It's the last day of the year and I am fidgeting.

So my New Year's resolution is this: stop fidgeting. Be cat-like, instead.

Notes and tea

I'll put the Thursday on, wash the tea,
since our names are completely ordinary--
- from "Identification" by Wislawa Szymborska

There's water in the kettle, the tea bag waits in the cup. The book I'm reading has tea in it, has teaism and Okakura Kakuzo in it, has Basho and Sei Shonagon in it. My eyes automatically dart toward my bookshelf, where my copy of Shonagon's Pillow Book is, and I remember the lists my teacher in poetry class once asked us to make. Lists like "things that make your heart beat fast", or "things that make you sad". I don't remember the items in mine. My recall of details has become feeble, and clutching at memory's hems requires much effort, most of the time.

"And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love.

Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon."

- from the Pillow Book

But, tea. Tea pots, tea cups. I have lingered over store displays a few times, trailing my fingers along the tea pots' thin, graceful necks, inspecting the cups' ears, admiring the artwork. They are the daintiest things, but I've never bought any. Maybe I didn't feel I'll have use for them, maybe I felt that it was too early in my "tea stage" to buy them. My knowledge of tea is confined to Lipton, Starbucks, and the instances it has come up in the English novels and Zen stories I've read. And, of course, there's the memory of poring over Proust's In Search of Lost Time and being profoundly affected by his tea-and-petites-madeleines passage.

photo from dinahfried.com

But I will buy a set, one of these days. It's on my list, definitely. Something that has little flowers on their faces. In white and blue, perhaps.

Meanwhile, the kettle sings.

"Come along inside...

We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place."

- from The Wind in The Willows

Good morning, Thursday.

from www.newyorker.com

Horrific.

In case you haven't seen it yet.
Poor Sylvia Plath. She would have cringed at this.

More here. (Thanks for the tip, Mr. K)

Meanwhile, I recently discovered lettersofnote.com. My starter meal was Doris Lessing's letter declining Britain's offer to make her a Dame. A delightful read, feisty and brief.

Notes and photos

I'm reading an interview on Jack Kerouac and I smile when I get to the part where I discover he's a Pisces. My mind drifts to James Merrill (he's a Pisces, too) and the James Merrill phase I went through after discovering him in my Contemporary American Literature class in college. I feel a pang of sadness as I think about the thick James Merrill book I found at a book sale (I don't remember where). It's one of the books I've lost in the turbulence of '11. I remember the Irish Setter in one of his poems, "The Broken Home". I can still recall, quite vividly, the smile James Merrill was wearing in the picture on the book's jacket. His smile was shy and sad, a faraway look in his eyes. He didn't seem to be where he was. Very similar to this one, though he was a little younger in the other:

Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

- from "The Broken Home"

But yes, Jack Kerouac reminded me a little of you.

photo from www.brainpickings.org

And that's probably why I started jotting down these notes.

Notes and flowers

Living things don't all require 

light in the same degree. Some of us

make our own light:

- from "Lamium" by Louise Gluck

This poet's obsession with flowers has single-handedly strewn your mind with blooms. Never mind the uncertainty that lives there, or the sadness that comes for occasional visits. You can count on them not to mind.

The poet has a book filled with flowers. Roses, zinnias, irises, daisies, asters, buttercups, lilies. The pages whisper pinks and lavenders, burst into yellows and oranges, spew out reds and violets, echo blues and incidental blacks. They speak of living, and pain, and sorrow, and death, and hope. So much loveliness lining the hedges, colors brightening the pathways.

But you have zero interest in gardening. Once, you planted lavender Milflores (scientific name: Hydrangea Macrophylla, the internet says) in some grassy front yard from your past. They died, all four of them. Did they know you were going away?

photo from houseonahill.net

Your shopping list has only once included "flowers" (you can picture Mrs. Dalloway shaking her elegant head in disapproval) and the ones you bought were plastic. Tulips, they were, and white. Or were they purple? You wonder.

Are there even purple tulips?

You must remember to buy a vase, next time you go out. Write that down. Now.

From this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.

- Louise Gluck

Naming

The beloved 

doesn't 

need to live. The beloved

lives in the head.

-Louise Gluck

From that conversation and others that came before, I am able to see that your proclivity for naming things stems from your almost instinctive tendency to dig up graves for what you refuse to deal with.

