sweet talk

renewal through readiness

“Please Please Please” was released by Sabrina Carpenter on June 6^th, 2024. It followed the chart-topping success of “Espresso,” the first song off her latest album Short n’ Sweet. As spring turned to summer, “Espresso” played everywhere, especially in coffee shops, especially on the college campus where I was finishing up my last semester before we would move back to California. I had signed a contract renewal to teach again in the fall and then had to break that contract when my husband got the news of his job offer. Everyone understood. Everyone wished me the best of luck. No one knew that I had been in and out of doctors’ offices since the new year, all the ultrasounds and MRIs and bloodwork trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

I can’t relate to desperation / My give-a-fucks are on vacation played while I signed paperwork and waited under fluorescent lights to hear my name called, to enter an exam room and strip down to a paper gown. Brat Summer was upon us, but it didn’t feel very “brat” to be diagnosed with liver lesions.

Has my body not been through enough? Not a Sabrina Carpenter lyric, but my own thought that repeated on loop. Hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, an emergency cesarean section, postpartum psychosis— just to name a few things from the last calendar year.

Why couldn’t the random pain I felt in my side be nothing and not a cause for concern. Why did it have to be something?

I was told I needed to get off birth control in order to subdue the liver lesions, to completely change my diet (when I was already fifteen pounds down my pre-pregnancy weight), to quit smoking and drinking (I did neither), and to absolutely not get pregnant again anytime soon because hormones majorly affect the liver and could be the thing that caused the issue in the first place. I was told that my only option for birth control was a copper IUD, a non-hormonal device that would last 10-12 years.

On June 11^th, 2024, I went to my OB for the IUD to be placed. The procedure lasted all of ten minutes. I don’t remember leaving the office, or the car ride home, but I remember stopping for bagels with my husband and feeling a sudden ripping and tearing sensation in my abdomen, so severe that I couldn’t stand or support my own weight.

I knew something was wrong, but I pretended it wasn’t for another 6 hours.

*

Sivan is the third month of the Hebrew calendar that falls during May and June. It’s primarily known as the month the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai and celebrated the holiday of Shavuot. The Zodiac sign associated with Sivan is Gemini, the Twins, representing the integration of the spiritual and the physical. This momentous occasion is celebrated by eating dairy products and staying up all night studying scripture.

In Jewish tradition, Sivan represents alignment, divine instruction, and abundance. It serves as a transition from the deliverance of Passover to the spiritual empowerment of receiving God’s word.

The Torah is an oath, a promise, and the Jewish people accepted it without even knowing what was inside. It was an act of faith to make this sort of contract with G-d. It was, and continues to be, a collective experience for Jews.

Your soul was there.

Our souls were there.

Even though none of the women at my Rosh Chodesh group were actually there, we were all there in spirit.

Our group leader tells us that Shavuot, the day marking the giving of the Torah, is like renewing marriage vows. “Each year we fall more in love, we can enter the relationship with a new consciousness.” She talks about how we’re not the same person as last year, as ten years ago, and as we change, our awareness and perception grow. It’s a chance for us to identify what in our life needs rekindling.

“What in your life needs renewal, more trust, more presence, more intention?” she asks.

On Memorial Day of this year, Carl and I will have known each other for 10 years. On June 1^st, we will celebrate our 7-year marriage anniversary. So many couples get married in spring and summer, the perfect time of year for an outdoor wedding ceremony, for people to be off work on long-weekends and holidays, for good weather and good vibes. But on a deeper level, there must be some cultural intuition that this is the season of commitment and renewal.

I’ve been coming to the group for 6 months now. It’s not always easy to show up. Sometimes I feel like I’m dragging everybody down because I always have some crisis or complication happening in my life, or that I have nothing new to share because I’m still anxious, still listless.

But I show up regardless, and each time, I’m glad for it. I’m grateful that I don’t have to arrive with big news or something lovely to say. I just have to show up as myself—that commitment alone is enough.

*

I read Sweet Talk in the waiting room for the sports medicine doctor. My knee is in a brace that I panic-ordered from Amazon when I realized something was wrong. Overstretching in a yoga class led to a patellar subluxation, which led to a doctor’s visit and a series of x-rays, which led to a prescription for physical therapy and a referral to a sports medicine doctor. I wear the pink and gray brace from online and its cheap, thick straps cut into my upper thigh.

A friend had told me about Stephanie Vaughn’s work. She sent me a reading of “Dog Heaven” that I listened to on my podcast app, Tobias Wolff reading for The New Yorker back in 2008. The story is sharp, funny, tender. I cried hard at the end and knew I had to immediately order the whole book, and so I did. Sweet Talk was published in 1990. It’s a collection of interconnected stories that follow characters as they grapple with the lasting influence of family, of loss, and the search for belonging. At its center is Gemma, whose experiences growing up in an army family echo throughout the book, resurfacing in stories that revisit her adulthood. Together, the pieces chart the ways childhood shapes identity and how our understanding of ourselves evolves over time.

“Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” is the first story in the collection, and I finish it between the time I spend in the waiting room and the time it takes for the doctor to come in and see me. The story is about a father whose military career collapses and his daughter as witness to his flaws: he is charismatic, intelligent, and deeply influential, but also volatile and self-destructive.

At its core, the story is about how children come to understand their parents as complicated human beings, people who can be both admirable and deeply wounded. It’s also about memory, love, disappointment, and the struggle to preserve a fuller version of someone after they’re gone.

I’d looked up reviews of the sports medicine doctor online, and patients were unanimous on the fact that the doctor was extremely knowledgeable and helpful, but also brusque and curt. I found both to be true. He was in the room with me for under 5 minutes, and it was his nurse that spent more time with me and answered all my nervous questions. I wanted to know if I should not carry my daughter up the stairs, or carry her at all, and if I should wear the brace all the time, as in like every waking minute of the day. The nurse brought in a new brace, one that was much more comfortable and looked much more expensive.

“Is this going to cost 700 dollars?” I asked. “We bill insurance,” she said and laughed.

I wanted to know when I would get better, if I’d ever be back to normal. For this she had no real answer.

“We try the physical therapy,” she said. “We wear the brace. We do all the things. And then in a few months, we check back in and see how you’re doing.”

The physical therapist I’d been assigned to, who had the same name as my brother, said similar things in response to my same questions: you come here and do the exercises and then we see if you need to keep coming here and doing them.

I wanted a date on the calendar, a timeframe at least. I wanted a surefire answer. What I got was basically Listen to your body.

It’s probably not a surprise that I have a very hard time slowing down and taking a break. Rest is a word that simply just does not feel like it pertains to me. I feel like if I slow down, I’ll miss something, mess something up, and it’ll all go to shit.

But the knee injury, albeit minor, forced me to take it easy for a bit. And opposite of what I’d assumed would be the case, I actually got a lot done during that time. I read more, for one, and I didn’t fall off my writing schedule. I applied for more jobs and updated my teaching pool applications, which led to me getting an interview and securing something solid for the fall. It forced me to be more present with my husband and my daughter because I couldn’t be literally running around all over the house and instead, I’d park myself on the floor right in the middle of the action of whatever my toddler was doing. It made me more careful with my body. I am so often careless with it, throwing it around into different shapes in workout classes and accepting a forever-state of dehydration.

It wasn’t too long before I was able to walk long distances, before I could go back to yoga and carrying my daughter, even before the brace came off and I just had to “be mindful,” a concept I’d learned in yoga teacher training that hadn’t brought itself into practice in my life until now.

“Are you pushing against the river, or letting it push you,” a yoga teacher said in class almost a decade ago and it never left my brain. This concept of the river and how we are either resistant to it or we let it take us where it wants to go.

“The river fascinated me. I often stood between the yellow curtains of my bedroom and looked down upon it and thought about how deep and swift it was, how black under the glittering surface. The newspaper carried stories about people who jumped over the Falls, fourteen miles upriver from our house. I thought of their bodies pushed along the soft silt of the bottom, tumbling silently, huddled in upon themselves like fetuses—jilted brides, unemployed factory workers, old people who did not want to go to rest homes, teenagers who got bad grades, young women who fell in love with married men. They floated invisibly past my bedroom window, out into the lake.” – from “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” by Stephanie Vaughn

The river as a magnet for despair.

The river is a final, unifying destination for those overwhelmed with life’s burdens. A journey into oblivion. While Vaughn’s narrator, Gemma, means to be morbid here, I think most times we hear about going with the flow, it’s aimed at aligning us with a more peaceful existence, one that promises harmony.

If we let the river carry us, will we find peace?

I think of the “River of Dreams” by Billy Joel:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross

Even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for

*

There is a bodywork and massage therapist at my yoga studio who specializes in the type of woo-woo that I ascribe to. She combines myofascial release and Reiki and whenever I have a session with her, I always leave feeling emotionally and physically sore, but in a good way.

“This is more than a massage,” as stated in her services description. “It’s a powerful opportunity to reconnect, reset, and experience lasting relief and renewal.”

I booked a session so she could take a look, and feel, at my leg. At one point while she was working on my lower back, she asked me to describe what I was seeing.

“I see a river, but it’s flowing in all different directions. It feels disjointed. Gray. Stuck in some places. Moving too fast in others.”

