Daydreaming

She was sitting on the porch, after having forced herself outside to relax. She wasn’t happy about it. She wasn’t necessarily unhappy about it, either, but relaxing usually meant sinking back into the corner of the sectional to watch another episode of Netflix or turn on Harry Potter on streaming. “Watching,” of course, being less about watching than providing background noise for whatever was happening on her phone – scrolling through Instagram reels, readings news stories and giving up in the middle, checking emails about grade appeals – or in her head – worries about getting the house clean, paying the bills (shit, she forgot to pay the bills today. Add it to the list of Saturday morning chores). But no. No more communing with the couch, in the corner she loves because it has conformed to her body exactly and hates for the same reason.

So instead she sits on the porch. Because the porch is why they bought the house but also because her therapist told her she had to, and she’s nothing if not obedient: an American Hermione who is 34, a little overweight, and less sure of herself. Same frizzy hair though. Then she’s thinking about Hermione and how she became Minister of Magic, and is that what she really wanted to do? Was it what she felt she was required to do? Or is it where she would always have ended up because she’d always need to go to the next step and the next and the next? (Do you think being Muggle born helped her in dealing with the Muggle Prime Minister? She thinks yes, it must, but then can’t help but imagine – so clearly it’s like a memory – Hermione saying “Honestly, don’t you read? to the Muggle PM). She thinks Hermione’s accomplishments probably resulted from a desire to do more, a need to serve (like Elizabeth Warren). Hermione did it because it felt right to her. Following rules felt right, so she did, until breaking them felt right, too. Going back for her last year at Hogwarts felt right, joining the department of Magical Law Enforcement, becoming Minister, all of it because she wanted it, the level of achievement so high because she was so gifted.

And our porch dweller realizes she meant to write about daydreaming on the porch because she had been daydreaming on the porch and instead spent twenty minutes ruminating on the inner life and psychological motivation of a fictional character. She stares back at the trees at the back of the lot across the street. Can’t remember what about the trees and the sun coming through the leaves and the sounds of fast cars and motorcycles had made her pick up her pen in the first place.

Oh yes.

The daydreaming felt familiar. Hearing summer noises she’s been hearing for years but tonight she remembers them floating through her bedroom window in elementary school. The sounds that formed the backdrop to watching the Red Wings play for the Stanley Cup on her neighbor’s TV, kneeling at the window sill with her brother, because the games in ’97 and ’98 came on after their bedtime. And she thinks how familiar and how comforting and how uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable. Daydreaming was something she did when she had time and when she had space and when she could give herself permission. Mental space, free of creeping thoughts about the papers she should be writing or grading or the jobs she should be applying to or grant money she should be asking for. Emotional space, too. Even when grad school was over, the dissertation written and defended, the paperwork signed, the PhD on the wall, worries about getting paid enough, choosing the right career, grappling with an identity without “student” or “candidate” central to it, but with “wife” and “mother”. How could there ever be space for space? For quiet, for observation? For observing the change of the air around her from warm – a summer hug – to cool, a deep breath, a dive into cool water. A summer evening on the deck with MSNBC on the iPad until mosquitos and Harry Potter on the TV and scotch in the glass called inside.

So she’s practicing making space, taking a breath, giving herself permission to fuck it up, to throw it away at the end, to follow it to weird places (see: Hermione’s career path) and trust that it’s the process and not the product. To remember the joy of following the lines down he page, not knowing what would appear on the next line (line) but knowing she’d point it out. To search for joy for joy’s sake. To try to get below the cliche of the phrase, to dig for the truth way down below the months and the years and the layers of fluff and bullshit until she finds it. Joy for her and by her and in her, unshared and unsharable. It sounds like summer bugs humming, motorcycles and the warm, all-encompassing wwwwaaaahhhhmmm of a car engine on Telegraph and it feels like a hug melting into an expansive, deep breath, and it tastes like white wine in a sweaty glass, and it smells like ink from a rollerball pen on the off-white paper in a fancy notebook. She sits in it for minute, luxuriating in where she followed it, proud that she did. One more look at the tress, one more check of the baby monitor (she’s been checking it this whole time), one more cocked ear at an airplane overhead that threatens to take her into the clouds and then back to life. But somewhere deep down inside her she found a little joy and a little peace, sat with them and pet them like cats, cuddled them like her daughter, and loved them for their own sake and for hers.