Rough Drafts
A Series of Pieces Written in The Wild
#6
I’ve been in a new flat for the past couple days. Or few? I don’t even know. Days, months, years, all tend to blend together. I don’t identify the day by it’s Gregorian name but by what my calendar tells me I’m doing: Writing Group Day, Therapy Day, Day 27 of My Cycle Day, Birthday of Person I Haven’t Spoken To In Years Day. You get the picture. During the early days of the pandemic I tried to figure out different ways for me to not feel like I was living in a kind of Groundhog’s Day or episode of Russian Doll. I declared Fridays Aphrodite Fridays where I would dress up, put makeup on, and dance around the house with my cat. In Astrology, Friday is Venus’s day, a time to celebrate beauty, luxury, joy. An acupuncturist I went to in New York to help with my fibromyalgia symptoms also celebrated Aphrodite Fridays. Those were my favorite days to get acupuncture because alongside the needles adorning me would be crystals and rose oils cooling down my inflamed and overacting body. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any kind of body work like that or wanted to embody my inner goddess or wanted to define any aspect of my life based on looking a certain way. When I was a kid in private Jewish school we were required to dress up on Fridays for Shabbat. I hated doing this. I hated being told what to do especially when it came to my body. I hated dressing up even though I loved clothes. It didn’t make sense to me that what we look like externally mattered more in terms of honoring a day, tradition or person more than how we felt internally. And I resented not being able to figure out my own ways of honoring special times. I haven’t kept up with many of my childhood traditions or ones I began trying out in 2020. Who knows what I might return to while trying to make sense of the next stage of my life and the one after that.
