Cloud Watching, or, Becoming a private person

Is it still moving in silence if you talk about how you’re moving in silence all the time?

Though I am unsure exactly when it happened, at some point over the last several years, I have become a private person. I did not expect to ever be this way. “Child of the internet” is sort of my whole thing. The long arc of the indie folk solo project does not bend towards privacy. My Substack lays somewhat dormant, but if you crack it open, you’ll see a shrine to RADICAL HONESTY! under the guise of “culture criticism” (gag!). A line from Tumblr Poet Laureate Richard Siken: “I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything.” But there was a time when confessions were all I had (princess of the bottom of the hole/trip-hazard/camera-ready). Three years ago I was gossamer thin and made of snow in New York. I was a spider web under running water, I was lying prone. Today, I watch the clouds.

Here are some things I am prepared to confess: I am twenty-two years old, I live in Los Angeles, I am a nanny. As a child I, like many others, anticipated quicksand being a far larger issue in my adult life than it has proven to be. The nature of my job is such that childlike wonder is able to maintain dominion over considerable real estate in my brain. I write letters from the Tooth Fairy. Upon entering a room I case the joint for potential hide and seek spots. It’s a Friday in February and the baby and I look for shapes in the sky. “I see a lobster. That one is a mermaid. There, a group of monks climbing a hill. What do you call a group of monks? A monastery?” The baby didn’t answer for obvious reasons.

Days prior: I sip whiskey neat and shiver. I like being outside even in February because it feels wrong to cower indoors when California winters are so forgiving. I rebuff advances of affection: “I keep my feelings and desires locked away in jam jars in off-site storage.” He doesn’t think this is as funny as I do but, much like when talking to babies, most jokes I tell on dates are primarily for me. In college I cried an average of three times per day. Now, my best friend earnestly described me as having “a coastal coolness,” as “sometimes unaffected.” In college I believed my life would never look any different from the way it did then, getting a dance degree at a liberal arts school in New York. Now I know that like most things you believe at age nineteen, that wasn’t true. I tell my best friend over the phone that the date and I slept together last week. “Why did you wait to tell me that?” I tell her I don’t know even though I do. “Were you afraid to tell me?” I tell her no even though it isn’t true. I am a private person now but my face betrays me. She jokes that I’m the Serena Van der Woodsen of traumatized women: “You’re always saying ‘I have to go.’” I have my fingers on the floodgates and I know when their structural integrity is threatened. I’m a private person now; I know when to extricate myself.

Cloud watching is a Rorschach test. On Friday I see lots of evil dogs, baring their teeth and snarling. I am a writer; I am oriented towards words. There are corners of my heart, long echoing hallways, that end in TV static. I have nothing to say about these corridors. They have no names. I am a private person now—I have secrets even from myself. I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, but my face betrays me. Am I forgiven yet? I ask God to turn me into a flower. “That one looks like two lovers kissing,” I tell the baby, “or maybe they have a secret.” Cloud watching is a Rorschach test and I am bifurcated again. I whisper to the baby, “You have a whole universe inside of you. Your heart is constantly expanding. In seven years when all your cells turn over your body will be essentially new but still you will remain.” He doesn’t respond because he’s busy building a neural network. He doesn’t do anything just because he likes the idea of being the kind of person who does. He, too, is a private person.

When you finish dissecting the animal, when the autopsy has been dutifully performed, there comes a time when it’s just mutilation to continue digging your hands into the soft belly of a once-living thing. The snow melts in your hair. Your other halves take a path you wouldn’t want to follow. Your heart is wide and tender, constantly expanding. You hold a baby. You watch the clouds. You see the Vatican and white water rafters, snarling dogs and the Sydney Opera House and lovers meeting. God turns you into a flower.