We Gather for Warmth

Last night my boyfriend and I had our first Thanksgiving together in our new apartment. We congregated around our make-shift table like a transplanted family with a clan of New Zealanders that we've met through the local cafe. The wine flowed freely, as did the conversation, and we were happy.  Peeking through our window, you'd see a group of slightly drunk twenty-somethings talking and laughing in our studio apartment. 

It was a good prompt for us to get the apartment cleaned and set up as well. We hung paintings and photographs like freckles on the walls, splattered the apartment with our expressions and were happy. Our four walls begins to feel like a home while we collect our memories and experiences and store them beneath the floorboards so that the apartment's a little bit warmer. We save our laughter in lightbulbs so the apartment's a little bit brighter and our gas and electric bills remain untouched. 

A huge part of moving out of state becomes new family creation. We meet new people, curate our finds and house a gallery of intimacy. This new family comprises our top picks and we choose. That's the most amazing part, this choosing of family. 

Tonight we gather again for a birthday celebration, my birthday being tomorrow. It'll be a larger gathering, here in Bushwick in this new home, than I've had in several years and I'm amazed at the pace with which we've been establishing connections. I'm excited. I'm always excited for my birthday, being an only child of a single parent it was always a big thing. But for now I sit, a fixture in the local cafe, a light on the wall, writing and crocheting scarves.

A Thought:  Holidays are interesting phenomenon. They're days assigned by a calendar to be special, to stand out from the rest. On these days, besides possible congregating with friends or family, there's really very little that makes them different. I say this not to downplay holidays, but to make a point of how easy it is to decide that a particular day is special, and then act accordingly. Why not do this with more days? Establish personal holidays? Or even make every day a holiday?

A Find: Sitting in a different cafe the other day (yes, I'm pretty much always in cafes), Miike Snow's song Cult Logic came on. It's an awesome song that I hadn't heard before, even though the album came out a few years ago. Definitely youtube it!

From the Wings of a Butterfly

Sometimes ice creeps into the veins and movement becomes sluggish, thoughts become sluggish, and to-do lists fall by the wayside. The events of the past few weeks transpire and culminate in a loss of words. My first attempts at public laundry, an exciting success, becomes silenced by the following storm, Hurricane Sandy, which struck my home county quite hard. Words dry up in my throat and I am at a loss for what to write, blessed by minimal-to-no damage in my part of Brooklyn, horrified by the amount of destruction my childhood beach towns endured, the week without electricity my mother endured, the loss of a house my uncle endured. 

Now, following the storm, certain aspects of life resume normalcy. I once again feel I can write about my experiences, my safe, primarily unaffected experiences here in Brooklyn. We never lost power, experienced no damage or destruction, resumed normal life the following day (with the exception of the downed L train, which proves to be our main artery into the city, to school and work).

We wake, do our laundry in the building next door with the help of our faithful cart Lermy, food shop, cook tempeh and rice, go to school, go to work. We do these things at times as though on a conveyer belt. The novelty, the beauty in these tiny moments, moments so full of life and uniqueness, gets lost in the repetition.

Last night, while my boyfriend was cooking dinner, the oil in the pan caught fire. It was terrifying. The pan fire lasted about a minute before it went out, setting off the fire alarm that I had to fan while he opened the windows. Neither of us were hurt, but once the danger was gone, all the possible outcomes flooded our heads. He could have been horribly scorched, could have set fire to the whole building. Most terrifying is that the fire started during a normal, almost rote action. We don't understand what happened or what went wrong. The rest of the night was spent in near silence. We ate quietly, dressed for bed, and slept. 

A Thought: These tiny traumas, tiny disasters begin so unnoticed, a wind that turns into a hurricane, a dash of oil that ignites, yet can build and build into such horrifying outcomes. In our daily lives, these are things that can possibly be avoided, the hurricane of a verbal fine, the fire of a confused action. Take notice of the little initiators. Doing so could prevent large, disastrous outcomes.