Pain, memories, losses. Things that matter enough to be seen, acquiesced, named. Guitar strains you once loved, warmth you once felt, dreams you once conjured, luminous tears turned to dim aches, questions you once asked, over and over.

Names. Faces.

You close your eyes and push, push downward, push, until they're deep enough, until they're gone enough.

So they haunt you in your dreams, people your untold tales, disappear into deliberately forgotten landscapes, blur into uncertain photographs.

You end up drawing blanks. Blanks you're unable to fill.

For C--

Day 5

Waking up to CNN's Anderson Cooper's coverage of Typhoon Haiyan's aftermath in Tacloban  has paved the way for gloomy thoughts to come.

Today's rain seems a fitting backdrop, too, highlighting patterns of grays and blues, and grays again. I have been told to stop following the news, but an inner voice is telling me that isn't the way to go. That I have been spared by this catastrophe should be reason enough to be in accord with what is going on. My sense of decency tells me that anything in proximity to celebration (the sumptuous lunch we just had, the weekend party we've been planning), luxury (that expensive gadget we've been wanting for months now), and pettiness (the headaches and traffic we normally complain about) have absolutely no place in the middle of all the grief, desperation, and destruction that the people in affected places are currently going through.

photo from www.nationalreview.com

But let me stop there before this turns into a lugubrious and preachy post, if it isn't already one.

Aid continues to come from all over the globe. People are braving the backwash of the storm, setting aside differences and comfort and safety in order to rebuild. The days and nights to come will be long and dreary (as they have already been), but so long as there are people like the ones out there who are lending out hand and limb and heart, the sun will shine again.

Sketches

I can almost be sure I had warned you before: you will find your way here.

Hope Floats: Baby being rescued in Tacloban.

I found this on Ninotchka Rosca's Facebook wall, and was haunted by the image.

Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda has ravaged so many, but hope lies in those who help bring to shore whomever, and whatever, can be saved.

*Photo posted by Armand Bengua Frasco, courtesy of Gen. Charly Holganza/ via Willy Ramasola

Because this miss is on my list (ugh)

I have decided to give up on the book I've been reading. I seldom ever go this far into one (3/4) and not finish it, living by the belief that if the first few pages of a book doesn't appeal to me, the only recourse should be to put it down and move on to the next. One of the very few exceptions was Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which somehow proved my judgement on its beginning chapters wrong, and it was, perhaps, the memory of this experience that was one of the reasons why I stuck to Kundera's Life is Elsewhere; the other being that of reading his The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and liking both.

The book has its merits, but the current mood I'm in has been unable to find a juncture to settle in, so for now, I'm putting it back on the shelf. I could probably pull it out it at a later time, though judging from the list of books I still want to read (not counting the ones that are yet to be added), I'm predicting the chances to be very, very low.

Meanwhile, I'll be having this for breakfast, lunch and dinner:

Sheltered by this roof

In the wake of the typhoon that has passed our way, the slightest darkening in some patch of sky now brings with it some foreboding of disaster.

The mind's eye conjures an entire city well on its way to being wiped out of the map; the heart remembers the shudders that came with the images flooding the news; a little fist of conscience recalls the shame one felt while digging in to a tub of popcorn to chomp away the fury one felt because the internet connection during the last few days was faulty, when distances away, families may have lost everything they had worked all their lives for, death tolls have come up to alarming heights, psyches have been forever tainted by the trauma of having lost so much, of having been lashed at by winds and rains so merciless, that living will never be the same again, even after the wounds have become scars.

It seems almost a sacrilege to be surrounded by so much warmth and safety, and to still be wanting more than what comfort and luxury there already is, when one has become aware of the loss and devastation that has been gone through by countless others, in one single afternoon, within the stretch of one night. 

If one were to look back at the headlines, one would see the glaringly sorry state that our corner of the world has come to: Trailing the Napoles brouhaha, typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda comes along. Do not mistake me for blaming one for the other; because in the scheme of things--where, after all, there is no scheme--there is no connection, whatsoever. I juxtapose these two events not out of superstition, but merely to illustrate--and highlight--the outrage that the former ought to incite in us, and the contemplation that the other inevitably brings with it.

It is at times like these that one, in spite of oneself, is made to pause, and reflect on the the significance of living: what is it that truly matters? 

You've been having dreams lately and, as you wonder about it now, you remember thinking about it some days ago, though which day it was, you don't remember. A line of words dances before your eyes: cease, seize, bees, sky, window. Another follows its tail: chair, smoke, bloom, tea, pavement.

