things i took personally this week

a list

- when i called the post office on friday, it was closed, presumably in observance of veterans day, which was on saturday, so i guess the post office was just closed for two days? this feels unlikely and i’m haunted by the possibility the post office was actually open even though the answering machine announced it was closed. because i only called, i never left my oakland office with my canvas tote of parcels that makes me feel like santa and walked the seventeen minutes through the backpacked streets to grip the cold door handle in my bare hand to find resistance and lean forward to peer through the glass window. maybe the post office was open on friday and they sent all phone calls straight to voicemail because they couldn’t be bothered. maybe they went out to grab lunch so they put the phone straight to the machine. maybe the post office was closed, but how am i ever to know? the packages are still in the backseat of the car.

- our garbage disposal gave up on us, i found it crying under the sink, the tears never stopped coming, the garbage bags wet with sludge and shame. i never got to say goodbye. how it mocked me with her smelly tears, what are you going to do about it, call your husband?

- at warby parker, i was trying on glasses, squinting at myself in the mirror because i didn’t wear contact lenses and so could only witness my blurry reflection. someone with a kind face went into a back room returned with pair of frames wrapped in plastic and offered me, with flair, these are the frames that i would pick out for you and i put them on, again squinting, and couldn’t figure out what it was about these frames that felt so ‘me’ to a complete stranger

- spotify created a robot playlist so i could always listen to what i want without thinking or seeking it out for myself, i now realize it doesn’t even matter what i actually might want to listen to because the data knows me better, and so i opened the playlist to listen while i write this list and the robot told me i’m listening to SAD POETRY TUESDAY EVENING. am i sad? i don’t feel sad. how can music even be sad? they might evoke a feeling, but what does it mean if i don’t feel sad listening to sad music? what does it mean if i feel happy? does it mean i’m too sad to notice my own sadness? the data would know

- ab went to an alumni event for his boarding school on friday. i didn’t want to go, because of many reasons, mostly because i find these social functions where you don’t really know anyone but you see them once a year and they only know you by association as wife from the east coast and so they ask you the same questions they asked you last year and make the same faces at your polite and distanced responses to be an exhausting waste of time when i’d rather do almost anything else. but i took it personally when ab acknowledged this to his parents, telling them, oh no, kelsey won’t be going, she hates these types of things

- i forgot my favorite scarf in a restaurant on friday night and it was still there when i went back on monday

- in jenna’s apartment, the previous occupant of her room had a tacky disco ball on the windowsill, and when we made a comment during her visit to the room that would become her room, the girl said, no but really, the light in the morning with this is crazy. so when i returned weeks later i brought jenna a spider plant in a disco ball hanging planter. when we woke up on the morning of her 30th birthday, the sunlight scattered all across her room - the area rugs, the walls, the bed covers. you should really get one, jenna may have mumbled, referring to the disco ball planter, or maybe i said i think i need this and jenna confirmed you literally need this, or this was a wordless exchange that only exists in my own memory during that sleepy moment. this weekend i finally acquired my own disco ball planter and i put in my spider plant and begged ab, pretty please, please hang this now, and he went to home depot for the fourth time because it would make me sooooo happy to have the scattered sunlight in our pittsburgh room. its overcast as we hang it by the window and when i wake up, the sun is about to crest the hill outside,i am so excited for the scattered sunlight, to see my room as if i was in a dream, and i lay in bed with fala warm and curled at my hip and i wait and i wait and i wait. and i realize that the angle of the sunlight will never reach the corner where its hung, at least not in winter, at least not this week, and now this planter is only a physical memory of waking up in brooklyn

- i saw someone i knew at an art show but i couldn’t tell if they had already seen me and not said hello. they arrived after me and so presumably they were seeing and i was seen. right? but there are other people in the room, we are not alone, they were with a group and laughing and at this point it would certainly be rude for me to interrupt, to exist here in this same space. why would i presume this person even remembered who i was? it made more sense to simply move through the space, over interested in the artwork, stare at the flowers on the wall in front of me and pretend we are strangers, which i guess, at this point, we are

in writing this list, i’m thinking about this recent reflection from one of my favorite writers, elif batuman, about diachronic writing:

So look, on the one hand, writing or reading a text of any length is a diachronic process—i.e., time passes while it’s happening and, during that time, the world is changing, and you’re receiving and processing new impressions. On the other hand, we tend to think of a printed text, especially a book, as having a synchronic existence, as an artifact that comes into being at the moment of publication, and then fully exists, all at once, as a single object I can hold in my hands. (We don’t think of it materializing at the same rate as we read, or as it was written.)

what i mean is, this list of things i took personally will never be remotely comprehensive, and i don’t want the fact that this is now published to mislead you into thinking that these are the only things i’ve taken personally this week, as if such a list could ever be finished. i think this idea of diachronic writing is part of why i’ve written this without capital letters or proper punctuation, as if to prove to you all of this is a work in progress