He might be smiling. You might be screaming.

On marsh mud, missed appointments, and paying attention

If you prefer to listen, you’ll find an audio version of this essay, read by me, here. ⬆️

This isn’t the first time you’ve wrested yourself from the grip of confusion, and you’re sure it won’t be the last. Try as you might to direct energy to something less disorienting, you drift back like a jellyfish caught in a rip tide. You’ve been cross-examining your thoughts for almost a week now trying to hear what’s speaking to you, what your intuition is telling you needs tending.

You get glimmers of clarity, flickers of focus, moments when you’re able to stay anchored to what’s right in front of you. But even as you think that, you have to acknowledge how thin it sounds. Whatever this was all supposed to mean, it used to feel sturdier than this. How do you maintain equanimity when forces masquerading as benevolence make life even harder for the human and non-human inhabitants of this water-colored, wounded, whirling place?

Your intellectual self knows anger won’t help here, no matter what the influencer therapist says about letting it pass through you. What good is railing about quality control when the thing is already exploding in your face?

You stare at your phone. The headlines are a Tilt-a-Whirl.

Israel bombs Gaza City as UK and allies urge action against unfolding famine
White House announces comprehensive review of Smithsonian exhibitions
Scientists find blue whales suddenly going silent. Why they think it’s happening.
As National Guard troops arrive, uncertainty over command of D.C. police
Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study finds.
Putin heads to Trump summit confident he is winning in Ukraine
Hand soap recalled nationwide over bacterial contamination that could cause sepsis

At first you look pleadingly at the ride operator each time you wing past, but he’s deliberately ignoring you. Is he smiling? He might be smiling. You might be screaming. You close your eyes against the spit gathering in your mouth and pray for it to be over.

In the midst of the spiral, here is what you can’t remember:

Laughing until your stomach hurts. The feel of marsh mud between your toes. How the early morning smell of petunias reminds you of tomatoes and the last time you watched the sun rise. The sound of a brush sweeping through your grandmother’s hair. When moonlight was enough.

Driving to the appointment is like anticipating a first date, wondering if you’ll like it, or if you’ll say something stupid and ruin it the way you sometimes do. Are you wearing the right thing? Will you look different after? You have to be the least cool person you know. Of course you’ve turned a routine appointment into a referendum. A referendum on what, exactly? Who knows. Everything.

“You’re going to love it!” your friend said.

You arrive 10 minutes early, which seems right, not to mention impressive for you, and ring the doorbell. You watch how the blue light circles the button, hear the chiming, chiming, chiming, listen and listen for footsteps. Nothing. Maybe you’re too early. Maybe she’s with another client. You stand for a while then take a seat on the porch, noticing the trio of small American flags scattered around the yard. She’s Russian, you think. Why are there no Russian flags? Why are you thinking that? What the hell kind of thought is that, anyway?

At a minute past the designated time, you ring the doorbell again. Blue lights. Chimes. Nothing. You look for a side entrance, notice the single car in the driveway, notice the other houses on this cul-de-sac, how big and similar they are, check your email, wait five more minutes, dial, leave a message that’s more gracious than you feel, then drive away. After all, you were the one who missed the first appointment. So you guess you’re even now.

On the way home, you feel sorry for the half-dead evergreen at the corner of a massive convenience store, along a massive road, and for the raccoon that didn’t make it across. You take a picture of the gap in the clouds that reminds you of Thomas Jefferson.

August, 2025

Among friends, you say you feel flat but decide that’s inaccurate. Flat is empty, void, unable to care. You are not that. You are overwhelmed, full to overflowing and simultaneously drained. You care too much, if caring too much is possible in a time when echoes come back with battle scars.

You don’t lack emotion, you segregate it. You shove it to the back of a closet with all the times you embarrassed yourself, with the 8th-grade taunts, and the hand-knit socks from the woman who stopped talking to you years ago. You box it up and pile it in the basement where you ignore it until it’s time to move and you’re forced to carry it back out again.

Flat doesn’t find herself in tears over someone else’s hardship.

Flat doesn’t feel her chest ache at the thought of the last few wild red wolves on the peninsula where she once sailed for seasons at a time.

Flat doesn’t rage against the carelessness of politicians or the callousness of their indifference.

They’d love it if you numbed out, quieted down, gave up. That’s how it’s always worked. Turn the ones who notice into outliers, turn the ones who feel into threats, rename the ones who heal—witch, heretic, unstable, dramatic, hysterical. Make them easy to dismiss. Bury the people in noise and tragedy until they stop feeling altogether. Confuse them, exhaust them, keep them toggling between sympathy and fury, shame and uselessness. Convince them to blame what’s right in front of them rather than dealing with what’s in the basement.

And here you are. Full and paying attention. Full and heartsick. Full of memories, full of questions, full of everything they told you couldn’t be saved and holding what they hoped you’d forget.

~Elizabeth

One of the sweetest parts of this whole project is the unexpected ways we get to know each other through the words you leave behind. I don’t just read your comments—I savor them, like my first cup of tea (with real cream!) in the morning.

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