The attempt to rationalize is quickly assaulted by the reprimand There is no pattern.

Last book I read:

What I'm reading now:

Morning

See how the day glimmers with clarity, framed by the four sides of your window. The corners are there so the eyes do not stray. Take a step back and keep enough distance, should the longing to look beyond them seize you.

If the distance doesn't douse the impulse, take a walk outside.

Remember how you described that movie in a conversation from years ago. Remember how pinpricks feel. Remember the lilt in voices. Remember voices. Remember the way a surface can both be sunlit and not. Remember how a smile tugs at your mouth. Remember the distance between your eyes and that wall from years ago. Remember that wall. Remember distances. Remember how a crease can draw attention to itself. Remember how empty losses can feel. Remember how rain feels on your face. Remember the sound of a car being driven away. Remember the oblivion in corners. Remember the strangeness of cold floors. Remember how nights can stretch for miles and miles. Remember the strangers in your dreams. Remember dreams. Remember your dreams. Remember what weariness feels like. Remember that chair. Remember all the keys you've lost. Remember doors and doorways. Remember that hall. Remember what vagueness feels like. Remember the sound of wind chimes. Remember violins. Remember the impossible softness of this pillow. Remember water. Remember the smell of an early morning. Remember rain-soaked mornings. Remember the sounds of morning. Remember how quiet sadness can be. Remember what laughing feels like. Remember how your laughter echoes upward. Remember the falls you've had. Remember how soft surfaces can be. Remember how hands are surfaces. Remember soaring. Remember solitary silences. Remember shared silences. Remember what hunger feels like. Remember sweetness. Remember what bland tastes like. Remember soaring. Remember how awake the mind can be. Remember lullabyes. Remember Thursdays. Remember that Thursday. Remember forgetting. Remember the comfort in slumber. Remember this road. Remember your footfalls. Remember remembering.

"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you."

- Sylvia Plath

Monday is when you're in-between weeks.

At least, I am.

Watching "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is just the sort of thing that could get one fired up on a Monday morning. More so since it came after the reading of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad just a week ago--in a parked car, surrounded by twilight.

Homer's been in my thoughts, lately.

But Lou Reed died yesterday, and the local elections are well underway. All in all, a gloomy morning.

October 27th was also Sylvia Plath's birthday. I remember reading her Unabridged Journals a few years ago and being struck (and left thinking about it for days) by how she was much the same person, inside and outside her poems.

Have a good one.

Post Script

But there is dullness, too, and gaping time. As much as there is that constant exercise in quiet and contentment, the unaccustomed mind finds the (oftentimes) unfamiliar silences a little disconcerting. What of the previous life spent asking and chasing and turning things over and over until there are only more questions, more distances to run? What of the sleepless nights, the burning days?

But I have books to read, and music to play.

I have promises to keep.

Sunlight

I am grateful for today's sun, and that there is sunlight where I am. The rain can bring such gloom, can stir so many dormant, nameless sadnesses.

A window is a blessing. I am grateful for windows, too.

Some days are made of downpours.

Someone asks a question and suddenly there is a click from the lock. The utterance of a name is an invisible hand that turns the knob, that opens the shut door.

The memories come rolling out and the intrusion of remembering, so painstakingly thwarted many sunsets ago, resumes where it had been left off.

We end up finding ourselves in the last place we want to be: inside a dark, erstwhile forgotten room, counting could-have-beens.

The question of tenderness

How I would like to believe in tenderness-
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way.

-Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"

Another series of points, revolving around the word "tenderness":

the end of an exhausting week, the body collapsing into vague relief; limbs weakening to softness; the mind yearning for rest; that conversation on poetry with my daughter, exchanging notes on Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and agreeing on the sadness in its lines; next, a flashback of my sunlit childhood, glimpses of orange twilights, a song; that word, tenderness, this line, "because there, too, is tenderness" limning my thoughts like some sad loveliness; pages on a page, Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", that line, "How I would like to believe in tenderness--".

The question of love breaks, certain, under its own weight. Remembrance, instrospection--they come in, swift and incorrigible. The night falls, wistful, its softness more pronounced. Solitude, daughters, childhood, the promise of sleep. Where there is poetry, where there is tenderness, the heart succumbs.

Where--

For we are ether

Coming across this bit amused me:

An excerpt from George Eliot's "Silly Novels by Lady Noveslists", which A.S. Byatt quotes in her book, Passions of the Mind:

"Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph and reads the Bible in the original tongues... Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs; indeed there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty."

