It's a Sandcastle World in the Summer
You keep choosing. Eventually, you answer for all of it.
There’s a story about Georgia O’Keeffe. When she moved to New York after teaching in Texas, she brought a trunk of watercolors. It burst open with a gust of June wind, the myth goes. Alfred Stieglitz chased her notions down the street while she stood laughing. Let them go.
You don’t need to know if it’s true. Only that it feels true. A kind of freedom: not carelessness, but conviction. The sense that if it’s real, it’ll return.
“What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?” John D’Agata asks. The myth teaches. So does the gap.
In 1916, O’Keeffe lived in Canyon, Texas. She taught. Hiked. Wrote long letters. Watched her students become soldiers. She turned 30. In 1918, as the Spanish flu snaked through the country, she went north to watch skyscrapers grow like teeth from gummy Manhattan earth.
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — There is no such thing — Making your unknown known is the most important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you,” she wrote to Sherwood Anderson. Not a mission. A mode.
The essay as a form resists closure. “Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.” D’Agata writes. What if change isn’t rupture but erosion?
Some days I circle the work but don’t enter. Too aware of time. Of being seen. The waves come: energy, fear, paralysis. And maybe, if lucky, a thin green shoot.
Maybe I resist writing because it feels like asking something to come true. Like opening a door I’m not ready to walk through. But it’s all energy. Even the drag.
Still, there’s the call in drafts, in scraps, in things almost said. You keep choosing. Eventually, you answer for all of it.
And then, you read about another shooting. A man on the scene in Allen, Texas saw a girl crouched in the bushes. Her missing face met him when he went to check her pulse. Mid-interview: Wayfair has just what I need.
This is our wartime: grief between video ads.
O’Keeffe said: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I never once let it stop me from doing what I wanted to do.”
The sandcastle is beautiful until the water comes. Then it folds. Then it remembers it was always going back.
The bloodline in us remembers. The voice beneath the vice. The fault line that doesn’t crack but calls.
Maybe it’s not a flaw. Maybe we built it because the tide was coming. Sometimes we need to watch a thing vanish.
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Wayfair has just what I need. *cry emoji*