“What does that feel like?” she says.

“Chaotic.”

“What would it feel like if the river was moving all together?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “That feels really impossible.”

“Are you in the river?” she says.

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

“So, you’re not in the river, you’re just thinking about the river?”

“Whoa,” I say. “I feel like that’s literally the source of all my anxiety.”

We wrap up the session but I keep thinking about the chaotic river and how it’s all in my head. And how there is a version of my life that involves actually being in the river instead of just thinking about it, ruminating, obsessing. Just being in it and not trying to change or control it or even monitor it.

It feels impossible to let the river be the river, but it also feels entirely necessary, and like hey it’s about fucking time.

*

My husband, Carl, attends a service at a Serbian Orthodox Church for the Pentecost. It’s a Christian holiday celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary, the Apostles and followers of Christ. My husband’s boss is Serbian, and she’s been inviting him to the church for years. This time it felt important for him to go and see what it was all about. During the service, which was almost 3 hours long, the congregation read from Acts 2, which contains the story of the first Pentecost when Jesus’s disciples were gathered together when the Holy Spirit came upon them with the sound of a rushing wind and what looked like tongues of fire.

Filled with the Holy Spirit, they began speaking different languages, allowing people from many nations in Jerusalem to understand them. There is also a sermon from Peter who explains that these events fulfill the prophecy and proclaim Jesus’s resurrection. Carl was mesmerized by the traditional hymns sung by the choir, by the decorated sanctuary—all the red banners and flowers and vestments to symbolize the flames that appeared over the disciples. The service itself emphasizes spiritual renewal, unity, and the beginning of the church’s mission in the world.

“At some point during the service,” Carl told me, “There was a beam of light shining down on me and I felt what I can only describe as grace, just this pure, calm, grace for me, for you, for Elaine, for all of us.”

Later, I look up images of the church and see that it has an oculus, an opening at the center of the domed ceiling. Oculus comes from the Latin word for “eye,” and in a church, the oculus is designed to serve as the single source of natural light, acting like a celestial sundial while also symbolizing a spiritual connection to the heavens.

I imagine Carl standing in among the congregation, the beam of sunlight catching his face and holding it there, staying.

*

From “Cartographies of Silence” by Adrienne Rich:

3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

*

Two years ago on this day, I almost died. I told Carl to call an ambulance and within the hour I was being prepped for surgery to remove the IUD that had perforated my uterus and bled into my intestines. I had “Please Please Please” stuck in my head, and even then, I could see the irony.

I know I have good judgment, I know I have good taste

It’s funny and it’s ironic that only I feel that way

There is so much noise in my head all the time, but on this day, Sabrina Carpenter and her beautiful music was saving me. Her song felt like a prayer, which accompanied the actual prayer my husband said at my bedside before going into the OR.

The whole song is a plea against uncertainty, a request for something she can’t control. It’s funny because she can’t guarantee any of the things she’s asking for—the asking itself becomes the point.

I spent most of that year wanting certainty from doctors, from my body, from my future. But the bottom line is that there are no guarantees. There is only hope, prayer, and the willingness to love something anyway.

The 7-year marriage anniversary gift is copper or wool. Again, the irony is not lost on me.

Please, please, please don’t prove I’m right
And please, please, please
Don’t bring me to tears when I just did my makeup so nice

The gray river. Thrown right in.

*

One of my favorite stories in Sweet Talk is called “Snow Angel,” the story of Marguerite, a young mother who is trapped in the house during a snowstorm with her two kids. The storm, and the time alone, tests her patience, her sanity, her faith.

At the end of the story, she makes a snow angel outside:

“She moves with the slow rhythm of the moon moving across the sky. She moves with the slow beat of the stars pulsating their light to stars in other galaxies. She has a pair of white wings and a white skirt. She has white moonlight and the clean white frost of her own breath, and now, alone on the hillside in the white universe, with the shadow of her own footsteps reaching back to the house like a lifeline, Marguerite feels the calm of a great and voluptuous sigh.” – from “Snow Angel” by Stephanie Vaughn

Not certainty. Just grace, and a big ol’ sigh.

—

Thank you Burial Magazine for publishing “Blue Gatorade”— a poem about Miami and the infamous sports hydration drink.

I have 3 workshop offerings this summer:

Main Character Energy: Claiming Our Own Narrative Authority, a 4-week generative class with WritingWorkshops.com.

Interior Weather and the Exterior World: Rendering Inner Life, an 8-week generative class with a workshop component at Lighthouse Writers.

Personal Essay II, a 10-week generative class with a workshop component at UCLA Extension.

***Advanced copies of The Style of Your Life are making their way into the world!! If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)