letter 14: molting
pieced together rambling: martyrdom, year of the snake, remaining soft
I just rearranged my entire home. I’ve lived here for about a year now: my little cabin fifteen minutes from the nearest town on either side. It’s a one bedroom cabin with a small, manmade pond out front. It’s nestled in with multiple other cabins, but I don’t really have any neighbors. Here is the first home I have ever lived in truly alone, other than my tiny, sassy, grey cat, Sophie. I am 25 years old. Today is February 4th, 2025. It is February 4th, 2025 and I am writing on a typewriter,,, and sitting on the floor. I am currently reading Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and the Selected Crônicas of Clarice Lispector. They are two of my own literary heroes — masters of essence, masters of self, authors I consider to be quite close to God.
I was raised in the Catholic Church, something I consider to be a blessing more and more the older I age. There is a massive amount of sensuality involved in a Catholic mass. I do not attend mass anymore, except on particular holidays with my family. Recently I had dinner with a friend and felt the urge to pray before the meal. I am not quite positive where I stand with God, but I feel the presence of God often.
Saturday at ten in the morning I plan to attend an Eastern Orthodox service. Friday, I’ll get drunk with my friends.
There are sweet potatoes in the oven. I can smell them. I should get them out now, probably…
They aren’t quite ready. Not soft enough on the inside for my liking.
I’m not so sure if I’m doing the type writing right. The ribbon keeps slipping and my fingers hurt a bit. They’re also covered in ink. I like the way the ink smells on my fingers.
I’ll keep going anyways, the click, click, click of these keys makes me feel giddy on the inside. My ex man gave me this typewriter. I don’t know if that relationship was really love or if it was a strange unlikely angel placed in my life to remind me of my love for words. Perhaps both? He took three tabs of acid in September, made me cry a lot, and then took off for New York City. I couldn’t honestly say that it broke my heart, but it did certainly rock my world. He didn’t feel god in his life, neither did the one before him. Rather, the one prior despised God.
I am learning the typewriter now…
It feels good to lay on the floor and feel my spine move apart from itself.
Last night I cried and wished myself to disintegrate. It feels good to change my format. Mostly, I am currently concerned with the process of getting closer to myself, which I also equate to getting closer to God. That may come across as self-obsessed. Of course, if you know what I am speaking of then I should not need to explain much further than that. Truthfully, I don’t wish to do much elaborating anymore. What I have come to understand is a necessity of trust. In God, self, love, words. In my body, in the chaos. I am not seeking for much outside of my self but I do feel a deep longing to create in the current moment and body I sit in.
My sweet potatoes are ready. I have been writing for over an hour now. I’ll have a hot tea with honey, maybe a bath. I don’t have work tomorrow. I don’t have much money, either. Such is life.
It is nearly II pm. Where is the number one on this thing?’. exclamation point
Your capacity to love others unconditionally is contingent on your capacity to love yourself unconditionally
Your capacity to dole out grace, compassion, and understanding is contingent on your ability to relentlessly grant yourself grace, compassion and understanding
This does not mean that you should accept shabby, half-assed love. This means that you should understand when others are incapable of letting themselves simply be — those who feel the need to manipulate the situation of humanness at hand, who run, who pick, who pry. There are people who cannot grant themselves humanness, mistake, and will try to will you into a place of control again.
To continue to love unconditionally can be difficult. There is a deep messiness in being alive. The crux of transformation is seated inside of the messiness. You must practice allowing the mess of it all wash over you instead of frantically trying to manipulate it back to controlled spotlessness. Similar to letting a fever run its course, all things come back to homeostasis at some point. The fat falls away on its own when you stand in yourself confidently, when you love yourself unconditionally above all. You do not have to be a martyr for others’ comfort in control.
The first book I finished in 2025 was Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector. It’s only the second of Lispector’s works I’ve read. After reading The Hour of the Star early last year, I was left stunned. There’s something in the way the woman writes that feels so deeply like home to me, something that makes me understand that others understand it, too. I long to savor her writing like no other author I’ve ever read. I want a shrine devoted to her.
You could open up to any page of my copy of Agua Viva and find a faint underline in pencil of nearly every line in the book. At random, I opened the book found two which spoke so clearly to me they brought me to tears.
“The secret harmony of disharmony: I don’t want something already made but something still being torturously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air — I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only gives me the full measure of silence.
And if I say “I” it’s because I dare not say “you,” or “we” or “one.” I’m forced to the humility of personalizing myself belittling myself but I am the are-you.
Yes, I want the last word which is also so primary that it gets tangled up with the unattainable part of the real. I’m still afraid to move away from logic because I fall into instinct and directness, and into the future: the invention of today is the only way to usher into the future. Then it’s the future, and any hour is your allotted hour. So what’s the harm in moving away from logic? I deal in raw materials. I’m after whatever is lurking beyond thought. No use trying to pin me down: I simply slip away and won’t allow it, no label will stick. I’m entering a very new and genuine chapter, curious about itself, so appealing and personal that I can’t paint it or write it. It’s like moments I had with you, when I would love you, moments I couldn’t go past because I descended into their depths. It’s a state of touching the surrounding energy and I shudder. Some mad, some harmony. I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.”
(7)
“Can’t you see that this is like a child being born? It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-to-be is a slow and slow good pain. It’s the wide stretching as far as one can go. And your blood thanks you. I breathe, I breathe. The air is it.“
(56)
I know, I know for I say it all of the time like a mantra, because the words are bitter and wild in my mouth: to be surrounded by dyings means to also be surrounded and shrouded by new life — a cocooning, a molting. The loving hand demands so many endings for so many more precious birthings and God, I am in the velvety thick blur of it all, and God it is absolutely terrifying and delicious to be here. I can taste the blood in my mouth. I am oozing!!! I am oozing and I do not at all long to wipe it from my brow.
The second book I finished this year was A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux. This was the second of Ernaux’s works I’ve read. The first was Do What They Say Or Else. Alongside to Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, this book landed easily among my top four reads for 2024.
March 1963, in my room.
« In my bedroom at my parents’ house, I pinned this sentence from Claudel, carefully copied onto a large sheet of paper, with the edges burned with a lighter like a satanic pact: “Yes, I believe that I did not come into the world for nothing and that there is something in me that the world could not do without. »>
September 1963, breakfast at the desk in my room.
I received a phone call from my brother while I was reading A Woman’s Story at work, letting me know my grandmother was in the hospital. I finished the book that night, and went to see my grandmother the following afternoon.
“One day she fainted in the sun and was taken to the medical service of the old people’s home. A few days later, after she had been fed and rehydrated, she felt better and asked to go home; ‘Otherwise,’ she said, ‘I’ll jump out of the window.’ According to the doctor, she could no longer be left on her own. He advised me to put her into an old people’s home. I rejected this solution”
(75)
My grandmother is in the hospital. She’s had dementia for years now. When the nurse asked if we were close, I told her we used to be. The entire time I sat by her bed, and despite the heavy sedatives, she had one leg draped over the bedrail — with a wish to leave. She is strong-willed and certain in what she wants, what she feels she needs.
I played Al Green for her, she sang weakly but with a soft smile painted on her exhausted face. Her toes moved erratically to the beat. She spoke to her brother, Josh, on the hospital bed remote. I asked her about her rings—this was mama’s, she told me. I kissed her forehead as I left and her pale blue eyes opened to meet mine.
My grandmother is back at home and doing as well as she can now. I fully understand where a good bit of my obsessive and hard-willed nature hails from.
And as I so like to do, I’ll leave you with a playlist.
We’re living in warped time. It’s the year of the Snake. Go forth and let yourself molt.
Love,
Morgan