On August

September 24, 2024

Will and Katy’s disco ball, August 10, 2024.

Punchbowl Falls, August 11, 2024.

August was a beautiful month. The months this year have not been beautiful for me, but August surprised me. I swam in glacier water and stayed in longer than anyone else. My legs grew numb beneath me and then they didn’t exist; my hands skimmed the water; I baptized my wedding ring; something healed up. No one wanted to dunk their heads beneath until they did, and yellow wasps hung around, greedy. Jeremy and I flew to Portland together and sat in a sunny part of the airport until an old friend arrived to drive us to Hood River. While we waited, I ran into another old friend, someone I hadn’t spoken to in years, and we embraced as though nothing had happened. Nothing did happen, in the way that time unfurls and softens the face. Weddings stir up feeling. They have inspired forgiveness, or demanded forgiveness, or seemed to elicit forgiveness in my family unit, or perhaps my heart. (But I am writing about other people’s weddings at the moment, not mine, which happened partially last year — an elopement — and will conclude next month with a party, and which is causing undue stress I had hoped to avoid by eloping.)

I was not the only photographer at my friend Will’s wedding, which was a wedding well-attended by photographers, but I photographed his now-wife Katy getting ready and then the rest of the day, too. There were wildfires somewhere, and the sky was hazy and hung close, obscuring the view of Mount Hood until sunset. The details of their wedding are theirs, not mine, but it was an honor to photograph a day dedicated to two people I care deeply about. I cried during the ceremony, which happens at every wedding, but I cried so hard that my sunscreen ran into my eyes, which made my eyes red enough that people were concerned. The stars were bright. Breakfast was served to us that morning, and the following morning, by an innkeeper who baked the goods herself. Sometimes life in San Diego feels very monotonous; the changes in seasons are slight, and it has taken four years to adapt to them, and the sky and the air often feel the same. Going somewhere else feels like a reminder that the rest of the world experiences change, that stagnation is standard to me now. The glacier water, the afternoon after the wedding, turned my legs bright pink, almost like I had taken a very hot bath. I bought multiple postcards showing the tip of Mount Hood, crusted with snow, which became the water that I swam in.

*

My mother picked me up from Newark at seven o’clock in the morning, an ungodly hour on the New Jersey Turnpike, and we went shopping for a dress for my upcoming wedding (what I have finally resorted to calling the party). She smoked a cigarette in the Macy’s parking lot, stubbed it against the pavement. Her new apartment contains all of the furniture from my childhood home, as though someone distilled the essence of the gray house into her gray apartment. There are artifacts I haven’t seen in nearly a decade: a yellowing photograph of her in a high chair, my grandfather’s handmade fishing rods, the wooden chairs she snagged after a renovation at work. I fall asleep on the couch, and my mother falls asleep on the floor with the dog curled into her. She paints my nails. We play backgammon, which she taught me the last time I was here. The dog has to sit with her ass touching one of us at all times. (The dog is nearly eleven. Her face is white, but she barks as though she is a puppy, and she remembers me on this visit.)

I sleep at my grandfather’s that night, and in the morning he takes me through the house to show me all the things my grandmother made: her embroideries, the massive vase in the upstairs hallway, the tall statue of a Dalmatian. The heat and his age have lessened the amount of regular walks he takes, but we go together to one of the county parks and do two miles. He walks more briskly than I do, and he says good morning in his beautiful old Brooklyn Italian voice to every person we pass, even when we catch them on the second loop. After we pass, he whispers things to me that he remembers about them: She used to have a different dog, but it passed. They walk so slowly together. The younger people wear AirPods and don’t acknowledge him. The older people are sometimes too engrossed in cautious momentum. It isn’t quite like the harbor where he used to walk, where he had a dog he considered a friend but never caught the owner’s name. Back in February when I visited during a depressive episode, he and I walked along the harbor and saw the dog’s owner, far out at low tide near the water. I think that’s Bishop, he said, but it was impossible, because Bishop had passed. Many regular characters of my grandfather’s life have passed, which makes me feel desperate. I yelled the dog’s name as loud as I could into the wind, and he and the owner came over. Not Bishop, but the right man, who had adopted a new dog that looked like Bishop. We caught his name this time. (I can’t remember it now.)