George Eliot was laughing at the archetypal heroine much written about in her day, and Byatt did well in quoting this passage.

Plus, the term/phrase mind-and-millinery.

Now, back to reading.

Ennui, 2

There are no unwashed dishes in the sink, no garbage to be thrown out. The floor is clean, the bed is made. I am staring at the day.

Pygmalion, on my mind

Recent events in my friends' lives (and, for the longest time, mine) have made me start thinking of Pygmalion: he of the famed myth, he who inspired Bernard Shaw's play, he who made the creation and popularity of "My Fair Lady" possible, he who found love in a stone-filled place.

We are all Pygmalions, in one way, or another, at some point in our lives, or another, at certain hours and days of the week, the year, or others, with certain variations to the story.

We sculpt ideals in our minds, often make resolute plans to redo, and undo, and end up with feeble attempts at justifying these sketches' likeness (or lack, thereof) to the blueprint we had so painstakingly labored at, in the beginning.

We sculpted and stared, tried to breathe life into our work, only to find out, way before the end, that our fantasy of a being, could never be what we dreamed for them to become. Our expectations slip away from their fingertips like invisible dust; their eyes, their stare, seldom end up frozen exactly where we intended for them to. Our recourse is to alter, to rearrange, to cut--until all we're left with are scraps, shards, pieces. We cut ourselves as we fumble, to look for what is no longer there, to reassess our thoughts and actions, to rebuild the dreams of wholeness, both ours and the beloved's.

Even the flowers from our mouths are illusions. We have to begin with, and love, what's already there, to begin with.

Ennui

The cloud formations I was trying to read before the afternoon started drawing to its close have already fallen to the ground, a grand cacophony of intermittent downpours and whipping winds. In between, an indeterminate stretch of minutes, bouts of calm and expectation, static conversation, a reel of shut windows, jolts of weariness. After the rain, a drowsy stillness: the eyes giving in before the mind shuts to various shades of darkness. 

I don't know what this is. I only know that I am about to fall into (another) slumber.

But how to keep at imagery, and how to fill a page?

There's anguish in this state.
There's anguish in this state.

Yesterday,

I missed the sunrise and didn't feel sorry for it. I looked up and saw cobwebs in the ceiling's corners. The sunlight did nothing except sting my eyes. My cup of coffee went cold, barely touched. I forgot to put Bill Withers on. I stared at a blinking cursor for thirteen minutes, and then closed the page. I read a write-up on Kierkegaard and felt too lazy to bookmark. It took me an eternity to get out of bed. A memory of yellow butterflies crossed my mind, but I shooed it away. I cringed at a mental picture of my list of to-dos. Not even the prospect of seeing "The Great Gatsby" blurred the blues. The results of the recently-concluded elections depressed me. I could smell the dust. I wanted some pasta, but decided I'd rather heat the previous evening's left-overs. I knew I shouldn't talk to anyone, otherwise I'd end up barking at them. I thought about today and felt compelled to shut my eyes.

Forgiveness

Most of the time, I make a decision to not judge you.

What you have done to me, you must have done unwittingly. What you have taken, you must have needed more than I did. Was your father good to you, I wonder. It dawns on me that you know no more about yourself than I do.

Of this, I am certain: you had your reasons. The things you saw, I did not see; my hours are different from yours. The places I've been, you might not have; your pains are unknown to me.

Perhaps you were as lost as I used to be: wading in pools of doubt, clutching at forgotten lights. Perhaps we both still haven't been found. The world is too big for certainty.

I wish you lucidity, I wish you inner peace.

Because this, too, is true: Stranger, you are my sister.

Appearances

At least three people have told me I remind them of a hippie.

Maybe it's the stuff in my wardrobe; maybe it's my hair. Or, maybe it's all the 60's and 70's music I've  assimilated into my system, and, consequently, am emanating.

Maybe their eyes are fooling them. Maybe it's all in their minds.

Far more people have called me Matet, though.

Hahaha

While the earth is sister to the sky

I'd forgotten to put pepper on the omelette.

The mind is a convoluted sheet of canvass, with no room for pepper, or for love. Joan Didion once said: Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

And so, I tap away, scrape against the surfaces of things, bringing back twigs and ashes, sentence fragments, footsteps, evenings, memories of rain, a dream of clouds, echoes, a flower. When the edges of days threaten to break, when the fringes from where I stand start to tear, the fumbling starts-- that quiet flutter for solidness, that rouse to consciousness, that jump back to the ground.

