Conspiring with the Universe

The book is done, for now. The self is not.

A meme I found on the socials. Relatable.

I finished writing my book this week.

Well, I finished writing a draft, and I am sure there will be more to write and certainly more to edit, but for now, I can say that I have completed the task at hand and it has been an interesting journey.

Finishing a writing project, especially when working on a memoir, is never really possible. We continue to grow and the stories from the past do too through the prism lens of experience, time and perspective.

I received my editor’s notes in that movie theater in Paris last October, the theater growing dark and me willing my hands to shut down my phone and not read the suggested edits. I ignored the work through December and returned in January, determined to finish while on break between semesters. I quickly realized I would need more time and set out to clear space on my calendar through February, looking at the symmetry of the month to act as a container for the work. February 28 came and went and I laughed at my attempts to bend and control time. As the Universe would have it, I needed until March 6.

They say that every seven years your body, mind, and soul go through a powerful transformation. Some people think that reflects linear time, meaning every seven year cycle from birth until death, some just look backward to the past seven years. All of those years swirl, a vortex reaching up up up, sometimes a timeline of tumult, others a deep calm.

I rode all of the currents this week: art and poetry and celebration of community alongside frightened peeking at the news, disbelief at the war and frustration at all the other horrors it has covered in an avalanche of slop. I longed for all of it to stop, for the tragic velocity of the year to return to a pace that doesn’t dizzy.

So I did what any normal person would do — I went back in time.

Seven years ago, I left the offices of The Wall Street Journal. This week I returned to visit with students. It was lovely to say hello to many former colleagues. I saw my old desk, noting the newsroom’s fresh coat of paint, my former team’s section filled with new bodies. Walking past the old conference rooms where I laughed and cried over the years — shoutout to the weird mirrored glass conference room where I watched myself at various moments doing both — I was struck by how small it all felt. Despite the televisions broadcasting the biggest news stories of the day, I allowed myself loving distance — perhaps the closest I can come to objectivity. There was an undeniable sense of it being all in the past, as if it were from someone else’s lifetime. Because it is.

The next morning, I listened to the entire De La Soul Tiny Desk concert from earlier in the week — 3/3, aka De La Day. Their voices took me back to Carla at 16, house parties near my high school, punk kids dancing with the Filipino club kids who introduced me to a new kind of music beyond my alternative music cassette tapes. I write about That Carla in the book, how confused she was, how sad, how on the edge of life she was hanging, but I also remember her laugh, her dancing, her body and desire to live. How she loved.

And in my kitchen I felt myself reach back and sway together with her, arms in the air, laughing as the cat watched me jump around to the beat. So much of the music seemed to call toward this cosmic connectedness, toward life force, maybe even god, and in that moment the overlapping years, seven and more (or perhaps 3?), all arrived in perfect symmetry, filling my heart and making me cry, grateful for these versions of Carla and for that moment, all of us in the kitchen, reaching forward and backward, rooted in the ground and beaming higher and higher to the sky.

Maybe this is what it means to “finish a book.” It’s not the last word on the page, not a specific date marking the moment of completion, not the breath I took and the tears I cried in release. Because although the book may be done, I am not done with myself.

The draft is complete. The journey is not. That Carla in the kitchen dancing to Me, Myself and I, that Carla walking through the newsroom, that Carla sitting at her laptop, all of those versions are still reaching toward the sky, conspiring with the Universe.