love stories
I thought this week was going to be about beauty, about how beauty can regulate us, and help to rebuild the fallen structures of us. I wanted to write about paintings and sunsets, about rainbows appearing when we need them most, about how I followed beauty back to myself after so much loss, but days go by, and phone calls come that you didn’t know were coming, so maybe it’ll be about something different, but maybe it’ll still be about beauty.
Kind of recently, but not that recently, my mother said to me, like when you sent Ethan Hawke your headshot. I fired back, that never happened. There is no way in hell that I sent Ethan Hawke a headshot. i would rather die!! She insisted, and later that day it all came rushing back at me. I had gotten a copy of his first book, Ash Wednesday, in a swag bag at some event, and for some reason I read it, and I LOVED IT. I was twenty six at the time and experiencing my first adult break up and something about the book saved something in me. Everyone made fun of me, but I still tried to get everyone to read it. And then I decided to send him my headshot and a letter about how much I loved it and that maybe he should make it into a movie and I would be great as the lead. I don’t know if I said the lead part, but I imagine that’s why I included the headshot. I sent it to Ethan Hawke c/o The Chelsea Hotel, but I never heard back, and I shoved it in a little corner of my mind. I still think it would’ve been a dream project!
Recently I saw a instagram thing where some lady for some reason asked Ethan Hawke if he had any advice for unrequited love, and he responded, (Don’t worry! We are almost at the end of the Ethan Hawke portion of this newsletter. I promise!!) He said, “The one who’s in love always wins… It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken. You’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive.”
I don’t mean to write so much about death, but the people reading this who have experienced a lot of loss, know that I am writing about living, about what it is to be alive, like really alive. The people who haven’t, maybe still think I am writing about death. I’m not sure who the lucky ones are. Maybe we all are lucky, maybe it is actually a gift to be alive. Please consider that for one moment, actually consider it, YOU, being alive is a gift, to you and also to others.
YOU BEING ALIVE IS A GIFT. You can stop reading.
I love the Confuscius quote, We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.
I found out I lost someone yesterday. We met when we were 6 and 8. She was my family, and six years ago after 35 years of friendship, we got into a huge fight, and because we are both so stubborn, we never spoke again. This could be a really easy message of go tell everyone you love them, but that’s not my point. Maybe we weren’t supposed to spend those last years together, but my god am I grateful that we spent those 35 together. I am grateful for all of it, for the time we got into a fight treading water in a lake and only stopped when someone said, enough. just look at yourselves, and then we laughed and laughed so hard about yelling while doing the doggy paddle. We could be mean to each other and then tell the other person all our secrets and that we loved them more than anybody. We looked out for each other. We sang Time After Time so loud in a parked car outside the Rhinecliff Hotel. We got drunk and made videos and played dumb games we made up and sang Lucinda Williams songs and pulled angel cards and got hundreds of coffees and drove around smoking cigarettes. We had the chicken pox together and did plays with Mariah where I got to be the crazy woman in a cage, at my insistence. We lived together, we talked for hours about anything at all. We made each other; we helped each other be more and more into the people we were meant to be. We were a love story. We were a life.
I have so many love stories in my life. That is what I am grateful for. I am grateful that more days come, and more stories unfold. I have loved so many moments, flowers, fights, repairs, embarrassments that became laughed about with the people I have collected in my heart.
One time before my mom died I looked at her and I said, I don’t think I deserve how beautiful my life is, and she stopped what she was doing and she said, you make people feel so seen and loved, you should have a beautiful life. And this is true sometimes, and sometimes I am defended and I can make people feel ignored or cast aside. Do I wish that I was only the former, of course, but can it be okay that I am both sides of a coin, a store that has both open and closed hours. Can it be okay that it is not so simple?
Life is complicated. It’s my big fat opinion (I stole that line from a therapist) that anyone who tells you they have a simple solution to living is a) full of shit and b) selling themselves short. Life is not for solving, but for living.
So I have a few hopes for myself. I will not speak for you. I hope that as I age I learn to open my heart more and more. I hope to love and respect myself even when I am full of defenses. I hope to practice falling more and more in love with my life no matter what it looks like.
Can you fall in love with your life no matter, NO MATTER WHAT.
with love,
Jen Davis
Matriarchs of The Hudson Valley by Celeste Dupuy- Spencer