So while I was scraping the pan for left-over flakes, I remembered the pepper I'd forgotten to put on the omelette, and made a mental note to write it down.

Let us deconstruct, then, you and I--

And because I thrive on incoherence, I will make an omelette today. The chopped onions and tomatoes should go well with last night's rain, and the eggs should serve the morning right.

Pepper, as signifier, I have yet to mull over.

A bird is chirping from nearby. How near, I cannot tell. My head is full of Derrida and Bradbury. Men are part monsters, part-- I forget what he (Bradbury) said our halves are. I am swimming in theory; there's never enough movement for what's actual.

Love calls for our vulnerability, and not all of us are willing to be so naked.

I refuse to be vulnerable. Stay away.

But what to make of this sudden namelessness, this all-consuming mediocrity, spreading out into this otherwise glorious sunshine?

*getting up to make that omelette*

In case I forget--

"We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us."

-Roland Barthes

Settling takes time. Some things take hours, others take years. It takes spaces between clocks, distances between days, weeks, months--for situations to unravel, hearts to sink into acceptance, losses to be gathered, thoughts to stabilize, memories to take shape, emptiness to lodge.

In retrospect, what you were to me yesterday, no longer is. Though what you were, in the first place, took a while before it became what it was. And it still, at times, catches me by surprise, what you have become. I'm hard-pressed to use the word "finally", because inserting it anywhere here, while I am in this context, would lend it all a semblance of purpose, as if there was a goal to all of it, in the first place, when there was never any, to begin with. It was a transience of sorts, now that I look at it with clearer sight. It did start out with a thunderclap, yes, but it was one that gradually simmered down into a passage of unnumbered days, stretching out into several, blurry rooftops, nameless except for a haze of conversations, unrecognizable except for a few lines, some weak laughter. A brush here, some strains of music there. A drink, maybe two. Some hushed exchange. There were never any tears; the lines were never drawn that way, the dimming never deep enough.

As far as you and I were concerned, distance was never a question. You were never anywhere, anyway. And now that things have settled into what they have become, I realize this: Neither was I.

There isn't much here to unlearn. We could have been mere shadows passing each other by: noiseless and faint, with neither bruises, nor the possibility of them, to remember each other by.

Elsewheres

You tell me you've been walking at night. You've been waking up in the middle of some moonlight-swathed hour, always elsewhere from where you actually are, seeing him in the places you used to go, meeting him in places you've never been. And yet, always, that sense of already having been there, of having lingered everywhere with the memory of him crossing your sight like some persistent ghost.

You've been dreaming in snapshots, you say: chimeric sequences of finding, being, losing. Some stray wind bringing him to you, a standstill keeping him near, a stray wind taking him away. You, wishing haplessly for that breeze to bring him back, to pass your way again and put the shambles back into place. You, standing in the middle of some remembered space and well-cherished time, holding still even as the dream has gone, closing your eyes and wishing wakefulness away, because daylight always seems to change the landscape, pulls you away from where it all is, away from where he is.

Even the memory of dreaming has been elusive, you say. You have had to summon consciousness to paint the pictures, to sew the pieces together, to weave them all into a symmetric whole.

But the end-result is always the same. You are where you are. And he never is.

For C--

Things that stay

During a Booksale hunt this afternoon, I saw a copy of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, dirt-cheap at PhP115, but couldn't find it in myself to buy it because of the tears in some of the pages. And I found it so sadly predictable that, in the middle of my frenzied search for some invaluable find, I suddenly remembered you.

I paused, glancing at the stack of books I had been lugging around for the past half hour.

Is it such a wonder that when I find myself inside a bookstore, it is the titles I used to see in your shelves that I seem to instinctively look for?

I am drawing shadows for you to disappear in. I put on one dark hue after another, so no light can pass through--until no question is left of darkness, no space for silhouettes to linger in.

I am drawing shadows for you to disappear in.

Daphne, once more

I cannot have you follow me
this way--

Today's dose of madness

Reading the final pages of Fanny Howe's The Winter Sun, I was struck by the similar thread through which most of what I had read in the past days seemed to run. These materials--a number of blog posts, some really striking passages on Twitter and Facebook, another book which I had reread--all seemed to resonate with a similar theme. If I had been my younger self, I'd probably be making (thwarted) attempts at deciphering its meaning, some secret message, perhaps, that the universe is trying to deliver to me, some hidden design that would make sense out of whatever's happening in my life.