When my grandfather is pensive, he looks at his hands, which are deeply spotted from the sun and damaged from an antibiotic we both took at different points in 2020. The antibiotic raised all of the nerves in my hands to the surface, but after I finished two rounds for a persistent kidney infection, the nerves settled back. For my grandfather, the medication permanently ruined sensation in his hands. He tents them, again and again, trying to exercise them back to usefulness. At his birthday dinner, he asks for the sugar packets, and someone pushes the container down the table to him. Caitlin, he says, nodding at them, and I flick the packet back and forth for him and empty it into his coffee. I am like him in this way: I do not want to ask for what I need aloud. I am pleased to understand what he needs. I am ashamed I cannot fix his hands or bring any of the people he loved back to life.

*

I take the train into the city and stop at Printed Matter, where they do not have the book I ordered, and the Locavore Variety Store, because I want a hat and a pair of toenail clippers that I hope will change my life. (I haven’t used them yet, but I will. I have fucked up toenails. I don’t think you can expect objects to change your life for you, but you can ask nicely.) I find the keys for Maria’s apartment where she hid them for me, and then I go to my old pizza place on the corner of Myrtle and Hall and get a white slice and a black cherry soda. The owner remembers me. Where have you been? he asks. I think I saw him back in February, but I was very sad then. I didn’t want to talk the way I do now. California, I tell him. I give him the options of where we may go in the future, and he requests that I come back. I used to call on the bus ride home and ask them to set a white slice aside for me, if they had one. They usually did. Sometimes he would make a fresh pie for me, even though it was late and not many people want white slices that late in the day, pure bread and cheese. I have been coming here and eating pizza in the front window since I was eighteen. A few days later, his brother is the one behind the counter. You look different, he says. I’ve gained weight. I look tired, I know. He also casts his vote for us to move back.

Mike and I spend a day at Coney Island, alternating between water and sand. I pee in the ocean. I bob around, far from shore, for a long time. My body is something else in water, something that doesn’t need tending or attention. I like it best this way. An old Russian man, also bobbing around far from shore, asks me if I am Russian. You look like a good Russian girl, he says. My mind briefly flickers to my Ukrainian grandmother, and I shake my head. Are you from here? he asks. Sort of, I tell him. Eventually he swims off. Hours later, when I am brushing sand off my feet at one of the benches on the boardwalk, he will silently sit down next to me and begin dressing. My shoulders turn pink.

The placeholder at the New York Public Library Picture Collection, August 15, 2024.

James Turrell’s Meeting, August 15, 2024.

Usually when I visit the city I make very few plans, but I had two research assignments for this trip: a visit to the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection (which I wrote about for Picture Files), and a visit to Interference Archive with Josh MacPhee. Both were overwhelming; you forget, when coming back from a smaller city, how much New York contains. At the Picture Collection, I pulled many folders, and scanned at least one image from each: Dance - Social - 80s, Telescopes, Temptation, Personalities - Jansky, New Jersey - Life, New Jersey - Industries, New Jersey - General, New Jersey - A-Z. The librarian gave me a small orange cone to place atop my folders while I went to eat lunch in the strange cafe/bookstore combination. (A sad little cheese stick, like the ones I ate obsessively in college.) By chance, someone had left out a photograph of Karl Jansky and one of his antennas, something I’ve been researching for years, atop a stack of images. I tried to keep myself away from the New Jersey folders, but I could not. I took the train to PS1 after, mainly to find a zine that Maria designed about Little Manila, but I snuck up to the third floor and sat in the Turrell exhibition, which always smells nicely of wood and made me feel warm and sleepy. For a few minutes I was alone, and I took a self-portrait there. My face looks unrecognizable in the picture, the way it often does to me now.

