Tuesday, February 25, 2026

I noticed protrusions from the apartmentbedroom walls, small tumors of paint like splattered curds of cottage cheese, comet-tail shadows streaked by desklamp illumination. Before the protrusions, I noticed that my days have been undifferentiable despite their demarcating events— days of work at the same school (instead of the usual scattered hauntings), months delayed coast with its snow-wisps of sand, unexpected drive through a snowed Tilamook State Forest, church for the first time (since moving) in time for Forgiveness Sunday, waking up in the middle of the night screaming— though I don't know what amount of time the blur of days spans. And before the dissolvement, I noticed that I am very unhappy for no discernible reason.

On Sunday I returned to church for the first time since moving to Oregon. I visited a couple of Catholic churches— The (Tourist Trap) National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother & a faraway Trappist abbey with the humility hush of monks' voices— but neither were my church. Both times unused to sitting in a pew, I was observer & not participant. I even felt a little dirty, neurotically. A rained-on Sunday bus ride delivered me directly, on asphalt just outside the gate. Back to standing church, I went through the gestures & the words again like talking to an old friend, as though there were no time apart. Father A—n had told me once that no matter where it was in the world, each Orthodox church was going through the same choreography, and that choreography had been mostly unchanged for hundreds of years. Thinking of Mary in her Michigan church, this made complete sense to me, and I could think of it as a sort of intuitive bilocation. But in this church of strangers, this observable fact felt like a small surprise. The priest talked about another priest tortured, & that a saint said our sins were a handful of sand thrown into a God's forgiveness sea. I thought of the wisping sand like snow across the beach a day earlier. That of course sin is that insubstantial. That tomorrow it would be Lent. That for Lent I would write every day again, because as Mary said to me "not a writer but someone who writes". And I already failed, but the failure is a snowball of sand across my own shoes & I am a worker in the vineyard.