Get your line in the water
Flourish Vol. 54
Sunset in Beacon, Hudson Valley, New York
About a month ago, sitting cross-legged on the grass during a blue summer dusk in Central Park, I looked up at the pencil-thin skyscrapers and the papery sky—and noticed for the first time dark streaks floating across my eyes. Disconcerted, I chalked it up to the seasonal pollen floating like confetti through the park that made my eyes feel like sandpaper. I’ve never had allergies in my life, but then I’ve never had problems with my vision, either, and I’ve got more than enough things weighing on my mind right now anyway.
Despite my best efforts to downplay them, though, the floaters persisted; any time I looked at the sky, or the white-blue screen of my laptop, or the aggressively minimalistic modern art at a warehouse-turned-gallery upstate. At one point, I struggled to read without the strings pulling like fishnet stockings over my eyes. I tried to downplay the panic tightening in my chest as I made an appointment with an eye doctor, perhaps only the second or third time I’d ever done so in my life.
On a humid morning last week at an optometrist in Midtown, I blinked away the eyedrops that made my pupils dilate and vision blur as I focused on neon x’s, red and green and blue, the bright flashes and laser beams that took scans all the way to the very backs of my eyes. In the exam room a few minutes later, the doctor tested my vision—20/20, and I breathed a sigh of relief—before pulling up a black and white photograph of my right eye. He slid the mouse back and forth and back and forth again to show me a dark, round orb beneath the retina, creating a peak and valley where there should have been a smoothed curve. He called it a macular lesion, the swelling beneath my retina. It was probably nothing, maybe even something I was born with, he said calmly, but referred me to a specialist just to be safe.
A brisk receptionist at the office a few blocks away told me they could fit me in the same day, and I tried not to read into the urgency. I killed time until my appointment at the public library near Bryant Park, the one that feels like an Ivy League campus, or Hogwarts, where I made TikToks in a silent study hall and tried not to spiral into hypochondria. Once I arrived for my appointment, I waited an hour and a half to have my eyes dilated and scanned again for a second time that day, before I was finally called back to be seen by the retinal specialist. His face was covered with a mask and he barely met my gaze before diagnosing me with frightening efficiency, sliding his mouse back and forth across the fundus photographs, the same valleys and peak I saw before.
You had toxoplasmosis in utero, he says matter-of-factly: Did your mother have cats? Taken aback at the statement, I stumble over my words before I tell him probably, because we always did. He points to the macular lesion, which is really a scar, a fossilized orb in the center of my right eye, the corpse of an undetected and long-vanquished infection by now nearly thirty years old. You’re lucky it didn’t spread any closer to your central vision, he tells me, and I do feel a sense of relief, strangely, over avoiding something I never even knew I had to fear.
As it turns out, ocular toxoplasmosis is fairly common in the womb, usually harmless, and the virus is long dead. White, practically mummified. But the doctor tells me I’m not entirely in the clear. The vitreous fluid in my eye is beginning to liquify—the culprit sending shadowy ghosts streaking across my eyes. It happens with age, he says, but you’re still fairly young, right…? He trails off, rustling through papers to confirm. Twenty-eight, I reply, fighting the urge to add, almost 29. He nods, pauses. Younger than we’d typically see this. He tells me to come back in a month, then pulls out an analog tape recorder and begins to speak into it with the speed of an auctioneer. His assistant tells me I can either stay or leave, and it feels disruptive to go, but almost intrusive to stay, listening to a clinical briefing of my own appointment: I had the pleasure of seeing this lovely young woman, twenty-eight. Macular lesion. Ocular toxoplasmosis. Vitreous fluid. Follow up in four weeks.
I have been something of a hypochondriac all of my life, and though my mind naturally thinks of all the things that would go with it if my vision were to ever fail—writing, travel, photography, virtually everything I love in this life—I am more intrigued by the medical revelations of the day than panicked about what the future might hold. When my friends and family ask me what there is to do, I tell them nothing, because it’s true. At the risk of sounding overly-dramatic, there are various treatments available to help shore up the vitreous fluid of the eye and vanquish floaters, and by the time I may actually need them, there will likely be even more. Until then, though, there is nothing to do, nothing that can be done, except to wait. To go on living. There is only the eventual outcome, one way or another, a future in which I may retain my vision as it is, or I may not. But this has no bearing on the life I live today, on the decisions I make now, on the fear I can choose to feel or not. For now I feel strangely calm, a little curious, mostly grateful; for seeing clearly, in more ways than one.
-Maggie Smith, Goldenrod
I keep smelling roses,
Cool skin-soft petals
Summer breeze rustling trees in the park.
Dancing in the dark plays
Days after I heard it in a dream.
A respite in the cathedral and
Tears that don’t seem my own.
Lord grant me the strength to release
What is not meant for me.
