Patreon Letter - 1st of June, 2019

I wish that photo above was mine, because it looks nice as hell. Alas, it is not.

CW: death and grief stuff, nothing too intense

Hi everyone, Em here today with another letter. I think Jackson's one from last week is coming along presently, so thank you for your patience. I am hellbent on getting this out on time so I can enjoy the rest of my weekend without it hanging over my head! So let's get into it.

When I took over the apartment after my dad died, a large portion of the cleaning out of his stuff was done right away in the first two months when it was easier to throw things away than worry about grieving. That left the apartment in a pretty refreshed state where I didn't get reminded of him very often, which is good. The one exception was the large garden he had built outside, which we took another 7 months to really dig up and throw away, long after the adrenaline of fresh trauma had turned to the dull, endless exhaustion of a new normal. Mistakes were made.

If you question the idea of a large garden in an apartment I'm with you. My father had a real green thumb that nobody else in my family has, and had converted our small cement patio of our ground floor apartment into a full on flower garden by building planters and large fenced soil areas right on top of the patio. It was so much, and took forever to break down and dig up to make the patio usable by humans, a full year's project around the edges of free time that was made worse by how labor intensive and bad the whole thing felt in terms of knowing it wasn't going to be replaced by anything of note other than a bare patio. 

It got done, though honestly there's still work to be done to get rid of all the little rocks and wood chips that turn up now and then in the grass around the patio. But it was only now that it's finally warmed up and I did a little more cleaning that the patio actually felt like a place that was fit for use, turned over back into a fresh space with the long winter. 

So I'm using it, dragging out a chair and a little table to read in the evenings when the sun is on the other side of the building and it's shaded and pleasant. Much like the photo above I normally grab a big glass of iced tea and kill an hour trying very hard not to read twitter compulsively which is my usual anxiety reaction to being outdoors for any length of time. It's nice, if a little sad in that shaggy dull ill defined way stuff is sad over years and years and not just in the moment. I remember growing up my dad doing the same thing, sitting on a porch swing at the house I grew up in, sometimes dragging me out to join him when all I wanted to do is sit in the basement and play video games.

Speaking of, does anyone have any good go to iced teas? I'm getting tired of the standard ass lipton iced tea I've been using, and none of the hot teas I have taste particularly good iced. I'm not especially picky, I am drinking lipton. Anything is an improvement.

All these strange feelings are compounded by the neighbors, all of whom were on good terms with my father because he was personable and always out there. I've had no less than three people come up to me and talk about how it's nice to see someone out here again, and how strange it's been for everything to be left and then emptied out with nothing in its place. Which is a true thing, and reasonable to say, but also its own strange type of trauma where people tell you the things you've lived most poignantly as their small environmental sadnesses. 

I get that sharing them with me is a way to remember my father, but I'm already doing that enough on my own by just being out there. And yet, I'm not exactly upset by this, because it's nice to know that he's remembered by these people and that what I consider an important and restorative cycle of coming back and reclaiming this space as a happy one is also important to people I don't even know the names of. 

I don't have any grand conclusion to all this, other than it's nice to sit outside and read, but please also remember to bring sunscreen, because I'm as anxious about skin cancer as I am talking to strangers who've lived next to me for years. And that sometimes things are sad and nice in ways that it's hard to have precise language for, and those things are worth sitting with even if you can't do anything with them. Because sometimes it's just like that.

Until next time,

Em