UFR Weekly Newsletter #23: What I'm Trying To Say
David Cotrone
I’m thinking of when I was younger. I would spend hours in my basement using a portable version of Dance Dance Revolution, that game where you shift your feet across a mat while looking at the screen, waiting for directions. It was summer and I would sweat through my shirt. I would put my hands on my waist and hold my belt, telling my brother I lost two sizes because of the dancing. It was silly but I wasn’t joking. I’m still not. Those are the kinds of things you do when you’re young.
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Don’t Forget You Love Me by Danny Goodman
On Legos and Monsters by Sara Lippmann
Mother’s Day by Judy Clement Wall
The Myth of Fingerprints by Roxane Gay
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I don’t consider myself a writer. I haven’t earned it. But anyone who writes lays claim to the process of becoming new, again and again. What I’m trying to say is that I’m still young.
I finally got around to reading Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids. Most of it is the story of her life before she became a legend, the story of her chance encounter with another artist, a boy named Robert. The book is as much a memoir as it is an elegy to him, a shared history. Together, they struggled with ideas of art and sex and what it means to live. They lived on nothing but understood that people before them had lived on less. Upon meeting they promised to take care of each other. And they did.
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“We said farewell and I left his room. But something drew me back. He had fallen into a light sleep. I stood there and looked at him. So peaceful, like an ancient child. He opened his eyes and smiled. “Back so soon?” And then again to sleep.
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
-Patti Smith, Just Kids
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This letter isn’t any good. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.
But maybe I do.
Maybe what I’m thinking about is morning. A few Sundays ago. Sitting in a car with a friend, waiting for the sun. She talked about how she liked sunrises because of the feeling you get when you’re starting something new. She said she was being cliché and I agreed, but it was okay. Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re kernels of truth. She asked me what my favorite word was and I said devotion, because of the way it sounds, what it means. The sky changed and she said, There it is.
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We have a couple of interviews in the works for Talking with Furniture, and another for Talking with Women. We can’t wait for you to see them.
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Keep looking, I said. The sun comes up fast. It always does.
David