“I sometimes worry about the imperfections and incompleteness of it all. […] But maybe it’s supposed to feel unfinished […] In that spirit, I am resisting my urge to polish up this letter too much…”
                -Sarah Travis, “Friendship as Scholarship: a Path for Living Inquiry Together,” Experiments in Art Education, p. 178

                Someone told me once that reading the beginning of a novel is like walking into a room and meeting an author who hands you things: here, a description of a fallen tree. Hold this. Here, a child climbing the fallen branches. Here, a quick pair of fluttering wings. The author’s trick (this someone said) is to have the pieces pull together into a story the reader wants to keep reading before the reader gets overwhelmed or bored by what they’re being asked to hold.
                I see what they’re saying, this someone. They’re right sometimes. And sometimes…

                In my teens I started lying awake at night, thinking back over the day to trace out what I had accomplished. What made this day worthwhile. I started doing that for reasons that made good sense at the time, and it might be an interesting practice, sometimes. And sometimes…

                If you were to give me today, if you were to hand over the trees and the fluttering wings and the thoughts that child-me and older-me and our friends are having, apart and together, it wouldn’t make a very clear story. As a reader I might say why are you giving me that. That’s what I mean, sometimes, when I tell my partner at the end of the day wow today feels so long. Going over to feed Jackie’s cats? That was just this morning. There isn’t a nice finished arc to this today-ness. There’s a warm crackling fire. Ash on my hands. A cold, cold wind. Voices. A delicious mouthful of fish. Clothes scattered on the floor. Imperfect and incomplete. Sometimes like my friend Sarah Travis I worry about that, and sometimes like my friend Sarah I celebrate that, because it—whatever it is—is not ending right now. Oh no. It’s snuggling up with blankets. Then it’s dreaming. Who knows after that.