Listen, it was either this or “Living on a Prayer” (you know, because I’m halfway there and all). Then I realized that I am not just halfway through my month of unemployment but also my “Year of Less Taylor Swift1” and decided it needed to be done.
Time has moved both incredibly fast and also slower than usual all at once. I may never understand how it all works (all being human perception of time passing) but I have no regrets so far with how I’ve spent my time. There has been an ebb and flow of togetherness / alone time, going out / staying in, structure / spontaneity. I am not chomping at the bit to go back to work. I am not bored. My longstanding suspicions that I could go an entire year without working and keep myself occupied remain — even though I have limited myself to a few activities on rotation so as not to spiral out of control with ambition, I know there are so many other things I could add into the mix if I had more time.
I am fascinated by all the ways humans bargain for more time. I myself have been there in both terminal and menial moments. A month is luxurious, really, when you think about the amount of time most Americans get to spend relaxing in a year. American society is truly not built for recuperation, rest, recovery — all those delicious R-words that get in the way of the so-called American Dream. And still, I wish for more. I wish to get paid to make it through my reading list in a lifetime, to be able to bake cookies with my favorite album on vinyl in the background more than once a year, to let my body tell me when to go to sleep and when to wake up, when to eat and when to move.
At this halfway point, I am reminded of my childhood self who could move from drawing and crafting, to reading a book for hours, to going to the park with my sister, to swimming in the pool with friends, to imagining all kinds of scenarios for my Barbies and Polly Pockets to venture through, to pick up my flute and make music myself, to popping open my purple boombox and inserting another CD to keep me company in the air conditioning, to capturing it all in my diary (later known as my journal). These are the ways I remember filling up my summers before I entered the workforce at the age of fifteen. Somehow, almost twenty years have passed, and this is the first time I can remember feeling anywhere close to the level of relaxed that my first fourteen summers allowed.
I’m afraid I will never understand what possessed humans to construct far too many broken and interlocking systems that keep us grinding, exhausted, burnt out, and resentful. Where is the time to get burnt by the sun instead? Where is the space to be exhausted because you played softball with your friends all weekend? When do we get to lie down and just breathe? In these two weeks of freedom, I have thought often about the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which we were “locked down” for at least eight weeks. Could we call it freedom when so many were still working? Things slowed down, got more introspective, and perhaps more unmasked2 or realigned for some, but there was also a collective rattling of the cage, a haphazard transition to doing work at home, a desperation to return to “the way things were before.”
There are so many ways in which I still haven’t returned to the ways things were before COVID-19. But in this month off, I have found someway to return to the girl who could keep herself occupied through rowdy recess periods each afternoon at school, through rainy days “stuck” at home, through hours of medical waiting rooms, or anywhere else in the world because she had her thoughts, her curiosities, her interests, and her creativity. I hope I can continue to bring her along with me through the next two weeks and beyond.
How will I keep her alive when I return to work? Your guess is as good as mine, but I look forward to finding out as the experiment keeps unfolding.
XOXOXO,
Ash 💙
What would it take for us to cut the cord? To live our lives adrift and free to roam. Instead we push on, reaching out for more. We go to work, we eat, we sleep at home. Time melts away without us knowing it. Things take up space, the schedule might explode. We rarely laugh or breathe or pause or sit. One more paper to grade, another load. If you're reading this, I wish you these things: A blank page with ten gel pens, stickers too. An empty field to dance or scream or sing. A pile of books no one assigned to you. What would you reach for, throw your heart around? Ahhh. Can you taste it? Does it make a sound?
This poem is a part of exohexohexoh’s Playlist Poetry series, in which the title of a song serves as a writing prompt. Poetry is usually reserved for paid subscribers at exohexohexoh3, so be sure not to miss out on the rest of this series as it arrives over the next two weeks. 🎶
There is nothing more to this experiment than wanting to get exposure to other musicians in a deeper and more lasting way. A palette cleanse so to speak. A broadening of horizons. Which my five-year binge of Taylor didn’t really leave much room for…I’m sure I’ll write more about it later in the year, but right now it’s really not about her! (but what if it is…)
In the neurodivergent use of the word, not the public health one…
Yes, we are in iambic pentameter again for this public poem, but don’t blame me, I didn’t make the poetry rules about which forms feature the numbers seven and fourteen. 😇