The glass jar

On memory, meaning, and moments to keep

She set a small glass jar between us on the yellow table, uncorked it, and said nothing. She smiled and went back to sipping her hot chocolate, so I did the same, and for a few hours, the jar just sat there as we talked. We laughed over it, held hands over it, and only when we were getting up to leave did she tell me what it was for.

“You put in the good moments you want to keep,” Grace said. “To store. So when you need one, you know where it is.”

My sweet, thoughtful, caring, beautiful friend knew I’d had a fucking rollercoaster of a year, and she was giving me a way to keep specific heartbeats from dissolving into the kind of vaguer and vaguer impressions you flash back to until all you remember is the feeling of remembering something.

She was giving me permission to be selective. To say: this one mattered, even if I can’t explain why. This one was worth it. This one brought me back from the edge. This one was the edge.

This one I’m keeping, even if it contradicts the story I’m trying to tell about what this year was. This one I’m keeping, specifically because it explains what this year was all about, and what was that? This year has been too many things at once. The plot contradicts the feeling, the feeling contradicts the facts, and the facts keep shifting depending on how I look at them.

I keep trying to land on a single true sentence about what was happening and keep finding five conflicting ones instead.

So fuck the single true sentence. I’ll take the truth instead.

The jar sits in my bag now, a small glass promise that some years you don’t get to summarize. You just have to hold them and say: this happened. All of it. The beautiful and the unbearable, sometimes in the same afternoon, sometimes in the same person, sometimes in the same breath.

Simple things, like a chorus of us singing “Beast of Burden” with my feet on the dashboard. Cold water at a natural reserve in Lazio. A waterfall where we screamed under the stream. Eating burrata in the car straight from the packet, juices spilling, smiles so big I thought they could power the rest of my days. A fire ceremony in Bali, my paper meeting the flames after everyone else in the group has gone, my body already knowing what my mind wouldn’t admit.

The Sartre quote* that kicked my ass the way I so desperately needed and made me start writing again after two years of not being able to write a single sentence.

The wild ecstatic dance in May where I just jumped in the air for hours and hours and hours. Ancient runes and mushroom picking hikes in the Swedish countryside. Making pretty things with my hands, ceramics and meringues and sushi and watercolors. Licking the blender clean of peanut butter while laughing like a madwoman. The ​​Holocaust memorial in Berlin. That one week in July I watched Superman in the cinema three times in a row and felt insane but lighter than I had in months. My first reading in five or six years, at the European Writers Salon in Brussels with Katherine. Pulling cards with Affie in her new home. The inedible lentil dahl Steph and I made with too much salt, and how delirious with joy we were when we figured out it would taste delicious if we added all the cream we could find in the house. The weekend in August that brought on both my unraveling and my becoming.

Watching wild horses run beneath me as the sun came up. Watching several of the best sunsets of my life. Watching each other nap on the beach in the late afternoon light. Watching the Moon, and her watching us back. Watching myself come back to myself, to life, to the light.

Someone asking me what I need, and me knowing.

Someone asking me what I want, and me answering.

Friends, I hope that no matter what this year brought you, you get to savor some sweet minutes as we leave it behind. I hope that your own glass jar, literal or otherwise, is full of heartbeats you want to hold onto.

Not because they were perfect. Not because they proved anything or solved anything or made the hard parts worth it, no.

But because they were yours, and mine, and real, and they happened exactly once.

* This guy here, obviously:

"I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone."

Sartre, The Age of Reason