Buttered AirPods

I don't want to reflect

There are still more apples on the Orchard and we can’t leave until they’re gone. There are apples in crates, apples in the trees, rotten apples thrown to the deer. We can’t use them fast enough. There are not enough crates in Michigan, and it’s not just this Orchard. There is a surplus of apples in this region. Does anyone want apples? Please come get them so I can leave.

I’m in a city today, sitting in a coffee shop feeling like I’m part of a Wes Anderson movie—the walls are turquoise, my pants are hot pink and flared, and the baristas are gay and hot. Someone just told me that my AirPods were sitting in a plate of butter. Which is true, they were. I plucked them out and wiped em down. I’ve been oblivious. Sometimes things just add up to mean one thing or another, and today they have added up to this: me wearing a fur coat and flared pink pants, drinking a cappuccino. How wonderful. 

I guess this time of the year is when you’re supposed to reflect, but I refuse. I have lost, reconstructed, let go of—and I imagine I will do the same next year. What is there to reflect on when I have just begun to learn how to loosen my grip on what I thought this world was. It is changing everyday. 

If I have anything to reflect on, it would be my return. When I explain to people why I came back, I tell them I needed to be closer to people. Which is a little weird of me because I am still tucked away in a house that has three rooms too many for the amount of people who live here and I am surrounded by workaholic bosses, not my friends. It’s a strange pace of life. It is somehow what I needed though, and I’m happy to live a quiet rural Apple life until it ends. 

Last week I went to the bar, which is something I rarely do, but it is a nice change of scenery from trucks, crates, and corn. At the bar we talked about trips we took this summer and my friends spoke lovingly about Maine, North Carolina, special spots in Michigan. Your life is one big trip, someone said to me. I have to agree, and I like it this way, but sometimes I long for something else, something safer. 

I’ve really spent most of this year thinking about where I want to be and who I want to be with and what I want to spend my life doing. Which are big and ‘silly’ questions, in terms of impossibility—things you have to spend your 20s asking, but I’m gearing up to have to ask these questions to myself for the rest of my life without ever getting a real answer. I don’t want to reflect until it’s over. Maybe I don’t want an answer.

In a letter from Anna that I received this spring, she wrote about her life and how it had always been one thing to the next. She finally felt that she had found a place in the world to rest and stop, to settle down for a while. She wrote about how she was learning to slow down, though it was difficult for her. I’m so glad she got a chance to rest. 

I never feel as safe as I do when I’m in my car with everything I have, on the way to somewhere else. Yet, it’s always in the back of my head: where is the place where I will finally find some rest? 

Ya know, I think I found some rest this season. But I don’t want to reflect. ;)