i got this

Today was my first time in Griffith Park in months. It is – as ever – a monument to wildness in the city of angels. Not one but two rabbits crossed our path. Vincent felt only one was worth chasing and the other he observed. We went the steep way, not the way we usually go. Since there is no usual anymore, we broke with another pattern and I noticed my hunger for variation. Lately, I have felt lost in the most familiar of places. Like I need breadcrumbs for my breadcrumbs or better yet, a guide. It’s getting harder to trust my experience in isolation and I don’t want to be patient anymore. I want to be sovereign again like the good old presumptive days.

It’s not easy having the freedom to turn within, it is interrogation. Ask my closets! They feel violated, tidied to the point of irrelevance. And no matter how many zoom meetings I have, the day manages to wrap it’s long arms around me. Immersive and unfamiliar, like skin with no skeleton. Perhaps this is the longest period of my adult life where I haven’t felt on a path. I can’t get my bearings and everything seems to require a password I don’t remember. I get repeatedly logged out of the unemployment website, redundancy squared, like a 2020 Waiting for Godot.

I took this picture of the power line in the park today because in the upper right corner, there is a nest. Energy thrums between the electrical towers; like siblings whispering under sheets after lights out. Statuesque walkie talkies. But that nest – improbable, precarious, unfazed by gravity, electrocution, change in wind – felt very human, a symbol of risk and desire and the momentariness of both. That nest is like my move to New York at twenty years old. It is the miraculous first step of a fearsome change. The ingenuity that moves us and the impermanence that governs us. That nest balancing on a thin metal arm of a tower pulsing with current is like life and I have taken for granted her fragility.

Max and I laughed so hard we cried when the unemployment website gave us my password prompt. The words I chose to help me retrieve my password were as follows: I GOT THIS. You can’t make it up. I GOT THIS was the prompt and an emoji of a cowboy hat, which I have no recollection selecting. But if you can, there’s something – other than my weak grip on reality – to appreciate about the bald hope of I GOT THIS. I got this – unemployment, joy, doubt, loss, desire, pain, love, fatigue, ambition, heartbreak, anxiety, impatience, depression, despair – I got this. I imagine the bird – weighing doubt with each twig of her nest while saying I got this. Not a prompt or password. A guide.