&c.
They told me it was around midnight, when my grandfather died. Almost four months now and it is not sad anymore as much as it is strange. An entire summer gone without him. I can still remember the exact way he said hello. Every conversation spent trickling backwards to when he was my age, in the Navy, all those times he sailed into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My nieces are too young to ask where he’s gone. We called him Pop. I never gave him as much time as I should have.
The week he died I did a lot of things. I decided I would finally leave New York, the city I’ve lived in for the past three years, called “home,” sometimes, felt a part of, hardly ever. I decided I would go back to school; I signed up for the GREs. I took them only last week. I did better than I expected.
The week he died I sat down at my computer and started from scratch, throwing out a story I’ve been working on for years, a story that’s come to me in bits and pieces since my early months of college. I’ve written more in four months than I’ve written in years. Everything else can fall apart - everything else can crumble around me, but if I am writing productively, if I am creating something out of nothing, I am happy.
Other things, I’ve spent less time on. The internet, my journaling, my social life. I’ve created a world for myself in my apartment and I’ve committed myself to a final goal. I feel happiest on mornings when I write for hours. I feel completely dejected if inspiration won’t come.
I’ve been working on other projects, slowly. I’m writing a movie with my best friend based entirely on one conversation we had in Madrid. I am taking care of her blog while she is away on a mini-vacation (one post, so far, regarding my distinct lack of religious tendencies). I am trying to think directly about things I have never thought directly about before. My motives. My deficiencies. The things I excel at.
It is hard to look at oneself and see anything different. In my experience, at least, we develop an opinion of ourselves and then it is unwavering. We are unfaltering in our dedication to it. I am trying to shatter that opinion, to create a new one that encompasses all the ways I have changed in the past three years. Every moment of every day brings some new molecule to how I hold myself, to how I like and dislike myself.
It sounds cliche to say that everything is changing, but it is. The seasons, the scenery, the situations.
Even the way I approach my writing, that has changed.
From death a new life, etc.
