pepper grinder
There’s a metaphor I’m fond of using for when I’m thinking about fate. I think of it as a pepper grinder. You know, the kind where you twist the top. In my head it works like this: One turn of the pepper grinder and I’ll learn javascript and go into front-end; two turns of the pepper grinder and I’ll take remedial chemistry and go back to school for art conservation. One turn of the pepper grinder and I’ll start believing in god. Three turns of the pepper grinder and I’ll move to Japan and enter a Buddhist nunnery.
It works for the past, too, if I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, or want to hurt my own feelings by imagining how closely I could have missed the life I have now. One turn of the pepper grinder and I would have never met you. Three turns of the pepper grinder—if I had been a better daughter, less selfish, less rebellious—and I’m certain I’d still be in Oregon. Doing what, exactly, the pepper grinder has failed to tell.
As much as I use the metaphor in conversation, I still don’t quite know what the pepper grinder represents. I picture one like the one in my kitchen, clear plastic, the bottom filled with rainbow peppercorns. What the turn means is clear—a pivotal moment that leads to a decision that wouldn’t or couldn’t have been made before. The decisive twist that grinds the peppercorns which can’t be un-ground again. The 2016 election was a turn of the pepper grinder for many people—not, perhaps, in its geopolitical significance but in what that significance revealed about individual relationships and commitments and choices. Realizing I was assaulted in the spring of 2014 was a turn of the pepper grinder for me. I can see so clearly now how the effects of that realization splayed out into the rest of my life, like a shadow falling onto sunlit pavement, or a door that opens onto a hallway full of other doors.
The pepper grinder is there to remind me that the way I’ve come to arrive at the life I’m living has been almost entirely random. A series of decisions, here and there, that flipped open my life the way a light switch transforms a dark room. And it reminds me, too, that my future is just as uncertain. A turn could change everything: a death, a birth, a pandemic. The turn of the pepper grinder, of course, always either happens in the past or the future. The present moment is the only moment I own.
I used to spend a lot of time dwelling in the past. I used to wonder about—Santi and I once decided that the most fucked up thing you can say to an ex is, Do you ever think about…?—what it would have been like. If he had been better to me, or I had been better to him, or if we had met each other at a better time for the both of us. The weight of the lives we could have lived is so heavy to bear! Maybe, if there are different universes out there, there’s a different me, who’s chosen differently in all the choices I didn’t know I was making.
But in the only world I know, the world in which I’m writing you this letter, the pepper grinder has already turned. It’s turned and turned. It’s turned in a way where I have arrived into this life of mine, a life where I fell in love almost on accident, and at just the right time. What I’m trying to say is, I can’t be sad about all the times things didn’t work out, if it meant that they were all ways for me to end up here, now, in this moment. What I’m trying to say is, the present is the only thing we’re certain we can change.
I’m not a determinist—it’s not like that, even though I keep talking about this big pepper grinder of fate. I believe in free will, because I believe in our ability to change the world and to change ourselves; both, I hope, for the better, if not the best. But I think it makes sense to be looking for sense. Especially now, when there seems to be so little sense in the chaos of our days. I still find myself looking at the window at the empty street below my apartment, unable to imagine how different life will become in the next weeks and years. I miss restaurants, and bars, and nightclubs. I miss the glancing touches of strangers. If only we could run it all back, and start over again—like winding film back on a reel. But the pepper grinder has already turned. The rest of all of it is up to us.
This isn’t meant to be a sad or fatalistic letter. I’m trying to say, how incredible it is that any of us are reading this at all. That everything that’s happened to us has brought us together, here, in this virtual placeless place. No asteroid has struck, no Melancholia planet, no second Pompeii. For every turn of the pepper grinder, there are a thousand turns it didn’t take. So now. A question. What will you do with your—one wild and precious—life today?
The scallions on our windowsill are in their second growth since we trimmed them and put them in water. And. I finally got a library card, to check out ebooks. The one I really want to read is going to be on hold for a few weeks, but I have time. That’s what I’m doing today.
And I figured out the name of the bird that I saw on New Year’s. It’s called a mourning dove. The name is sad, but it wasn’t a bad omen. They symbolize freedom and peace.
Until soon,
LP
1: I turned in my book two weeks ago. I wrote most of it while listening to The Wilderness, by Explosions In The Sky. I listened to their 2003 album a lot when I was in high school, and it felt nice to encounter their 2016 album now. I’ll be going into edits soon, and writing about that here, if you’re interested.
2: This is a letter for another time, or maybe a blog post somewhere, but I’ve been thinking about fate in no small part thanks to this manga I’ve been revisiting during quarantine. It’s called Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, from CLAMP, and if you want to give your heart a big, painful squeeze, I recommend reading it.
3: More reading: Ongoingness, by Sarah Manguso; and I can’t wait for the hold to lift on a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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Hi, you’re reading intimacies, a relaunch of the original, occasional diary letter I sent out from 2016-2018. You’re getting this email because you were previously subscribed to its first iteration, and you got those emails because you were probably subscribed to Cum Shots, my previous letter at Nerve. If you liked this letter, please click the heart. Thank you for reading. I really appreciate you.