just a whisper of smoke

In her car on the way to an Alison Krauss concert E, who has read nearly everything I’ve worked on in the last two years, says: “Do you actually feel all that stuff? The stuff you write about?” We’ve gotten lost once already–E and I are constantly getting lost, all wrong turns and wrong trains and glancing over our shoulders with confused looks on our faces– and she peers down at the map on her phone, frowning. “I’ve been wanting to ask you that.”

I think about it for a moment as Connecticut whooshes by outside the window, green and fresh. On the train to New Haven all the trees had exploded candyfloss pink. “Yeah,” I tell her finally. I think of that line from Jonathan Safran Foer, the one about beavers needing to file their teeth down to keep them from growing into their faces and killing them.  “Basically I do.”

“My God,” she says. E and I are freakishly similar in taste and temperament, to the point where we are routinely discovering that we have purchased the same articles of clothing on the same day, but this is a point where we diverge fast and sharply, two-roads-in-a-yellow-wood-style. “Isn’t that exhausting?”

“Sometimes,” I admit, because sometimes it is. I don’t know how other people do it, though: how they wrestle their feelings into submission without turning them into a story complete with mood and moral, without clawing for that distance between first person and third–or if maybe other people’s feelings just don’t require quite so much desperate wrestling as mine do. Maybe other people just, like. Feel things a normal amount and move on. “Every once in awhile.”

E is putting her makeup on in the rearview mirror by this point, driving a bit with her knees. “Sorry,” she says, when she catches me watching. “Let me know if you feel, like, unsafe.”

I hesitate for a minute, confused, then burst out laughing. “Oh!” I manage, shaking my head. “For a second I thought you meant, like. Emotionally.”

E throws her head back, cackling. “I mean,” she says, around a giggle. “Let me know that, too.”

At the concert there’s a banjo and a fiddle, some of the loveliest voices I’ve ever heard. I sit in my chair with my knees pulled up to my chest and listen. I got into Alison Krauss in college, Restless on repeat and the soundtrack to everything I wrote the fall of my senior year. I worked like a demon that semester, slamming words upon words upon words down onto the page, a notebook in my shoulder bag and a song inside my head. Five years later, eyes squeezed shut and thoughts stumbling, my fingers scrabble restlessly for a pen.

I think it’s okay, the amount that I feel things. I think it means there will always be more story to tell.