For what feels like the first time I pray
For perhaps the first time, I mean it
Days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I wandered through midtown Manhattan, and felt myself pulled into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I told myself this was merely a sight-seeing tour, but as I walked through the pews I felt a lump forming in my throat. At the back of the cathedral, I sat in the glass-walled chapel and in the silence I prayed. I asked for guidance out of the darkness, for somewhere to lay down all the weight I’d been carrying. Tears sprang to my eyes, rolled down my cheeks for everyone to see. But no one was looking. My reaction felt like someone else’s, and yet I felt more myself than I had in months.
I have never been religious, and hold a good deal of resentment over what religion has done to this country, to women, to anyone who is not a straight, white, Christian man. My heart aches with my own sadness, and with pain for the women whose lives have become less their own because of someone’s antiquated ideals of what this country should be, something it has never once been. Because the truth is that we have never been further from god here. Not just in New York City, where random violence and people suffering in the streets feel like knives to my heart daily, but in this society as a whole, and it has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with a loss of spirituality, a disconnect from the soul, with living on the surface of life only to drown in the depths of everything we don’t speak about. Profoundly lonely, empty, chasing fleeting fame and success, clout, promotions, money, perfect partners, big weddings, material success. We talk about it so often lately, my friends and I. The arrival fallacy, I’ll be happy when… I’ll be happy then, I promise. But what about now? Isn’t this all you ever wanted? What if this is it?
Even in my reproach for religion, I feel myself spiritually starved, anemic. I walk to the used bookstore a few blocks from me and scan the shelves for new enlightenment: Deepak Chopra and Rumi, the Artist’s Way, the Power of Coincidence, Alan Watts, Jung. And all of it tells me, over and over again, to let go. Of pride, ego, selfishness, perfectionism. To let the creator work through me, through creativity. If the spirit compels you. Thy will be done. Leap and the net will appear. Ask and you shall receive. Let go or be dragged. Look for the synchronicities.
And up they spring, the synchronicities. My favorite artist is in town for a string of concerts, but I tell myself I have neither the money nor time to go. A few days later, a friend offers me two tickets for the show that night, says I can have them for free. A title pops into my head, of a book I haven’t read and have not even the slightest idea as to what it’s about, and a few days later I spy it sitting on a friend’s shelf. Bonfire of the Vanities, a quintessential New York novel. My friend tells me it’s one of his all-time favorites. I randomly remember a friend I haven’t see in years, can barely remember anymore how we met, only that she feels like a warm ray of sun, a genuine soul. A few days later she messages on Instagram to tell me she’s in New York City for a wedding, would I want to meet up? Over drinks, as I tell her about my overthinking, my second-guessing, my backwards-looking, she recommends another book, The Midnight Library. The synopsis goes:
"Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?"
I realize as I borrow the e-book from the library that I’ve already read the author, Matt Haig, before. That years ago in an airport bookstore in Indonesia, his book Notes on a Nervous Planet had shown up in front of me like a neon sign. Another synchronicity.
All of these thoughts and revelations are percolating within me, and lately I feel busier than I’ve been in months, yet I struggle to articulate what exactly I’m doing with my time whenever people ask. To show my work, broadcast my achievements, document vacations, post proof that my life is indeed moving forward at an acceptable pace. But I am learning to care less and less about these outward markers; I am in the garden of my life, excavating, planting. I am diving to the bottom and swimming back to the surface again. I have no concept of how much of time has passed, really, beyond the sheets I tear from the calendar, the rent checks written, weight gained and lost again. Milestones, anniversaries, birthdays, the relationships that have strengthened and those that have sloughed away. Here in New York, at least I have seasons; snow on the fire escape, peonies in bloom, another sweltering summer. Each day I walk outside and the humidity makes me giddy because it has always reminded me of places that are not home. Except this is home, at least for now. For now, a caveat, as if it’s less than anything else. As if it isn’t all we have.
I basically only watch TED talks these days, and I’ve been a big fan of Arthur Brooks and his “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic for a while now, so I devoured this conversation (it’s long, and the host isn’t totally my cup of tea, but Brooks’ speaking is just as illuminating as his writing.)
One of the parts that resonated with me most was an anecdote from Brooks (a Washington native) about visiting Lincoln City, Oregon as a child, where he attempted to fish in along the coast but struggled to reel anything in. That’s when, he says, a neighbor told him the secret to a fruitful bounty: you have to cast your line into the falling tide—even when it looks like all the fish are gone.
“He says, ‘hey kid, during a falling tide you can only make one mistake….not having your line in the water,’” Brooks recalls. “The falling tide of your life looks like you're losing everything. Get your line in the water, because that's the most fertile period of your life.”
And what does that look like, exactly?
“You must try new things, you must be fully alive. You must try everything you can…wake up each day and live that day full of possibility. Not to nurse your wounds, not to waste your time, not to do the things you used to do. To be fully alive is to be alive to the new set of experiences that’s coming across the transom. ”
Provence (just kidding—French lavender fields on Long Island)
In my attempts to not overthink or over-edit this letter, I think this is all for now. Thanks for reading/coming along for the ride. Until next time.
-Liv