How to Love a Wolf: An Accounting, July 29, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: an Accounting*

Today in the twilight I lit six candles in my apartment, now a quiet, tidy space where my efforts to organization have condensed piles, cleared the comfort of my recent history, and made way for that feeling of ease; a feeling of ease I've grown accustomed to as I re-enter my apartment from being out at the pool, the co-op, the woods.

I lit the candles for the first time in weeks. It's hot outside, and my AC hums annoyingly and refreshingly in equal measure. The candles burn bright, but don't feel hot, and the dull grey of the sky holds the big-leaf season of the near-August foliage.

I sit at the table from which I can see most of the apartment. It's a lovely view, expansive but cozy. Fortuitously the only room I can't see from this vantage is my office, which transitioned over these PhD years from a desk in the front room, to the spare room, to (moving my luxuriously-sized bedroom into the spare) the generous, work-filled haunt I spent most hours of most days between last August and January. If this apartment is like a spaceship, hovering on a hill in Mt. Airy, looking out onto the red maple and beyond it the Germantown Jewish Center, the office is like a shuttle, moving laboriously but steadfastly where I will it to go, sometimes resistantly. I think of Battlestar Galactica and remember my late nights in my Chicago apartment on Hermitage, after a long day teaching and often evening of rehearsal, before I was addicted to social media numbing, and "shows" were more pleasure than guilt. My office reminds me of those shuttles, jetting off into the darkness of space from the confined expanse of the main vessels.

As I struck each match, felt the sound and smelled the sulfur turn to flame, and the flame exacerbate the candle's wick, I knew it would be the last time I lit them in this house. The next time will be in the next house, I thought, with new rituals to hold new opportunities, relationships: there will be new noise and, hopefully, certainly, new quiet.

Now the sky has darkened and the candles burn more golden. A couple flicker from the action of the fan on the floor. The AC's hum disturbs, and I walk to shut it off. I stand at the window and gaze to the back of the building, where the sky holds the palest blue hand, lifted from a faint almost-yellow hue as the sun truly descends for the night. I stand in a reverie; the reverie is a familiar conversation I have with time, who passes me and in doing so lets the tether slack more and more and more. The slack is imperfection and forgiveness, I think. Imperfection and forgiveness, and in this moment I see time as my friend.

Tears form. Grief and gratitude. I think of my neighbor Donna downstairs, with whom I've shared what feel like countless meals these seven years: big events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, birthdays; and small ones like Exhaustion, Giddiness, Friendly Ranting, and a few constructed rituals of Dreaming, Planning, and Holding. "Can you pick me up outside Fitlife?" "When?" "Now-Anytime." "I'm on my way!" "I'm ordering pepperoni pizza at 6:30, wanna join?" "I've got a bottle of Prosecco, wanna drink it on your balcony?" This list is curated, edited for consumption, and my tears grow bigger in their membranes before falling.

I moved into this apartment a perfectionist. My drive was profound, though confused—running-away-from, denial-laced. My productivity was my superpower: 63 round trips to Chicago (Detroit, Milwaukee, Ohio etc.), 6 professional premieres for Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, 7 student-performed works for universities, 5 teaching gigs at universities—adjunct, lecturer, guest assistant professor, guest artist. A one-thousand-plus page archive—the foundation for a four-hundred-plus page dissertation.

In the middle of this perfectionistic drive: a heartbreak I was certain I would never recover from; one that engulfed me from all disco-ball aspects of me, most painfully from an internal uprising, a geiser-quick-sand hybrid fountain laying in wait for its opportunity to wash me away. My certainty that I would never recover was so engrained that even now, recovered, it greets me like an old forgetful friend. We smile at each other, this person I've become, the tenderness of my heartbreak, and the tough certainty that, for a few important moments (months) saved me from extinction in the fires of liminal not-knowing. I bow now to heartbreak: my most honest companion. My most stalwart superhero.

And yet this apartment was never tainted or dragged into the darkness I plumbed. It held me, literally, with the relics and decor of my perfectionism, my geeky ergonomics, and the graces of location and neighbor/s. It moved with me, without growing, just shifting, to become the laboratory of my dissertation.

(*July 29, 2019)