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
NINA CHAYKA
Sunday begins with cotton and murmur. I wait under the sheets for my partner to wake, until he’s yawning, twisting, coughing, so I can pretend that I too am only just waking up, precisely at the same moment. We stay in bed longer than necessary, longer than both of our daily schedules, carefully metered out in spoonfuls and errands, would allow. But it’s Sunday, so nobody comes to arrest us for our idleness.
I get up, I dictate my dream into a voice note: last night I went home again, dragging suitcases on the pebbly pavement, the phone’s keyboard crumbling into lego blocks, but it was home of ten, maybe twenty years ago, a more innocent time. While the coffee maker is running, I open the window to let the crisp autumn air fill the kitchen. I am a kid again, walking to school on a fall day in Russia, and nothing bad has happened yet.
I’m too lazy to actually go outside first thing in the morning—I tell myself I’m busy, I have too much to do, besides, it is cold now—but letting the air in and hearing the last birds of fall sing is almost as good as going for a walk.
I stand by the window and watch the trees in the park. Still green, but a pale green, a photograph drained of color, bits of dark red and gold starting to burst through. I drink my coffee and think about my day. It is Sunday so I don’t have to teach, but it’s best I get ready for a busy week ahead. Maybe I’ll go for a jog in the park in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll see a friend for a drink. I’ll finish grading homework early this time. I’ll finally scrub the oven clean and fix the leaking tap in the bathroom. I wash out my coffee mug and hang it upside down by the sink. I sit down at my desk.
I spend the day writing. I find a draft of a story tucked into an old novel project—only a page, but it has a fun quirky voice I like. I write a few sentences in that character. But the voice is too pleased with itself, bordering on pretentious, it keeps using words like ‘preponderantly’ or ‘insouciant,’ so three paragraphs later I reach a dead end. Right, that’s why I abandoned that character all those years ago. I find another mouse tail of a story. I reread what I have and take notes on how the plot might continue. A twin sister’s disappearance? A sudden illness? When I started writing, it was nine in the morning, the light out the window became the dull porous light of midday, then I stopped noticing either the light or the time of the day. I write until my vision starts to blur, until my hands tremble because I forgot to eat breakfast. It is maybe lunch by now. I didn’t go for a jog. I didn’t go see my friend. The tap keeps dripping. There’s joy in losing yourself in work, hard and austere, like something getting scooped out of you, like you’re emptied out, you’re not even there.
When I can no longer focus I break for late lunch. By now the sun in the sky is filling with red. So maybe it’s early dinner. I realize there’s only an hour left of sunlight. I put on a beanie and a jacket, I grab my copy of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and head for the park.
The big meadow is blanket to blanket—the last warm Sunday of the year. Dogs are running about, their humans watching with leashes in hand, someone is flying a kite. It is a Breughel scene. I’m rereading Pedro Páramo—a son goes to his mother’s hometown and finds no one there but the murmuring dead—and I’m astonished by it yet again, how it directs attention, how it moves with sound. It makes me listen too: dogs barking, children falling into piles of dead lives, teenagers laughing on a date, in the distance someone biking by with reggae on a boombox.
I’ve spent the day writing words that will never become a short story or a novel or anything I’ll share with another person. It is my favorite kind of writing—a little dance in a small space, performing a process rather than forcing it towards a destination.
I walk by swans on the lake, pecking at algae. I watch cats eat from plastic plates, turtles dive under logs. The light drowns in the water, racoons come out of a hollow tree. The meadow empties, the only sound is my own boots on the screechy dead leaves.
Back home I prepare my notes for teaching. I settle on “New Hampshire” by Robert Frost.
How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
My partner fixes the leaking tap in the bathroom.
In bed we talk about what we’ve read, what we saw, about racoons, Juan Rulfo, the paragraphs written and read, about the birds.
I fall asleep at midnight, grateful.
~
THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…
1. What one word best describes your writing life?
- Intuitive.
2. Is there a book you read over and over again?
Alice Munro’s Selected Stories.
3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?
Buying every copy of the same Japanese notebook I can find.
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By NINA CHAYKA
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—Other Writers in the Series—
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