Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE

For nearly a year, the only appreciable writing I’ve been able to muster has been in the form of emails. Work emails, certainly, but in the months leading up to my debut novel’s publication in May and since, an ever-expanding litany of personal emails. Emails to friends, acquaintances, booksellers, influencers—all bearing the same beseeching plea for promotion. Today, then, felt like its natural outgrowth. I’d been asked—or perhaps, more accurately, I’d goaded my former colleague into inviting me—to give a reading to a group of current students at my alma mater.

My day technically began in New York, where, at midnight, I was piqued by the smell of street tacos and momos on the way back to my hotel in Long Island City. The streets were bustling, full of as much noise and activity as I could expect from Seattle during rush hour. Though I was born in New York and lived there my whole life until I left for college, the feeling of “returning” to the city over the last near-decade that I’ve been living on the West Coast has been one of bafflement. Who were all these people out at midnight on a Sunday? Didn’t they have somewhere else to be? And, invariably, why was I not one of them?

As a grad student at Yale in the 2010s, there was a sense of anticipation every weekend I took the train into Grand Central. New York was a retreat, a place to escape the affectations and provincialities of New Haven. But it was also deeply familiar. Pulling into Grand Central on Friday night felt like baptism, like rediscovering myself. As long as I visited enough, I could indulge in the fantasy that I was still a part of the city, and that life ceased to exist there without me in it.

This morning I found myself on the Metro North yet again. I stared out the window at the small bodies of water and derelict industrial sites, the suburban outcroppings that formed around each metro station. Had they always been there or had I never paid attention before? My seatmate was assiduously checking email while simultaneously answering work Slacks for the entire two-hour journey. She wore pleated pants, a burgundy scarf, and a scent I could only describe as New England WASP.

When I landed at New Haven’s Union Station, I took a familiar, if circuitous route up to campus, each street corner and storefront seemingly imbued with a different memory. My old apartment building. The Asian grocery store. The IKEA where I sometimes biked just for a cinnamon roll. The arcade bar where I threw up three times on a single New Year’s Eve (each, mind you, in the perfect center of the toilet), and still rallied enough to have a glass of champagne at midnight.

It was also, naturally, the site of many promising but ultimately failed romances. As I stood facing a restaurant where I’d had the talk, I began to think about of all the missed connections, the people I’d never have the chance to see again. The pervasive feeling that this city was a part of me, and then, the fear that there would come a time, months or years from now—had it happened already?—where I could no longer claim it as my own.

It had been years since K and I had so much as exchanged a message, but I snapped a photo of the repertory theater where we had once seen a play together—she was a drama major—with a short note: “Just landed in New Haven and thought of you. Hope you’re well!”

To my surprise, she responded immediately. Yes, she still lived in the area, about a thirty-minute drive away. And: was I free for coffee?

K and I dated briefly, the kind of romance that was precipitated by leaving notes under each other’s doors. As a budding poet, I had tried to regale her with lines from Rumi and Lee and Vuong. The night I first worked up the courage to kiss her, we had been watching Little Nemo on her extra-long twin mattress. When we decided to part ways, it was amicable, a reflection I attributed to wanting different things in life more than any shared enmity.

The café where we met sold baklava and date cookies, tiny bird’s nests spackled with pistachio. K entered with a stroller, her three-and-a-half-month-old daughter in tow.

“Surprise,” she said, ringing her arms around my neck. Her hair was still as wild and beautiful as I remembered, though—like mine—now flecked with gray. Her laugh was piercing and bright. There was still the same endearing gap between two of her lower teeth.

She’d met her husband during the pandemic, she explained. He’s eight years older and so they had to make up for lost time. And didn’t she see somewhere that I had a daughter too? I showed her a photo of my three-and-a-half-year-old grinning from the top of a mountain.

“Are you still in Seattle?” she asked. For all my griping about no longer living in New Haven, the irony, of course, is that you appreciate somewhere most only once you’ve left.

We talked for an hour and, afterwards, K accompanied me to the book talk. She managed to make it through the reading and conversation and Q&A, her daughter intermittently napping and nursing. When it was over, I walked with her to her car.

If there was a silver lining about moving to Seattle it was this: live somewhere long enough, and everything gets imbued with meaning. In New Haven, every place, every experience, and every moment had become its own memory. Seattle was a blank slate of stories where nothing yet had been written. I appreciate now the uncertainty of having to start out somewhere new, the challenge of making a place your own. I thought about the breakup with K and how, months later, I met the woman I would later marry. Sometimes we need to write our own endings, if only so that new beginnings are possible.

It was late and the wind had picked up. I stood, unmoving, on the corner, trying to take in every last detail: crooked sidewalks, tall oaks in metal planters, the streetlamps that framed the block like a noir film.

“Let’s not let another eight years pass next time,” K said, as she buckled her daughter into the car seat.

“I won’t,” I said, wanting to believe that this part of my life could remain with me too.

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**THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…**

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

Erratic.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

I usually can’t bear the thought of re-reading a book because there are so many in my TBR, but I do watch the movie Love Actually with my wife every December.