057: the meeting of the worlds. // {water, pt. 2}

At work, when it rains, I wander in a trance. Eyes tethered to the windows as if by strings. Shivering with delight at every rush of downpour, every thundersound.

People ask for more coffee; I stand halfway to the coffee pot, an empty mug hanging idle from my fingertip, and look out into the storm until something, someone, jolts me back to reality.

It’s a crime to look away from the windows.

My whole body aches to run out through those glass doors, dance in it, get soaked to the skin and not care.

But I don’t, for some reason.

056: stories.

Norman Rockwell - Saying Grace (1951)

Stories are appearing again.

Yesterday I pulled a Norman Rockwell book off the shelf. Stopped on the page with Saying Grace.

One moment I looked at a picture. The next there was a story in my head.





//

Some weeks this weird, diaphanous anxiety begins to rise under my skin. It comes and it goes and I get up in the mornings and stare into the mirror and ask, What is wrong with me? and finally, one day, realize that I’m not reading a book right now. And that’s why.

So, yesterday I started reading a new book.*
I feel better.

___________________________________

*The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, if you want to know. (Thanks to Nancy, whose book recommendations never fail.)

055: I could write about a lot of things

Rain, again—wandering into the cracks in my consciousness, lingering till I give it a name.

Missing dancing so much it hurts, but when I try to go back my limbs touch the walls of this room and the flame dies out in silence.

Worry, a dart, a sickness. A fog over bright moons.

Night, not my friend nor my enemy. I’m immune to it as it is to me. Every 24 hours we meet, play some cards. Whoever wins wins and that’s it till tomorrow, when we start again.

100: some days too much.
Some days not nearly enough.

054: the village.

I am moving to a new town. A new apartment.
An upstairs. A white house. A two-windowed room.

I walked there this evening, wandered among the coloured houses (Cinque Terre…?). Stood before the door I’ll come back to each night starting sometime in the middle of June.

When I looked between the houses, down lane upon lane, I saw ghosts of some place I once lived…passed through…dreamed about. I cannot always tell the difference.

Stood by a pond my voice can reach across. Missed the lake.

I whispered, This’ll have to do.

I think it may.

053: masks.

I am more than one person. I am layers. A body inside a body.
One mind and one heart, which throw themselves in a thousand directions at once.
I carry 1,000 masks.

At work I am one person. At home I am another. Elsewhere, out in the world, I am a third, a fifth, a sixteenth—all at once, and separately—in varying proportions and colorings.

Maybe no one has ever seen the real me.

I lay down this mask and take up another.
I am nobody––a lot of things––myself––someone I do not know.

I hold 1,000 stories.

052: the canal.

Not many people out here today.

A man spraypaints a railing.
Two girls, backs to the water, braid each other’s hair.
Two boys bicycle down from the bridge. One looks over
his shoulder, shouts something I cannot hear.
A woman and child crouch on the rocks. The boy,
blue plaid, reaches for birds with small hands.

All this on the far side, of course.
Over here there’s just me.
And the ducks. And a scattering of pigeons.
Oh--and a young couple picnicking
on the grass. He has binoculars
and a cigarette; she, long hair
and a laugh that carries.

051: I love a good rain // {water, pt. 1}

The bakery, this afternoon—I locked up the tables as it began to rain, and I realized it was the first time I’d felt rain on my face since…I don’t really remember.

The sunlit world is lovely enough. We get along most of the time.

But when it rains, the world and I are kindred spirits. We speak the same language for an hour, or a minute. However long that almost-downpour lasts.

Then it clears and, squinting into the sky’s halflit underbelly, I go back to being whatever it is I am. Except a bit better. And…wetter?

050: sunsets.

Sunsets. There’ve been two of them, in the last week, so beautiful I actually sort of almost crash into trees driving home. Sheldon Road. The road where I’m most likely to die because I’m looking everywhere except right in front of me. The road where I’m least likely to care because I am in spirit adrift, eyes up, lost in the haze of a sherbet sky lipped with fire, so that when the car hits the tree and goes to smithereens I don’t feel a thing.

I want to die with a gasp of wonder still fresh in my mouth.

{ interlude : it has been a very long time }

So.

I just found this blog today, again, after...two years or something of not remembering that it exists. That it existed, once.

The internet is a strange thing. Place. Thing. You can go back and quite literally find yourself standing in the text-speckled white space of your past, find words that your own fingers tapped out on some keyboard when you were eighteen and hopeful, when you were twenty and lost, when you were fifteen and stupid, when you were ageless and right. Right about so many things. And wrong, too.

This post is not going to be 100 words, by the way. The next one will.

Because I think I am going to start this again. This 100 words in 100 days thing. It's a lovely concept, one that I'm 98% sure I did not invent, although I can't for the life of me [cliche alert] remember where I came across it. Somewhere on the internets, no doubt. Where else do you find things these days. (Well. Books.)

Anyway, I left off on post 049, back in August of 2013...nearly three years ago. I am not going to write about this now--not go into the extent and depth of it--but I mean, so much has happened over the past three years. So much has changed. Me. I. I have changed. Really, everything has.

But I'm not going to go into that now. The whole point of this interlude-post-thing was to tell you, you, reader, person, human whose face I don't know, probably, that I'm going back and continuing this 100 words 100 days thing. Oh, and I'm starting at post number 050, where I left off last time. So really it's only fifty more days. But it'll still be 100 words. Yeah.

Because I really, really, really need to write again.

And this is the only answer I can find for right now.

So.  

On y va.

Let's begin...now.