From the afternoon of March 13 into the early hours of March 15, 2022—
Journals are more a nervous habit for me than anything else. I tend to copy out passages of whatever I’m reading, less because that passage is particularly important and more as a way of taking a photograph of a time and place and line of thought.
Starts with a quote from Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which I was borrowing from my dear friend and (at the time) traveling companion in Mexico, Sara, a.k.a SR.
This pair of thoughts is funny to me:
// Is the point of company in partnership to escape the self or to deepen it // I think I’m disturbed by how happy I am //
Then some analysis of a few lines from Shirley Jackson’s memoir.
Much of the opposite page was written while I was awake in the bed I was sharing with SR. I didn’t want to wake her up so I was writing in the dark. I was going over a conversation we’d had at dinner about self-deception.
Also, later, still awake after a failed attempt to sleep in the hammock in the yard, but I think I had moved to the bathroom floor so I could turn on a light.
Thinking of Sean’s encroaching blindness.
My other best friend, Sean, is slowly going blind, and I was thinking of it that night for a variety of reasons. I apparently didn’t have any language for this beyond the observation that it was on my mind. It’s funny how love can sometimes energize language and sometimes numb it, but lately I’ve been centering my life around my friends and the question of how to best take care of them and be taken care of by them. This has been rewarding and has produced a happiness I apparently find, at times, disturbing.
Catherine Lacey is the author of four books, including, most recently, Pew. She lives in New York and Mexico.
