Hello hello!! How have you been? Hopefully well, or not too badly! I’ve been terribly busy, since I got a position at the job I had my internship in, learning new tasks, bearing new responsibilities. In what feels like the blink of an eye, I’ve been employed for a whole year — yet sometimes I feel as lost as if I haven’t. There are days where I’m still not quite sure of what I’m doing, much less what to do if I’m not told beforehand, or if I finish my share of tasks earlier than expected. As the newbie, you’re expected to hear and question more, but it’s treacherous to read the room; even if I’m told I’m doing a great job so far, it still feels like I’m lacking, not doing enough. Everyone is too busy to help, the work never ends, I’ve learned that the hard way. I do what I can, all so that at the end of the day I can leave without a heavy heart.
In the meantime the urge to write never left. Ideas are bees, always buzzing. I’ve been reading a lot and enjoying it thoroughly, which makes feel even more inspired and creative. Questions seep into the nooks and the cracks of ordinary routines and there’s nothing else I can do but write.
Someone that took me under her wing, keeping me company with her team over the past year quit. It was a heavy parting, filled with tears and appreciation. She left me a letter even though I never really worked under her. Someone from the new team I just joined is retiring, which left a bad foreshadowing to the colleagues she worked with for the past 30 years. Now that I can say I’ve been part of the workforce for a while, I can admit there is a certain emptiness to it — to work, jobs, corporate, capitalism really. One day you’ll look back and I imagine it’ll truly hit you, the time, effort, the patience you’ve dedicated to a place that sees you as another number. How do we even make it all worth it? My answer is the people, who make it or break it. I still wonder when do they know that it is time to throw in the towel? Were is the line between abusing our limits instead of testing them? And where do we consider that the line has been crossed for the last time? Perhaps it’s not something you can explain, only feel.
For now I’m young and afraid of change so I shove those thoughts to the side of the plate like I did with broccoli when I was 5. I’ll reluctantly eat them only when I have to. I do this a lot though I’m trying not to do it as much, push thoughts and people away like a bull charging for attack. My mind gets so loud, and the melancholy has me disheartened. I keep pausing as I write today. As if this is a long climb and I have to catch my breath between sentences. I don’t know why but it’s akin to hesitating. My mind gets so loud and so quiet. I wish I could come to you cool and composed, but when I write is when I fall apart, when the lines that contain me are all but gone.
Why do we crave what isn’t ours? Why do we want what we can’t reach? What seems underserving? Who seems unavailable and unfazed? Florence in her song ‘The Bomb’, one of my favourites of her, writes precisely about this. About it, she said:
“Why is the person who creates the most space and gives you nothing the most appealing person? And really that’s because if you’re a songwriter, they give you the most enormous space for fantasy and you can write anything you want because they don’t really exist. Every time I think in my life I’ve been in a stable place, something or someone will come up and be like, ‘How do you feel about blowing all this up?’. It’s also a fear of growing up and a fear of getting older, because if you regenerate yourself constantly through other people by blowing up, changing everything, you never have to face ageing or death.”
The further you get away from me, the more I seem to want you. I’ll avoid checking the messages, because the outcome.. doesn’t matter. I understand that now, which makes me want to laugh. It doesn’t matter, I’ll be let down either way because the reality breaks the fantasy. The Crane Wives sing in ‘Say It’:
Did the real me corrupt the fantasy?
Did I spoil the view?
Build-up is almost always better than getting what you want
Did I disappoint you?
The person you are breaks the one I have in my mind that can be anything I want, except you. This person that doesn’t really exist, except maybe it did, maybe I didn’t imagine it, maybe I’ve caught glimpses and I’m not so crazy. But how do I let this go now? How do I mourn what isn’t over, what simply changed?
I’ve been this stubborn as long as I can remember. Once I set my eyes on something, if I want it badly enough, I’ll charge ahead, and then life will teach me it was never mine to begin with. People aren’t propriety, and even the lawns change, flowers wither and bloom without command. I can’t say I’ve never wanted someone and something that would fill all my needs for me, but I can admit that it’s not what I’m looking for anymore. What am I looking for then? My mind is so loud all the time, I’m not sure I can say what it is. Reading these letters you’d think I enjoy making myself sad with all this stuff. Except this isn’t sadness it’s… I’m unsatisfied.
What if everything is much uglier up close? This is a thought that keeps nagging at me. The bad strokes of a painting will be obvious, the blemishes and acne on your skin can’t be ignored, you’ll hear the crack in the voice of the singer that tried so hard to hold the note still, and what will you do? If the sound is too loud or so quiet you can barely understand? If the words you wanted are there, of the words you didn’t want, or if there’s nothing? ‘Uglier’ becomes this scapegoat word for anything that isn’t as you thought, as intended.
