As I sit to write a few hundred words in order to frame, to explain, to cement this album and these songs together as a coherent whole made in this place, at this time, urgently told and inevitably shaped by the landscape of the city that has started to surround me, I can’t find the right pen for the right paper that might most appropriately accomplish the task, and I find this particular barrier to be so powerful as to completely prevent me from accessing any part of myself that can make anything make sense. I have spent years letting go of so many skills that helped me at one point in my life and no longer serve me well in my mid-thirties, thanking them for their service over the last decades, and shedding them like the dead skin they often are, but I have only found it more and more necessary, this calling to make coherence and sense. Perhaps I am more lost than I realize in this interim of my life. Perhaps I am finally seeing how little is needed to tie the threads together. Perhaps both and multitudes of other explanations that I have yet to see or understand, floating just outside of my periphery.

I have been working to treat my emotions and needs – no matter how small or frivolous they often strike me – as real and valid and powerful. I am practicing believing (in) myself, both that my needs are valid and in that the work I do is, too. And if I need to spend time explaining all of the pieces and conditions to make the threads and themes that flow through my life make sense, then I need to honor that. And if the right pen and the right paper are conditions to make that happen, then they are conditions that deserve to be met because I deserve to have my needs met.

*****

It’s not some silly little thing, to know that this is the wrong pen for this, the right paper because I have seen the ways the right pen, the right paper, and the right summer breeze can trigger profound magic of the spirit. I have written twelve thousand words in one sitting with the right kind of dreams and the right tools at my disposal.

Conditions perfectly met and the urgent need to get down, get out these ideas from my deepest recesses made _In the Interim_. A few songs were composed after I left teaching but before I left my home of nearly a decade. Many of the others were germs of ideas that came to me in the two days I spent in my car as I drove West, cryptic voice recordings I made for myself, describing scenery and billboards, the yearning in my heart, the sexualized and romantic loneliness that typically marks youth but only recently became a feeling I was capable of understanding because of the confines of the closet. Pages and pages, hours of couplets that I wrote for myself and transcribed diligently, knowing that those pieces were brief and urgent messages to me, the seeds of which, when planted, would blossom when the time was right.

And blossom they did.

Gifts of, from, and to the spirit always do.

Most of the songs were then plucked and trimmed (and other plant metaphors I don’t know because I am not a person who actually knows anything about tending to plants) and became themselves in the span of just a few days. Two weeks at most. Again recorded to myself and, this time, shared with others. Looking for praise. Feedback. Legitimacy. Someone else to take it seriously, too. “Look what I can do!” my spirit finally found the voice to cry.

Thank you to those early listeners: ZB, JC, AA, and MC. This album would not exist if not for you. You’re in every chord and note. I see you in the echoes and the silence, just outside the focus of the song, nodding along, showing me how fine this all can be. That this isn’t a silly little thing I do sometimes at the copy machine or while cursing at the unwise decisions of other drivers.

_In the Interim_ marked the start of a holding pattern, a weird and constant lost and aimless floating, a sensory deprivation tank, instead of marking the start of something new, like it felt like it would at the time it came bursting out of me. At first, I thought the liminal space of the interim was between leaving teaching and arriving in Portland, the months in Salem, when I was the freshest, small town sweetheart trying to learn to behave like city folk. I recorded most of the final versions of these tracks – all but “Don’t Lie” – in my first apartment that belonged only to me, furnished only with furniture I loved, art on the wall for the first time. Start to finish, only mine for the first time at age thirty-four. I understand decorations now in a way I didn’t before, when I was empty. It’s hard to see how bad it is from inside, especially when every single day sets a new personal record for good, but I was still drowning miles below the surface, scaling the underside of the iceberg, hoping the next step would be the one that would finally make it easier to breathe.

*****

Crashing up through the surface to gasp oxygen instead of water for the first time is exhilarating. I am grateful for the breath and knowing what it is like to feel the right and needed chemical in my lungs, instead of cutting lines in my throat, hoping to coax the growth of gills. So much of my blood and flesh left in the water, and the gills never did grow. And that cellular knowledge of “Oh, that’s what it feels like” that finally came to me when I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t can only be experienced, not explained. The best that I have is that I tingle with joy in the bottoms of my feet as they slap on concrete and climb up stairs, step on wet leaves, and remember the distant memory of snow.

But the exhaustion of “Now what?” soon followed, and that floating started to take its toll. As the water buoyed me around, the interim spread out before me. 11 of the songs were tracked and waiting, holding their promises in a cloud storage service, reminding me of the ways in which they could bloom, whenever I was ready to till the ground and let them sprout. But I couldn’t do anything but float as my body was so busy with the business of burying and mourning the stories that had meant so much to me for so long, as my blood started to occasionally trickle fourth instead of pouring, as my body and my spirit finally started healing.

It’s hard work, healing, and it was all I could do. I had to come to terms with floating and being lost, acts I aggressively avoided my whole life, as being lost, this floating, has always been framed as a form of failure to me. And maybe it is. But it’s a failing I needed. A refreshing bobbing on the top as more and more threatened to swallow me whole once my energy reserves ran out.

I have adrenaline to spare. The floating has started to burn, and the water still threatens to swallow me whole, but I’m not giving into the exhaustion yet. Not while I’m still in the interim marked by a job worth all of the stories it brought me, the unceremonious ends to some of the most important relationships of my adult life, a long-time-coming-and-dreamt-for divorce and profound sadness and joy therein, a broken elbow, and terrifyingly tight finances I have given up so much of myself to avoid for so long, this time welcomed back as a dear friend if it meant I could finally start to see who I could become.

*****

I don’t know that my interim is done, but I am starting to see my way to shore. My floating no longer feels all consuming and aimless. I can feel the promise of solid ground from the Universe with each wave that laps around me, and I am finding energy reserves to start swimming to dry land. “Don’t Lie” had to stay the version I made in Salem, with the oscillating fan and the rough lyrics, because I still cannot finish it more than it is. And yet, exactly as it is, it is a symbol for the interim. Beautiful and painful and hard and incomplete and not ready and yet necessary and urgent.

These songs mark the start of an interim, instead of the end I tried to make them mark. They are the breaths that have kept me floating, knowing I would find shelter someday.

Thank you for being part of my interim.