🍂 Changing of the Seasons
Amen to new beginnings, and goodbye to all that.
I've always liked that Two Door Cinema Club song—Changing of the Seasons. I first listened to it in 2013, when the album to which it belongs was still brand new and on repeat in every grocery store in America.
2013 was the year before my high school graduation.
Changing of the Seasons is now around 7 years old.
I am writing this letter now because in the span of that time, many wonderful, terrible, life-shattering things have happened. (I feel utterly melodramatic saying this considering I’m only 22. But I digress). A season of my life is passing, and I thought to memorialize it with a new edition of Indoor Picnic. (Does it matter if it took over a year to get back to you all? Can you forgive me for the delay?)
The story begins four years ago, in 2016. Two years after I graduated from high school, and a little over a year after I first arrived in Indonesia. That year, I went to a wedding.
It was my own wedding, cut-and-pasted together after just two months of preparation. I’ll entertain you with a photo that looks like it should be from the 1960s, but is actually from 2016:
At this wedding I was married to a boy who I’d known for all of four months. In the span of those four months we had terrible fights about ideologies, personal tastes, parenting styles, causes for jealousy, and more. It is difficult to force two people to get on the same page in less than a quarter of a year. The wedding, unfortunately, was non-negotiable.
Four years ago I was running a blog, and on this blog I talked about how that wedding was going to be the start of a new, happy chapter of my life. I rushed into it carelessly and joyfully and wantonly, as I do with most things—do first, think later—and arranged 10-year-plans with the steadfast belief that everything would turn out exactly as I imagined it.
There were many, many posts about all my hopes for the future —beautiful, rosy dreams and wants. Then, several months later, I disappeared.
My memories of everything that has happened since then are hazy. Every time I try to remember it feels like my mind has waded into an oil spill; I emerge from the water bedraggled and petrol-ridden. Entire months and weeks are lost to me. Some time before the wedding I developed an allergy to personal storytelling. To cope, I retreaded my past; these stories were what made up the bulk of Mischievous God. (It’s strange, because I swear to you, I cannot even remember writing that damned book).
My acquired aversion to blogging and divulging personal stories went against everything I’d stood for up to that point. But I clung to the flimsy daily life that I had created because I had nothing else to hold on to. I regret this.
I’ll never get those days back.
The fact that I’ve picked this up again—these acts of writing in no uncertain terms about myself and being honest and sharing too much information—should mean a great deal. I think it tells you what you need to know without me having to say it outright.
Things have been difficult lately. But now that I think about it, I’m always talking about how difficult things have been. Perhaps that's just proof that life is a constant upwards battle. (Talking like this reminds me of the old "This, too, shall pass" fable). We all know it isn’t always a struggle; it just feels like it because the tragedies are so close together.
Anyways, readers, I’m home now. I’ve returned to you. During this chaotic time—a time of war and heartbreak amidst a pandemic—a time of love in the middle of a firefight—I have managed to eke out a space of my own. I am not new or shiny anymore and probably in the future I’ll retell stories that you’re already highly familiar with. But I have finally arrived. In my wrinkled pajamas, in my unkempt bed, in a new (rented) house with yellow curtains and unmopped floors—I am alive, still, and ready to witness yet another changing of the seasons.
As always, thank you.
If you have money to spare, please consider taking some time out of your day to donate to Nduga refugees. If you respond to this e-mail with a screenshot of your donation, I will match you 50%. Thank you ♡