My friend Michelle told me to “trust my beautiful brain” and so it stands that this is the only draft of Snippety for April, one of those deceptively chaotic months where groceries haven’t lived in my fridge since mid March, where clothes I’ve washed and forgot to unload stay in perpetual limbo in the machine, where every glass I own has congregated around the sink to watch a destructive game of jenga happening inside (of which I’m ignoring because I’m not really into games).

I trust Michelle when she gives me advice about my brain because she’s seen it through my era of gin, theatre school, and Libertine Rose (or is that Miss Libertine Rose?), a beautiful drunk mess of a red box dye time, and if she trusts it after that, then okay fine, the first damn draft.

That fall after I’d broken up with my boyfriend, moved across the city while my closest friend moved across the country, and started school for the 3rd, 4th, 5th time was vibrant. A period of chaos and change mixed with intense creativity and lonliness. I painted the walls of my tiny basement apartment pink, yellow, lavender. I rode my bike across Duluth on my way home, past Chez José where Ashley and I had shared a table with Ramstein the year before, past Eduardos where I’d cried into my bolognese when Johnny and I split, past the ice cream joint that reminded me of small town summertime, all the way till I got to Mentana. It didn’t feel like home, but I embraced the thrill of newness.

When the weather changed, I thrifted a faux fur leopard print coat from Eva B, dyed my hair red, and went to my theatre classes feeling provocative. I learned about Grotowski, Artaud, and Brecht. I told people I did burlesque. My apartment became a studio where I built props, made maquettes, created burlesque acts, embellished costumes, hand stitched puppets, read textbooks, wrote essays. At night I tended bar, performed in bars, drank gin (in bars), cried, made friends, grew into myself. I felt vivaciously alive.

Three months later in a blizzard I moved out of my basement apartment to go live with roommates up on St-Jospeh. The white that blanketed the city mirrored the freshly painted walls of my old apartment; a cathartic adieu to a turbulent autumn, a space of my own, a tiny slice of 25.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the letter opener as an emblem of love. Of radical love, because rad·i·cal is my favourite self-assured proclamation of being too much, outside the norm, a petit peau extreme, and also the ninja turtles got me hooked on the word sometime in the early 90s as colloquial slang, and I may or may not have gotten the phrase “radical notions thoughts in motion” tattooed somewhere near my ass during the aforementioned gin & theatre school era. I digress. No one’s writing love letters anymore. It’s all about texts and sexts and DMs and horny emojis, but ya can’t slice through a sext with a dagger shaped blade to read the handwritten note your love wrote, can you? I want my little own love defender, with an ornate handle, to open saliva sealed stationary sent by post with soft velvety purrs tucked inside and when I’ve read my letter 20 times and know it by heart, i’ll lay my paper knife atop and dare anyone to cross it. 🙂

None to report. This entire newsletter is basically just a journal entry.

I love waltzing in the gray somber softness of early spring. When it rains, I think of the barn my brother and I used to play in with its smell of decaying wood and stale earth, the laying hens, the vivid green on sharp blades of new grass.

As I’m clearly feeling nostalgic this month, I’d love to hear a little memory you associate with early spring or a moment you look forward to. If you care to share, please do!

🙂🙂🙂

Till next month, pals, get snippety and bask under the lilac trees.

Your radically unchill and ever so emo friend/barber/internet stranger,
Jess

PS Happy Birthday Michelle! ❤