A Different Kind of Full

It always amazes me how quiet pivotal moments can be, how lamplit instead of firecrackery they can come.

I started out taking pictures. Freshly torn butter lettuce. Walnuts steaming from their pan toasting seconds before. Oozing blue cheese. Apple slices so thin you can see through them. Oil emulsifying with a pool of fresh herbs and lemon juice and balsamic vinegar and a warm spoonful of honey. After a few shots, though, I just stopped. My mind was both intensely focused on making this simple salad sing, and wandering up the road to Sacramento. Sacramento was our shared destination, after all.

Over the winter holidays I was given a book by Rae Gouirand–one of my bosses at my internship, and also an intensely brilliant and beautiful writer and thinker–called “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Yuknavitch. It is one of those books that I have a hard time describing with words because all that wants to come out of me are guttural cries of adoration and gratitude peppered with a healthy amount of holy crap. It is a book that makes it possible to be me. It is a book that makes it possible to be you. It is raw meat and choked throats and sex and sadness and forgiveness and fucking up and standing up and standing up and standing up over and over and over again. It is a book for the spaces in between, for the people in between. It is a warm hug. It is feminist-queer-praxis at its finest. It is and it is and it is and it refuses to not be. It is one of those books that you are terrified to close once you read the last word, that sits there in your lap holding you in the space of its kinship while you work up the stamina to carry it in your heart beyond its pages and into the world. It is a book that–for me, anyway–radically changes its reader. It absolutely radically alters both grammar and lexicon alike, sucks them into the body and refuses to parse.

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