Time to Party Once Again (& Maybe Write Too)
This past weekend was the Mississippi Book Festival. It’s my second year working the signing tent, because I’m still trying to wring out as many perks as I can from all those years of being an independent bookseller, now a time so long ago. It’s like when you tell people what sport you played in high school; yes it’s a part of you, but it hasn’t been for a long time. Can’t you just let go of it already?
Book festival weekend is always a weird one for me. I always end up disappointed, ashamed or embarrassed. Two years ago the boy I was seeing found a new girl at The Apothecary during book fest weekend and broke up with me four days later to pursue her. He stole eggs from the bar top and they broke in his pocket, which I think was part karma, part sign to me that things between us were about to break too. But mostly, I always run into old and new writer friends who ask me how the work is going, and it’s always hard to figure out how much to lie, how much truth to tell. “I’m not out of ideas, I’m just out of time,” is what I tend to say now. It’s not a lie, but it veils the disappointment I feel in just the right way.
Anyway, I ran into my friend Mary Miller and her husband Lucky, and we caught up like we always do this weekend. We made plans to drink, we made plans for me to visit. “I’ve missed your newsletter!” she said. I tell her it’s coming back (because if I say it out loud I have to do it), how my life has changed since the last dispatch. “Yeah, last time I read it you were fixing up your bachelor pad, so I’m excited to see how things will be different now.”
Oh, dear readers, how different things are now.
At the close of June, the night before a two-week road trip vacation to Montana to see an old college friend get married, I moved my entire life into my boyfriend’s apartment. Two weeks ago, on Labor Day weekend, my sister had a health scare while I was on an eight hour drive to Austin for my childhood best friend’s bachelorette trip (everyone’s getting fucking married, everyone’s fucking growing up). A week after that, she moved into the house that I barely feel moved into, so my boyfriend and I can help her get back on her feet. It’s the three of us now, with a cat each for good measure. What a great Christmas card that would be, if they weren’t all trying to kill each other and mark their domain.
In the span of three months, I feel that I have become very old, that I have suddenly become an adult, that twenty-eight is the age I finally have to stop fucking around, whether I like it or not. In some ways, I feel incredibly proud of myself. I pay my bills on time, I take my car in for regular maintenance, I (mostly) know my limits when it comes to booze. I know how to fix most things when they break, I can cook a killer meal with what I already have in the pantry or fridge. But the adulthood also feels suffocating. There is no time to write unless I make myself write. There is no time to build new skills unless I make myself build those skills. Nothing happens by accident once you become an adult. It’s a process of building, a process of carving out time with the sharpest knife you have on hand.
Unfortunately, all the knives in my kitchen drawer seem to be incredibly dull.
Even the art of building a home feels a bit suffocating, though it is work that I enjoy. I bought Alex and I new sheets covered in purple flowers, which I love even though they pop off the edge of the bed every night because we’re both restless sleepers. I taught Alex how to build a gallery wall in our long hallway. It only took him three tries and one meltdown after I explained that the pictures should live in clusters, that the space between each picture should be the same, that the inside is like a game of tetris, but the outside of each cluster can be uneven and unmatched. Everyone who’s visited so far has commented on how lovely the gallery wall is, and I hope Alex is proud because he should be. We need a china cabinet, because people keep giving me glassware and I keep buying it, though I have nowhere to put it. We came home from Cape Cod with a set of twelve Waterford crystal champagne coupes, a gift from Alex’s Long Island grandmother, because how could I turn that down?
Alex doesn’t make the bed in the morning. He doesn’t believe in the garbage disposal – “I just don’t trust it. Where does it go?” – and when I told him we needed to mop once a week, that I do it every night when I close the restaurant, he said “Maggie, people don’t pay to come to our house.” It’s a learning curve, living with another person, and the learning curve gets steeper when you add a third person to the mix. Everything we had moved into our spare room that is also the office, everything that was placed with intention, was moved to make room for my sister. Alex came home from work to find his favorite chair shoved into the dining room, the boxes we’d hidden now strewn about. “Seeing it stressed me out,” he texted me, “but I’m fine now.”
In a week and a half, our house will (hopefully) be filled with the people we love to celebrate the fact that we’ve moved in together, that we share our space and belongings now. I’ll mix drinks and plate apps and float around with a vermouth spritzer or a dirty gin martini in my hand while we spin records and Meech (Alex’s cat) hides under the table on top of her favorite cardboard box. It’s hard to be excited about it when it feels like there’s so much to do. I have clothes to get rid of, I have furniture to place, I have boxes to hide, I have corners to mop. The writing work that has to be done occupies that same corner in my brain as the housework: there’s so much to do, there’s so little time to do it, I have so many ideas but I can’t make them happen, I can only seem to sit on the couch and shop for blush while Castle plays at moderate volume in the background.
I talked to a lot of people about my writing (or lack thereof) this weekend. I bartend at the newly reopened Mayflower Cafe now, and on Friday mentioned my time in Wyoming to Kaveh Akbar and told John T. Edge about the loose outline I have for a story collection about the esoteric south as the marble bar top separated them both from a three espresso martini chaos. I ran into Jimmy Cajoleas on the lawn of the capitol and when he asked about my work, I told him of my fears and that same outline. On Saturday night I worked a private event for writers. I mixed drinks for two University of Mississippi MFA alums who I remembered by sight, and I talked to them a bit about my work, about how it felt like I had no time for it, but I hadn’t forgotten about it. One said something I once heard often, but not in a long time: “It’s important to remember that the work will always be there for you to come back to, whenever you’re ready.”
I’m always trying to figure out where the line is between rest and excuses, but I think they were right, and I think it applies to the work in my domestic sphere and the work of writing. There’s always work to do, and I can come to it when I’m ready. When I think about this housewarming at the end of the month, it’s hard not to think about all the work that has to be done. But perhaps I should remember that I can do the work anytime I want. What’s limited, however, is the time I’ll be able to spend with my friends, with the people that love me. They shouldn’t care that there are still boxes unpacked, art lined along the floor of that long hallway. What they care about is being there. What they want is to be there.
And, of course, it’s always easy to forget how messy someone’s home is when you’re three martini drunk and there’s Japanese remixes of old soul songs spinning on the record player. All I have to do is set the scene, stand in the doorway with open arms and a drink in hand. The rest should take care of itself.