Blue Notes by Dana Ray

Dear Friend,

I love how a great croissant falls apart. The crisp outside that flakes away in a million crumbs across my shirt as dense layers of French butter melt across my tongue. I love the chew, the pull of it, the mess that feels exalted and chic and childish.

I have stories about croissants, croissants remind me of the first time I stayed awake all night with my future husband and we watched the sunrise from our cars in the winter morning and, after the sun went up, and went to Wegmans and got fresh ones out of the oven.

Or how a friend gave me a huge box of croissants from my favorite DC suburb spot after I had a c section. That now the taste of pistachio paste in buttery flakes both eminds me of the screaming pain in my body after being cut open AND the sense of being held and loved by a friend.

That’s what life is like. Sensory filled and sensual, messy and chaotic. The good and the bad.

In writing, I’m searching-out the pleasures that put us in a body in a place at a time in words—alongside naming the parts that make me want to split time and space and step outside an atom-amassed existence for some un-timed moment.

Here, we'll ask what it is to make the world from words.

To name the True Things that emerge from our fragile bodies and gut-wrenching desires, so we are less alone in life’s beauty and meaning.
For the ones who live between what is and what could be.

The bodiness of it all makes it make sense to me to have more tactile experiences. I love mail. I know that many of you do too. So let's try out paper and ink.