“The original queen of bold brows” (Audrey Hepburn)
Arching “his eyebrows about ten degrees” (Buster Keaton)
“Thick, black, expressive eyebrows” (Hayao Miyazaki)
I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to fall in love with another person. I wanted to fall in love with something bigger. Something that would hold me and my wandering mind. Something, like a love affair, that would allow me to say: I am here, I am alive. I am doing more than calmly bracing myself.
It was not enough to be a vigil flame, contained and burning around the clock.
As my days became increasingly plotted, I developed a bad case of wanderlust (Ger. wandern, to hike, and lust, desire).
I began to envy the literal wanderers, the ones out in the dark seas, or breaking away to hike up mountains and along the Pacific Crest trail. I dreamt of following footprints on a path, of going where the wild things are. But I had never been a Great Outdoors traveller. I was an urban person, a city-identified post-colonialist. The thought of pointing and gasping at something spectacularly beautiful on a warming planet felt dismal. Such was my state of mind. The feeling of pre-grief had made a home in my body. The shadow of an ending in my own family had made me alert to other endings.
Death is the definition of finitude. My wanderlust, I began to feel, was about finding my way back to infinity, back to the woods of a creative and contemplative mind.
I dreamt again of footprints on a path and realized when I awoke that it was not escape that I craved but guidance. For weeks, I sought instruction wherever I went. Please, YMCA lifeguard, will you coach me on my freestyle? Please, elaborately coiffed greengrocer, can you tell me how to cook these bitter greens? I wanted gifts of knowledge. I wanted company.
I wanted someone to lead the way forward and keep me going. Not a saviour but a guiding force. I was ready to imprint myself like a duckling.
I contacted a well-known artist to discuss the possibility of drawing lessons. As a child, I used to draw all the time. It absorbed me completely. At some point, writing replaced drawing and what had once been second nature (drawing) became foreign. But the urge to draw had remained. I missed its simple and primordial pleasures. The artist met me at a café wearing a black parka and a delicate grey-blue scarf and appeared doubtful that she was in the right place, even after I introduced myself. When she ordered a small chai, I ordered the same, companionably affirming her choice. When she straightened her spine, I instinctively did the same. When she asked me why I wanted her to teach me drawing, I replied, “Sometimes you just want to sit back and be led.” Realizing this sounded strangely passive and messianic, I added, “Through drawing prompts.” I didn’t want her to think I was looking for a guru or that I was the kind of person who would just hand myself over to someone else. I also did not want her to hear my hunger, because to hunger as much as I did at that moment felt lascivious.
The artist peered at me thoughtfully. Her blue eyes were clear and perfectly lined with kohl. Finally she spoke, with a hint of bemusement. She said the students who came to her were always full of hunger. They were seventeen-year-old aspiring artists and eighty-five-year-old retired businessmen. People of mourned, mislaid, or unmined creativity. Their yearning was like the white puff of a dandelion. All she had to do was blow gently and watch their creative spores lift, scatter, and take seed.
We sat by the window and watched the clods of fresh snow thrown up by the feet of passersby, the uprush of wings when a flock of pigeons startled into the now white winter sky. Angles of light, intensities of shadow, the way the sky clouded and cleared and the streetcars gorged and disgorged passengers. I felt the artist’s full-body noticing and the passing time.
I looked across the street at the signs hanging on the discount store.
DON’T JUST STAND THERE, BUY SOMETHING!
THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOE BUSINESS!
FREE 12-PACK OF RACCOONS
FOR EVERY VISITOR!
I knew at that moment I would not pursue private art lessons with this woman who, to be truthful, unnerved me with her quiet concentration and pin-straight posture.
I went home and pulled out my ancient brushes and pen nibs and old bottles of ink. I spent a little time sharpening my drawing pencils and cleaning my stubby grey erasers. I found a block of drawing paper. I looked at the sharpened pencils and for a moment they were arrows. They were arrows pointing to all the things that could not be captured with words, arrows pointing to other possible lives, potentialities, directions, even backtracks. I was waiting to be led by a line, in this case a pencil line.
In that moment of stillness, I realized I might also have been grieving the longer spans of time that allowed me to get a lift out of daily life.
As I sat with those arrows, as illness and caregiving further compressed my days into tiny snippets of moments, I had a growing feeling that my life, with its new shape and needs, required a different, less militant arrangement of time. What if I stopped fighting for the trance of long-form days, where I would be uninterrupted and ambitiously absorbed in a big project? What if I gave myself over to time’s dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than “sub-time” or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?
I wish I could say that in the weeks and months to come I no longer felt at war with the world, but that was not the case. I am a self-employed writer. It is not easy to stop being unstoppable. (Just ask the pronghorn who continues to outrun the ghost of predators past.) I still tried to protect and fortify myself against invasion from time-looting bandits, still moved through the world as if I were perpetually on-task, trying to focus on nothing but what was in my own head and what I might make.
But I did begin to make peace with my fragments.
On falling in love with birds and discovering other lessons in insignificance.
Then there were the birds, which were suddenly everywhere. I could hear them in the trees and tucked in the eaves of our house: idle choirs chattering and trilling—pretty songs and ugly songs, songs to pass the time. A hawk perched high above the ice rink while I was skating with my sons one afternoon. I spied a flock of migrating geese through a skylight while I did the backstroke in a YMCA pool. It moved like a giant cursor across the white flatness of the sky.
One evening I returned from visiting my father at the hospital and curled up on the couch in my composer-husband’s studio. I reeked of Purell hand sanitizer and the sweat that comes from acting chipper. The studio was the most soothing place I knew. The walls were covered in blue fabric and hanging baffles. These baffles, made of wavy grey foam, were designed to eliminate echo and absorb sound. A floating floor further reduced impact noise. I melted into its womb-like comfort.
My husband played a track he had made for a movie, ghostly and piano-driven. I wore his hat, which I had pulled from his coat tree. I wrapped myself in