Words that lead to nowhere

17 February 2025

The wind outside is howling. As if to give credence to what I easily hear, I open the weather app on my phone to see how strong: 20 mph; 41 mph gusts. My ears do not deceive me.

It feels odd to have a long weekend after returning from vacation – like the calendar made a mistake. The weekend has felt Long, aimless. I made no plans and felt oddly tired most nights. My appetite is a little off; I watch as my body melts away, and people comment on how strong my climbing has gotten. A girl even comes up to me and asks if I climb professionally. I laugh and say, “Oh, no!” and afterwards, wonder if I was nice enough because I am not always aware of myself and sense there is something in me that should be better.

I had my performance review at work the other day. I did not get promoted. Which was not a surprise – I justify to myself and to you. I told my manager I was likely leaving this year. She said, “Katherine, you say that every year.” It was almost enough to make me quit that moment. A fear, captured: Words that lead to nowhere.

She fears:

A life lived in perpetual delay;

Unrealized potential;

Complacency;

Never feeling clear in the head again –

Wondering, was she ever clear in the head? Or is it just something we layer onto the past when we are no longer clouded by the feelings that made us act and respond in such a way as to create that memory of ourselves?

I went to pick up the fourth book of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend series, but the bookstore I went to did not have it. Instead, I picked up a title, Mother River – a collection of surrealist short stories. I read the first one last night. It was odd, and I couldn’t quite make sense of it: Like the image was complete in the writer’s eye, and they wrote just enough to conjure that image, exact, for themselves, but for me, well, they were words that led to nowhere.

What do you do when you have a strange dream with someone in it, but you can’t tell that someone, though you want to? You just sit with it, I guess.

Memory is real estate. Some people and some things take up too much space. You wonder how or when they’ll downsize – taking up less of you. So that when someone asks, “How are you?” you are not thinking of all it is that you’re not saying.

I saw a group of friends for the first time in a while. They all went somewhere together afterwards. You know that if they had wanted you to come, they would have asked. You wanted them to ask. You feel stupid for having wanted something not readily given. But desire springs forth before words, and the words you use after to quell that desire, well, those often lead to nowhere, too.

A friend told me about an exhibit at the MOMA: A clock whose every minute is taken from a clip in a movie. It is 24 hours, on loop, as most clocks are, so you stay for only a few minutes or a few clips, however you want to measure duration. Apparently people still check their phones – so as to confirm the time. It’s a reflex, I suppose. Like how I checked my phone to confirm that there was wind.

I learned, or perhaps relearned, recently that wrist watches – at least those still traditionally made – run continuously by harnessing mechanical energy from the body’s movements, coiling a spring whose spooling and subsequent unspooling documents the regular procession of time. If you do not wear your watch for a period of time, it eventually stops and must be rewound. It only serves its purpose through use. A watch left in a drawer stops telling time. There is no one there to listen to it.

I think if I were the last person on Earth, I would keep writing, even if there was no one there to read it. Even as the movements in the world around me ceased, I’d keep spooling. Telling time, making of my life, a story, if only just for me.

I wish the wind were not still howling. I sense a walk would do me good. Inside, I am spooling. These words – they lead to nowhere.