As it is, the years have taught me that coincidences like these are nothing more than what they are: coincidence. The recurring themes in our lives find their way to our everyday because our choices have made them do so. And the patterns with which we make decisions can be traced to what and how we are as individuals--our backgrounds, our experiences, our reactions to those experiences.

Hence, this seeming tapestry of words must have arisen from nothing more than a chance click (or, several chance clicks) on random links, or from my mind's proclivity for certain subjects that had made me retain only the encounters with those subjects, and that had, in turn, consigned the others into shadowed blurs.

Arrggh.

Coffee.

A Starbucks table napkin found, stuck between pages 156 and 157 of a book--a collection of essays, to be specific--told me I might have brought this book with me on one of my frequent stays at the coffee shop. The napkin's edges were yellowed, and I hadn't taken the book out of the shelf in a long while, besides, so that particular trip to caffeine-and-laziness land must've been some years back.

This encounter with a napkin isn't really something to be made much out of, but I being I, my mind wandered a little, away from the paragraph I was reading, following my eyes as they landed on the rectangular, light brown object, lying flat on the desk. 

I wondered about that day and hour, irretrievable as they are from my cache of memories, when I had stuck this napkin between these pages; wondered about how I was-- my frame of mind, my mood, my clothes, my view, my companion (if there was), the weather. What song was playing in the store? Were they playing any, at all?

It is a blank that I draw, of course. Aside from its discolored edges, there was nothing in the napkin that provided any sort of explanation, or clue, that would have enlightened my musings.  There was neither an actual memory to anchor a memory on, nor an actual measurement of time and distance to base a recollection from. I had to shake off some unexpected wish to, somehow, go back to that time and place.

Some passing regret over not having scribbled anything on the napkin's surface, that time, flits by. And that must be why this bit is posted here, at all.

It is when the losses--gathered, counted--seem at their most, that the hands start teaching themselves to unlearn the act of grasping.

Caption: Triangle

They stand there, bodies and faces so close, that from a distance, the picture they paint is one of nearness, of intimacy. They are oblivious to the loud music, they are at a safe enough distance from where the dancing is: two tall, good-looking men about to lock in an embrace, until some stray beam of light zeroes in for three seconds, five, and you catch sight of the barely concealed wrath on their faces. They are both wearing blue shirts.

Their chests are heaving, impassioned.The muscles in their arms are tense, and one can imagine punches straining to break free. One realizes that they are not so much about to embrace, as to grapple. Their feet are planted firm on each one's ground, and the onlooker senses that each is insisting on a height inches above the other. The light around them is a blue haze.

They are shouting at each other, and one can make out expletives from the emphatic movements of their lips. The music drowns out any chance of the (heated) discussion ever being audible, but one can certainly make out that this is a brewing fight.

About  three long strides in front of the pair, one's eyes zoom in on a girl, diminutive, even in the heels she had so carefully chosen for the night that, hours before, stretched out before her like a gleaming promise. Her hair is one long, sleek mass, and the sequins on her white shift dress are blinking at the blue lights, as she had, when she first entered the crowded hall, hoped they would.

Her face is crumpled in an agonized frown; the cigarette she's been smoking is forgotten, as her fingers seem mechanical in their hold of it. She shifts weight more often than she would care to, but this is probably the last thing that's on her mind. Biting her lower lip, she would look upward and sigh, then blink back at the scene before her, of which she is, obviously, more than just a passerby.

Indeed, that is no mere speculation, for the girl had just been dancing with one of these two men, several minutes ago; and she had watched her world crumble down when the other shut the door behind him for the last time (or so, she had thought), a couple of months ago.

And these two men, furious at their blighted, lacking knowledge of who each was to her, all but seem to remember her presence in their lives, in this one heated moment of boyish tempers.

If she walked away now, they probably would not have noticed.

Versions

1. at the approaching sight of pain, turn
into stone

2. at the scent of pain, close
into a bud

3. at the threat of pain, curl
into a fist

Post-Birthday post-it:

I've just had a very long, eventful weekend. And though it seems that the proper thing to do right now is to write about it, all I feel like doing is collapsing into bed. The grind starts again tonight, after all, so I'm going to do just that: collapse.

Good night.

