On Fractals, and Vermont, and

I am in Vermont again. To me, Vermont is a place of fractals and in-betweens and dream-making and dripping in greens. It is raining, and the ferns gleam and the hydrangeas droop, and August has paused, with all its heavy air and deep promises of just one more. I am at a writing conference, which is not accurate to what this is. A failure of language. It is as if we’ve been invited to explore our dream and the written word at a hidden place in a forest, where we are allowed to indulge in the deepest truths and live as if we were twelve at summer camp and think of nothing but what we might become and what we might create. To be here is to be surrounded by people who understand a part of myself that I do not entirely understand. This time, held here, is both a right of passage and necessity and a sense-making.

I see in others a kirigami of myself. Versions that reach behind and forward, a string of paper dolls held together by their hands. If origami is the art of folding paper, then kirigami allows you to cut tape and replace but still create a unity of one. We can map ourselves through time, where those decisions folded us into someone else. How clearly I can see those other iterations of who I am.

There is a girl with hair like mine once was, when my hair was a monument to who I am, wild and unruly in the August heat, young and thin with tan legs and so much life ahead of her it almost breaks my heart. I see her across campus and once mistake her for an apparition of myself, and I want to tell her but do not, that there is nothing more promising than exactly who she is right now. But I suppose she knows, as I did at that age, that I had the entire world at my feet.

There is a woman who gives a lecture who recites titles of books like I might ingredients, and her daughter sits in the audience and claps wildly when she finishes. And her book is on the shelf, but her body and her youth exchanged for the career that I want. Is this what we arrive at, the trade, one for another, of value for value. This I could only hope for; this I could live with.

And I am wondering about worth a lot this week; of where I place it and how I will navigate what comes next, and whether I get what I want or do not, and as I age, how I might negotiate with grace, baby or no baby, book or no book. I want to love what I love without wanting more.

This is more of a record-keeping than anything else. I wanted to write you a list of things I do not want to forget, but now I cannot remember what they are. How quickly it all goes and how fast it comes. I go looking for a photograph of me and my hair and I find an image of me naked on a balcony in Paris and then line of kirigmi continues.