My visit to Interference Archive with Josh MacPhee was lovely; we talked for a long time about how to run an archive, what constitutes an archive, about living in the world. Interference Archive is a space that took my breath away. How should a space be? I think the answer is something like Scannners, where I volunteer, and Interference Archive. I did not get the opportunity to witness the archive on a particularly lively day, but I spent an hour alone going through the labor postcards and buttons, too overwhelmed to look at anything else before taking the train back to Jersey, my bags laden with books. Josh was generous with his time and printed material.

*

The last few days on the East Coast were spent with both halves of my family. Jeremy drove down from Boston on Saturday morning, and my father’s family descended upon his house for a barbecue; it rained, so we all crowded onto the back porch instead. Marriage has softened my family’s attention toward me; they like Jeremy, they are nicer to me in his presence. We had brunch with my mom and brother and sister-in-law the next morning and went to visit their new house. I am so proud of them — a very proud big sister, soon to be a very proud aunt — and it means a lot to me, more than I can explain, that their new house backs up against the same creek we grew up with, that they will be having a little baby, that the family is shifting into something new, which happens slowly most of the time. Jeremy leaves for the airport, and we go to the family farm to take pregnancy photographs. Michaela hands me an apple fresh off one of the trees, which leaves juice on my chin. The photographs I make of them are also not mine to be shared, but they are beautiful; Michaela is glowing. Her grandmother asks me to stay for family dinner, and we all crowd around the farmhouse’s kitchen table, eating fresh corn and fresh potatoes, and then we listen to the baby’s heartbeat with a tiny portable monitor. Jeremy eventually comes back from the airport, because a thunderstorm has flooded Newark and the train tracks and delayed his flight to an ungodly hour, and we stay the last few days instead at my grandpa’s house, sleeping beneath a pair of angels embroidered by my grandmother.

Grandpa and I go for walks while Jeremy works from the dining room table. I take the car and go to the beach by myself to make photographs; it is no longer a quiet place, unattended. There are streetlights along the seawall, police cameras pointed directly where I want to make a nude self-portrait. A teenager tries to recruit me into the church, and after I shake her off, I set up my camera facing the grass that overlooks the water. I cannot tell exactly where the police camera is pointing or how wide the scope of its view is. I have never deliberately made pictures anywhere near one, and I cannot get out of my body the way I used to be able to. When they first put these cameras up, a motion detector would set off an automated message: This is the Aberdeen police department. You are now being recorded. Something else about how they would dispatch an officer if necessary; they put the cameras up after my friend Billy was killed in the parking lot. (The writing always sort of dovetails back to this, doesn’t it?) No automated message any longer, but the threat remains. I had wanted to make different pictures than these; sometime this year marked half my life making pictures. Half a lifetime later. The pictures are still latent on the roll. But it felt good to run back and forth from the camera barefoot, to stand in the shade in a place where I was once very young and very afraid and very brave. I walked along the rocks of the jetty.

Jeremy and I go to hot pot in a strip mall with his internship supervisor, who drives down from north Jersey. We meet in the middle of the state, and at first I am resistant to trying anything. But then I taste the broth, which is too good to ignore, and the servers keep bringing out more food, and we all drink watermelon juice. I spill broth down the side of my dress. I am surprised by everyone’s generosity, the whole trip. I feel very loved throughout the month of August, a month that usually feels harried and full of pressure before the autumn, a month that usually ends up full of work.

Before we left for the wedding, a friend gave me last-minute tickets to see Alex G at a venue near the swap meet. Jeremy and I stood in a separate room in the back with cutouts into the other room, mostly for Covid safety and elbow room. The women’s bathroom had half an inch of standing water and a long line, and while I was pissing, one teenager said aloud that she was out of toilet paper. There was a loose roll in my stall, and I passed it under to the stall next to me, and that girl passed it along to the next one, and they began to talk about how this was what being a girl was, a communal experience in the bathroom, taking care of one another. I stayed quiet and ended up next to them outside, waiting for Jeremy to pee; you won’t believe what happened, one of them told the others. They were delighted; they were talking about me and had no idea I was standing right there. I didn’t say anything. I felt very happy. I would have corrected them, if I had thought a little bit longer about it: that it was not being a girl to hear someone voice a need aloud and answer it if you could, that it was being alive, and that it was something you had to learn to do, to both listen and respond.