted me about it just moments ago. Surreal that that year of our exchange is bookended so neatly. What you have told me so far about your life in Harlem sounds magical. And when I think of who and where I was when we first started emailing it's almost dizzying. Summer 2021 to summer 2022 will always be the year of Mariam to me. I’ll always treasure that period as one of deep deep expansion no matter where we go from here.
The idea I had for this email, oddly enough, was "happy graduation".
Meg had her final year show in June and will graduate this coming November, but two weeks ago when we went out to dinner in Uzès, she proposed a toast to MY graduation.
It took a long time to feel real to me, as I've told you many times, but this week it's becoming real. Maybe it's the first hints of autumn. All over french cities and towns are signs of "la rentrée", schoolbags and bullet planners on sale, autumn wardrobes in shop windows. That anticipation of the end of summer and the return to 'real life', as it were. Yet for the first time I am managing not to return at all. But to march onwards.
I finally feel the closing of the chapter in Dublin. That one that started with the relapse in 2017 that put me in bed for almost two years. My first experience living alone, trying to build a life and build a body and build stamina all at once. It was magical and visceral and life in the realest sense- yet it still incubatory in some ways. I said to my mum on the phone today that my association with that apartment is that it was always supposed to be the place that rehabilitated me, a landing place to rest and recover when everything fell apart. There is something about the uncertainty of this moment that suddenly feels so HEALTHY- like I'm betting in myself to figure stuff out, like I'm ABLE. Not abled, but ABLE, you know?
Anyway. I feel like I'm graduating. I actually do. Not in a minor milestone, this-feels-significant way, but in a like top-three-all-time-definitive-moments way.
Like I could divide my life into childhood, adolescence, the apartment years, and now, whatever this will turn out to be.
When I was leaving school I felt this huge sense of possibility. That sense is coming to me slowly now. I remember at that point having such a sense of who I had become over those six years. That's the thing about graduations, they suddenly clarify everything. You're no longer IN the period in question, and the second you get out of it, you turn around and there it all is, laid out like a perfect puzzle.
I wonder if you feel the same way? Leaving the city of one's birth is such a feeling of graduation. There is so much association in places, they hold stories and histories, sometimes so many stories that it's suffocating. In my case I'm leaving not just a city or state but a country, not only my own history but that of my ancestors and people, who's stories and histories can overwhelm me as much as my own do.
When I left school I was excited for what was ahead but I had no sense of having chosen it in any meaningful way, of having made decisive and considered moves in service of my own desires.
In that sense, this might be my very FIRST graduation- that graduation which takes us from the goalposts that adults have laid for us on the ground, into true adulthood, the construction of our own goalposts, the writing of our own map towards ourselves, and then audaciously following it to the place where nobody else has ever been!
I'm gonna leave you with something I wrote in my diary two months ago:
I toasted her at the graduation ceremony,
the baptisms,
weddings,
the tables when people inquired about the lives of others and
received succinct answers.
For some of us there are stretches of time without ceremony,
great planes of life,
spacious, wide,
unobstructed-
so open and empty yet so easy to get completely lost in.
I steel myself, I take a breath-
for a moment I lose myself to fear of the wilderness.
I breathe slower.
I extract water from a rock.
I go on.
*
I have accomplished nothing! I scold myself at the ceremony.
I am arrested, I am stagnant!
You are 24, whispers a kinder voice from somewhere in there.
You need not have accomplished anything by 24!
*
I find this line of thought reassuring, I let her go on.
Yes, it's okay that you've achieved nothing at all-
nothing except boundless love,
those friends you would paint onto the ceiling of the cistine chapel in gold;
A woman you give your heart to each day without fear;
a family you love so much it makes you terrified.
Nothing much
but an illness battled and courageously tamed;
patterns remoulded and reshaped
in the image you invented out of nowhere (like a god!);
a god found;
a god lost;
music notation;
cinematography;
the passé composé.
Nothing at all-
well except the novel, even if it isn't any good yet;
and what about that time you were kind?
And kind again?
and what about the time you failed to be kind and forgave yourself?
What about the time you tried to change a country, and,
like a droplet of rain in the ocean,
like a crucial part of a much larger whole,
you did it?
*
There are no ceremonies in this patch of land.
Tiring work, no places to rest on your successes,
no great peaks to admire the valleys you've crossed,
no medals, no titles.
One walks the planes, like any great and fruitless walk, as an act of faith.
As a love letter to life itself,
and to the inaliable, self justified value
of time.
This is a love letter to you, fellow pilgrim.
Bon Voyage.
Safe passage.
Well, holy shit, this hit home. Happy graduation!