Posted on February 26, 2017 by L.
A night for length not brevity. Save the brevity for the poems.
I am sitting in the dark. I am in every sort of exhausted wonderment.
It is so strange to me that this is happening, happening imperfectly.
I am thinking about how much I miss this place, this work, this slow unfolding. I want, at this moment, the time I’ve divvy’d up to other pursuits back in my hands. I want to have written every day. To have notes about how his voice feels in my ear as I lay the phone against it. The soft warmth of it. It has a shape now for me. How we watched Angel’s Egg together and he asked me if I looked like the unnamed girl. I did, sort of, when I was very young, and do, even less sort of, but still, right now.
The compliments are meted out at such a natural specificity that they always feel meant, if not earned.
Meanwhile, today was my celebratory pizza lunch. This meant the whole family found themselves capable of leaving the house and going out to a place – one in fact that the majority had never been before. The pizza on offer was well past acceptable, good even, and I wouldn’t mind returning soonish, though, that is in natural opposition to the idea that is flashing off and on at greater speed that this new job is a new recreation of my personality. I want to begin having the idea that I could be the sort of person I used to have a very specific burst of fantasy about. I used to, in my playful, unencumbered childhood, crave the complexity of an adult existence. The formulation for me was short skirt, long jacket. A corporate version of myself, though I never really visualized myself as being at the office, but tested by the gauntlet of it. The fantasy was returning home in a sports car or some sort of vehicle that looked like a pellet that could take hairpin turns over high mountain passes which was required for me to reach my secret aerie, taking off my high-heels, observing a sunset or somehow a sunrise, and feeling relieved and centered. Utterly capable of whatever the job was, but that peaceful core of self that I have cultivated and protected remained so. Untouched by the drag of the day, the demands of the higher-ups. In my vision, I was suitably high-up so that I could never be crushed under anyone’s thumb. In my vision, I was slender as a bay leaf. In my vision, in my silver power suit, I overlooked the whole world and had the funds and means to stay separate, untouched.
I need new habits. Day One, Starting Gun Habits. No celebratory sugary coffee drinks to cheer ourselves for breathing. No every moment needs a marzipan set of laurels to commemorate it. Not everything needs a blog post.
They were happy for me, they hate the things that frustrate me with a laser focus. All is as it should be.
And the past feels like someone else’s water in someone else’s jar.