Do you ever feel like this?

I call it the mushy place.

I call it the mushy place.

In the mushy place, I am a water balloon with a very thin, flexible membrane. The water swishes around. The membrane undulates with the movement of the liquid. The membrane expands left, swish, and right, swish. The membrane doesn’t break, it just moves and moves.

In the mushy place, I stare at people on the subway and get lost in the stories I make up about them. To my right, there’s a boy who looks about ten in soccer shorts and shinguards, wearing a blue plastic bracelet, like those Livestrong bracelets that were a thing when I was ten. The bracelet says #VOTE. He takes a book out of his backpack and I try to keep my smile normal-sized when he flips the page to reveal a map of an imagined place. I loved those books, I love those books. He starts to read, book perched on backpack, backpack perched on lap. A teenage girl sitting on the other side of me glances at him now and then. He reads. After a few stops, she leans forward and says, “Next stop, ok?”. He nods without looking at her.

I realize or decide I am between siblings. I am overcome by the older sister’s love for her brother. She let him read while she kept track of the stops. I feel a pinpointy, overwhelming desire to tell her, you’re doing a great job! They get off the subway.

In the mushy place I have a far greater capacity for attention to detail. I can stare at things for hours, or at least it feels like hours. I look at a navy blue beanie baby bear with a tiny sunflower-yellow ribbon around his neck and cursive “Cal” embroidered on the left side of his chest. The light from the dining room glints off of his black bead eyes. I don’t remember when I got that bear. Now he sits in a miniature rattan chair that hangs off of a hook we screwed into the wall of our sunroom. I brought him from San Francisco at some point, he flew on a plane.

In the mushy place I have to go on walks. I’m drawn frequently to the lake in Prospect Park. I look at a group of ten or so ducks swimming in tight circles, swift and focused like they’re plotting something. I look at the geese gliding, vaguely threatening. I look at the buildings across the lake, light emanating from windows. When I start to think about how every window has a person associated with it, or maybe even more than one person, my chest rises and I turn away. I continue walking.

The block I live on in Brooklyn is very into seasonal decorations. The house a few over from us celebrates seemingly every holiday by putting up these 10-foot-tall, blow-up figures made of semi-translucent fabric, lit from within. Around Halloween there is a 15-foot-tall, plastic, motion-sensor werewolf that howls and shakes its arms when a person walks by. Right now there is of course a jolly Santa, billowing, holding a Christmas tree in his hand.

I used to not understand why anyone would put up seasonal decorations. It takes time and wastes electricity for something that happens every year, I would think. What could possibly be more mainstream, and therefore boring, than the passing of time?

Thanks to the mushy place, I now love seasonal decorations. As I ascend the stairs at my subway stop, all I think about is what decorations I’m going to see. First I pass a house on the left that always has a wreath on its door; in fall it’s a bright orange and red, in winter it seeps into forest green with silver bells. Across the street there’s a man selling Christmas trees and maple syrup that someone drove down from Vermont. Next to him is a house that only goes hard for Halloween. It’s December and still I see: a decapitated zombie, a vicious skeleton, several plastic graves. They no longer project a spooky video onto one of the second-floor windows, I checked.

In the mushy place I think about people that have died. I think about my grandpa eating a satsuma. I think about the obstacle course he built for squirrels in his backyard. I think about my grandma who I didn’t meet, who looks like my mom and looks like me. I think about my grandpa I didn’t meet, who flew planes in World War II. I think about everyone thinking about other people. I wonder what device we could create to measure the moments in which people are thinking about other people. Would it look like a thermometer? Would it look like a blood pressure monitor, and if so, what would it wrap around?

Almost everything makes me cry when I’m in the mushy place. The walls of the mushy place are tender, raw, please for the love of god don’t poke them.

When I’m in the mushy place it’s hard to see a way out. So sometimes when I feel the pull of the mushy place, I resist. I don’t always want to go there. Sometimes I want to just look at a flower and not shed tears. Sometimes I want to just sit on the subway and not give a fuck. Sometimes I want to hear words as transient thoughts someone has, not searing indictments, not everlasting truths, not precious reveals, just some thoughts.

But for me, that’s not how the mushy place works. Resistance only makes its pull stronger. I don’t decide when I go to the mushy place. I go when it calls me.

That said, I’ve learned that going to the mushy place doesn’t mean I live there. I can visit. I can pass through without changing my address. The ability to leave the mushy place is still not entirely up to me; much like entering the mushy place, exiting just happens. I’ll go outside, or Jess will get home from work, or my friends will show up for Survivor, or I’ll crave a hard-boiled egg and then eat one, and realize I’ve left the mushy place, just like that.

And thank god I learned how to embrace being a visitor of the mushy place, because the mushy place is a beautiful place to visit. Everything is more beautiful inside the mushy place. Yes, more sad, and more beautiful. From the mushy place I look into a stranger’s bedroom window and see the brevity and infinity of their whole lifetime. The color blue — every color! — has more depth in the mushy place: ocean, sky, mourn, eyeballs, blueberries, book spines, blood, box, bottle. In the mushy place the smell of eucalyptus is my dad; cinnamon sugar is my mom; strangers’ efforts towards self-improvement are tangible, I can practically hold them in my hands. Don’t even get me started on how music sounds in the mushy place, it’s a revelation.

In the mushy place I have a clarity, confidence and appreciation that is harder to access outside of it. It’s fecund and easy to write in the mushy place. It was in the mushy place that I understood that to miss someone is to love them across space and time, and that’s not something to try to squish out, it’s something to hold gently.

I can’t help but wonder if you’ve been to the mushy place, or whatever you might call it. I imagine many of you have visited.

At any given moment, so many people all over the world are visiting the mushy place, seeing beautiful and sad things. Lights flicker on, illuminating a map we make.

If you’ve never been to the mushy place, I want to invite you to visit. If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this newsletter, you might already be there. I dare you to stay awhile, look around, breathe it in. You might find something beautiful.