The princess is in another castle
Welcome to Sorry Mario by me, Shannon Stirone.
Do you ever stand over your kitchen sink and think about your life? Why is it always the kitchen sink that is the central location for a bout of existential dread? Maybe it’s the routine, eat food, wash dish, dry dish, eat food–repeat until you die.
I’m in a new apartment, with a new kitchen sink. I just moved here in March, three days after the Bay Area announced their shelter in place orders. I left my home that I shared with my husband of eight years so that he could move back in. I found more work, moved near friends and now I live alone, a 30 something single woman, aka every romantic comedies fodder/worst nightmare. The fact that there’s also a pandemic happening is just a dark twist.
As it happens, I have spent the last year or so working on a few different pieces about death; the death of the universe, the death of myself, our flailing struggle with mortality. To now exist in a world where death is more prominent, where our physical lives are in lockdown as a result, has put a new spin on those stories. Death is everywhere though, not just during a pandemic. Every day is a little death. It’s like we are born with a raw slab of marble and each day we wake up and carve at it, shape it, mold it, examine it and one day it is our last day of carving–whatever is left is some proof of our time. Each bit we chip off is some kind of ending, we have to let go of parts of ourselves along the way to create something, who knows what it ends up as.
I am always surprised by those little deaths, sometimes they hit me so profoundly the way a leaf falls or the certain brush of a tree in the wind will suddenly call up a flurry of memories and I can feel some small part of me crumble. The poet Rilke wrote in a letter to a woman he once loved, that essentially he felt like we work our whole lives practicing these little deaths in preparation for the Great one, the Death that demands everything from us. I love how he wrote this to her, like he knew we are all training for this finale that is not the quiet denouement we usually think it is, but rather a fireworks show, a moment of nailing the triple axle, a real high point at the end of a life of lows. It sounds a bit grim to think of our lives that way, it’s not all lows it’s a constant ebbing and flowing, but what a victory death is made to be if we are challenged to meet it one day in this way, after all, we’ll have had so much practice by then.
Divorce is certainly a death. Moving is a kind of death. Leaving behind kitchen tools I used to cook with, meh, not really, but for the sake of my point, goodbye spatula I really loved you. This year has certainly been a challenge for the entire world, not just for me. My small life continues surrounded by millions of overlapping circles of others. I have a new spatula, a new bed, new neighbors, a new coatrack–new things, in another castle.
Space
Speaking of the pandemic, last week some of my colleagues and I found out that we would no longer be writing for Wired, which means my weekly space photos will be over at the end of May. While that is not ideal for me in many ways, I am really thankful for the two years I wrote for them. Each week I would get a batch of photos, read about them and learn something new. I didn’t know that the Pillars of Creation were destroyed about 6,000 years ago from a supernova blast. This is one of my favorite things about writing on this subject, it’s not locked in the present, it’s all already happened. We are like archeologists stumbling upon old bones and ruins of something that once existed and we think, wow, how beautiful it was.
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