Spring 2024

[Redacted]’s backyard, by the fire, in the drizzle

The prompt is some shapeless open question about NELP and reflection and the passage of time. In some ways, that’s the basis for every entry I’ve ever written in a journal.

My 18 year-old NELP self would believe and be touched that I am here 8 years later around this fire. Though I’d be validly confused by the group’s notable absences. Anyway. I’ve been transcribing all of my past journals (non-consecutively) onto a website blog thing. The post-NELP journals are the most intolerable because I was sick with grief and longing for the artifice. I had changed and emerged as an instar in exactly the tree had curled up in months before. Things don’t change because you do.

I don’t feel the crisis of longing or incongruous reality that I did then. I’m re-addicted to my phone and I don’t care. That’s actually normal. But I am here 8 years later around this fire.

The idea was floated to write about New York as though you are writing about nature. And there’s thunder and lightning above this overgrown yard so I’m like…this is New York and nature lol. But it’s also not, I get it. If there’s anything to say on that now, I guess it’s like: New York isn’t NELP, but isn’t it? NELP wasn’t NELP in the way I needed because of much besides the people and the things I could not control — like the rain and the lightning — and my journal, which persists.

So writing about New York like it’s NELP is not hard because the sirens and the bluetooth speaker and the beer aren’t actually impediments to the fire and this weather with my friends. And my journal.

I used to have fear that I would never rediscover that sense of place and time, but that wasn’t because I had lived in and lost the only recipe. It was just the first time I’d really had a sense of myself and my friends as world-builders. But we’re world-builders here too. It turns out there’s a hundred thousand ways of being together in earnest and on purpose.