For years now, I’ve wanted to write fantasy. I want to write about magic and dragons and kingdoms and power and… I have never finished a single piece. I build the ideas and tear them apart by abandoning them, castles of sand. I don’t think I have what it takes to be an author. Not just a writer, but storyteller. How do I write something that will stick? That will please and exceed expectations?
I get disheartened, looking at all of this, thinking of it as what’s left of life: dissatisfaction, leaving, disappointment, change. Never mind that nothing lasts forever and I’m past the point of knowing that, I return to this cliff with all these questions and not much to say, talking to the wind and the fallen leaves.
Life still happens. I think of my mothers’ hands, calloused and rough, her fingernails sharp, wrinkled, how unwelcoming they might sound and how warm they always are when they hold mine. Isn’t this all ironic? That it’s exactly the imperfection, the incomplete that enchants us? That is the whole issue, and it’ll keep happening probably. It’s not so much that you’ll fall for what will hurt you, that you’ll dream people away into nothing, that all your hope will turn into a knife you stab on your own back. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you still get the thirst for the tea that burns your tongue anytime you sip it. Maybe it’s not so much that what is unknown will only makes us happy because we dream it to familiarity, maybe it’s not that we must make perfection and completeness out of cracks, perhaps it’s not that people and stories and what you want and what you get and yes, not that you are ugly and wrong… perhaps we’re the way we are, and that is all there is to it. No, not supposed, not meant to be.
Are we puzzle pieces that will fit with a pleasing tick? Notes that fall into harmony? Earlier I mentioned a letter, and in it I’m told I have a kind and pure heart. People keep telling me things that I don’t believe I am. It seems as if whenever I look there’s a tension, a movement to the water, a change between what’s inside and outside my head. Which one is true? The past proves I don’t have to know the answers to keep going, to fix what has only this faint idea that it might be broken. I confuse discomfort as a curse, when to be honest, things, people rarely are as memory remembers them to be, and often the build-up gets to be more exciting anyway. Does this sound sad? I’m trying to make peace with the fact that noise is there. Disruption. The chance that something could be better, sweeter, funnier, lovelier — along with what feels like a certainty that it isn’t. Not in this world, who knows in this lifetime too. But that’s it. It’s different. Different is different. That’s it.
These days, I think about the poem ‘Wild Geese’ from Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Delicate is turning 3 this week. 3 years is a lot of time for a quitter like me. I lack the words to acutely describe how this makes me feel. Grateful that people read what I write? Proud that I haven’t given up? I’m not usually one for celebrations, especially when this one always ties to a big loss in my life, but I feel inclined to celebrate this every year. I don’t know what delicate is to you. To me it kinda became something much bigger than I am, which is strange because this is a place where I’m pretty vulnerable, and vulnerability can often be daunting and straight up uncomfortable. I’m someone who’s insecure, and it’s like here I get to be brave for a chance. A chance. That’s the perfect word to describe what delicate is to me.
Thank you for giving delicate a chance. For giving these letters your time which you can’t ever get back, for giving it a place in your mind for a while or for much longer. If you’ve been a long time reader, thank you for not leaving, I don’t know how you’re not sick of me!! If you’re a new reader, thank you for checking out and I hope it was worth your curiosity. If you’re a reader that misses most letters and somehow still remembers about the existence of this newsletter, thank you, memory means that all the work I put into this was worth it. As usual, I hope these words helped you or comforted you at least once.
Delicate is here and it will be back :)
here you can read the letter from the 2nd anniversary if you wish!
delicacies of the week
★ I finished reading ‘The Poppy War’ series and I’m mesmerised. How can a person wreck you so hard and make you enjoy every second of it? These books are terrifying and magnificent, making you care and then taking it all away. It was very much worth the tears I’ve shed.
★ Lizzy McAlpine has released a deluxe version of her album ‘Older’ with a few new tracks, special mentions to ‘Soccer Practice’, ‘Force of Nature’ and ‘Spring into Summer’.
★I also really enjoyed the new Crane Wives album!!
SONGS OF THE WEEK: spring into summer by lizzy mcalpine, time will change you by the crane wives and dragon eyes by adrianne lenker
delicate’s spotify playlist! & delicate’s tumblr
anything you’d like to leave anonymously or otherwise can be sent here xxx
3 years wow!!! congrats!!! i’ve been thinking ab you lately after taking too long of a break from writing. congratulations on employment also :) loved reading this and looking forward to whatever comes next 💗