On New Beginnings, a New Moon in Cancer, and Bastille Day — a writer’s diary entry, 14th of July

New moon tonight, which means no moon at all, just a black space where it usually hangs. I like the ones nobody can see far more than I like the full ones. Everyone photographs the full moon. Nobody photographs this one because there’s nothing there to catch, and that is exactly the point of it. Something is happening up there with nothing to show for it yet. I wanted to remember that today of all days.

Fireworks in the village already, hours early, some child clearly unable to wait for dark. Bastille Day. I’ve lived here long enough now to feel it properly instead of watching it from the outside the way I did the first few years. Nobody here actually says Fête Nationale. They say le quatorze juillet, the fourteenth, the way you’d refer to a person by name. A whole revolution folded up into a date, and no need to explain it because everybody already knows.

This one’s in Cancer, which I’ve been waiting for. Cancer is the sign of the house, of water, of the things you feed and the people you feed them to. A new moon in Cancer asks you what home means to you now, not what it meant when you were younger and had less say in it. That’s a question I’ve been circling for years without once sitting down in front of it. It’s a soft moon and a tidal one. It doesn’t push. It just keeps asking until you answer.

So I lit the candle and wrote down what I’m beginning.

Two things. The rewrite, properly this time, from the first page, rather than patching the old one and hoping nobody notices the seams. And the mornings by the vines, which I’ve only kept for a few days and want to make permanent. I want it to become the kind of thing I don’t negotiate with myself about at six in the morning when the bed is still cool.

The paper is under the candle now and that’s where it stays until the full moon on the twenty-ninth. Then I’ll see whether I meant it.

I sat outside afterwards with somebody else’s celebration going on past the trees. A new moon is for the things you start quietly, before anyone can see them well enough to have an opinion about them. The village was doing the exact opposite, beginning something at full volume with fire in the sky, and I loved that too. Both are true. They’re both ways of marking that a thing has turned.

Four hundred words on the new chapter today and I didn’t hate them, which on a day this loud felt like a small revolution of my own.

I should go in. The noise isn’t stopping any time soon and this year I don’t especially want it to.