P.S. Mercury's turned direct yesterday, by the way. I am looking forward to some semblance of order around here.

*crossing fingers*

Found:

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” 
--Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Weather report

The clock said 12:52 when I glanced up at it from the plate of greens I was picking on. A peek out the window yielded a sight of bluish/purplish clouds and a grey-tinted sky.

Non-movement. Muteness.

The beads of sweat forming on my arms, for some reason, ended whatever suspicions of rain/non-rain I had had this morning when I went outside and felt the sting of the sun against my skin. It looks like rain, I remembered thinking, as I looked up and saw the sky ablaze with sunlight.

Meanwhile, and more so because of the inclement state of the sky, I felt that sensation of being suspended nowhere and everywhere. The possibility of renewal lay somewhere, but I insisted on abeyance.

Quagmires lie where there is flux, and we've all been through enough storms to want another mishap, another fall.

But here comes a drizzle, and I find myself begrudgingly wishing the winds of a week ago back, the memory of a just-risen, benevolent sun--eavesdropping on a conversation about moonbeams and pathways and dreams--ambling into my mind like a cool, confiding breeze.

Sunlight slanting over surfaces is a breathtakingly beautiful thing. Like sadness, sometimes. Or, certainty.

Throw in particles of dust (star, or fairy), let them glimmer for a little while, and the mind's eye settles.

Exquisiteness is in the seer's point of view.

Admonition

Knowing all that you do, now, you should no longer be surprised. It isn't pain that hardens us, but the decision that comes after. 

The child that you once were, now looks at you with helpless eyes; the woman looks back, wistful. But in between, a valley of years: murky with the mire of tears, cloaking clocks of time, and underneath, a shroud of stories told and untold, the width between the torment and, always, the letting go. 

It should be no wonder that you walk away.

It shouldn't be.

Go.

And because I insist on images, I draw blanks. One after another, empty and unperturbed.

I wonder about the soul in things, turning them inside my head, as I stack stray sheets of hollowness on top of a desk. Loss is hackneyed, its heart a dead river. But we persist in making tangible, demanding preciseness out of space. Drawing blanks, along the way, from dug-up graves, from forgotten gaps.

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

-Audre Lorde

Today, I take a pause, to celebrate the women I know, have known, and will know, who have suffered, risen, and moved forward, once more. I salute your greatness and enshrine your legacies.

Diving into this wreck (an exercise on randomness),

these are what I came up with:

A list of things to do, two items in all. A bunch of keys, minus one key. A view from a window, moonlit and square. Left-over sadness in a yellow mug. 

A thin volume of poetry, dog-eared where the months have settled. Some random dream of forgetting, wafting in some fugitive breeze. 

A movie ticket, a concert ticket, four recital programs, three laundry receipts. 

Strings, an unlabeled bottle, forgiveness. Irony. A lotus flower, lilac and plastic. A smooth, round paperweight, squinting under the lamplight. 

A torn piece of laughter. Dust. A pill. 

An empty notebook. Shyness, folded beneath folded years. A pinwheel. 

Four pencils, sharpened and useless. A memory of trees, the comfort in shadows. 

A lone moth. A strand of sunsets. Blue post-its. An unfinished letter. A question. 

Nine questions. No answer. No answers.

A moment, a pause.

It is inevitable that they come along; first, one, and then, the other. Along with trailing noises--a puppy's bark, some jazz--and the daily sight of things, walls, maybe, or a folded shirt, an empty glass; some invisible door opens, and the moment tiptoes in, with the pause, in tow.

The moment stretches into something almost palpable, and so does the pause. One is made to acknowledge both, and the hours that came before. How long has it been? The question begs to be asked. How long since the once constant companions--endless wakefulness, maybe, or periodic stupors, insuppressible tears--have left? The days have been kind, one realizes. They have brought one to the present, where the certainty of pain, the sting of anguished thoughts, and the seeming permanence of grief for lost things, are but memories, that consign themselves deeper into some indeterminate recess of the healing heart. 

Some dull ache taps one on the arm. But the day waits outside and has, in truth, begun pulling one out of the hour. The interlude ends, and one stirs back into one's locus, where breakfast waits, and shelves need dusting.

Somewhere, the sudden loudness of a door shutting, the footsteps of someone walking away. Somewhere, the sound of someone leaving. 

But here, the sunlight streams in. And for a moment, the handle of the coffee cup sparkles where the light slants, like newness.