080: bandaids

three bandaids on my knee for the mysterious cut, the long bright red. when I left there were three, when I returned only one. I pictured them tangled in sheets, stuck to shoe soles, discarded on the subway. yesterday I passed a lone bandaid face-up on the sidewalk halfway to the depot. the red streak across it the exact angle, the exact dashed-line design. how long it had been there I don’t know, or if it fell going to or coming back. this morning I lost the third, the one that held on so long. blowing in the wind somewhere.

079: friday

she’s gentle. she smells like tea 

and milk. she doesn’t frighten me. 

her roads are quiet, too. she is elbows 

and cushions and watermarks. 

she doesn’t mind catching hold 

of a cold pole when the subway sways. 

wind only grazes her skirts. her hair 

comes undone, improving her. 

she dreams and forgets by 

morning; mysteries do not trouble her. 

she walks with an invisible, bending 

grace. she sets the glass on the counter 

and watches the water gleam. tall or small, 

she’d trade her own bones for a bite of that cookie. 

it’s all right. I know she ends softly.

078: younger

I read the old words I wrote when I was younger and god, she had such stars in her eyes. She asked such questions, walked with such purpose, lived with such endlessness. I want to weep over the words that are good. I ask whether I really made them. I know that I did. The inside of my head was beautiful. The way I looked at the world was beautiful. 

Am I less now? The words seem heavier, stiffer, less flung and chaotic. Stars chimed behind every syllable back then. Now I hear only my own silence, the stifling overwhelm.

077: tight

My hips press out sideways against the stiff denim and it is the worst feeling in the world. Tight. Tight. Tight. Tight. These jeans fit again and I hate it. There were inches between my waist and the band. Saddlebags of fabric, not body. I was younger then, better. Now I am oversized. My mouth has two frames. Each time someone walks by I am holding this bagel. I set it down, pretend I can take it or leave it. The woman behind me says, How could anyone eat that much? She doesn’t know that she is talking about me.

076: better

I have been wondering if I am better. First thing in the morning, a joke bursts out of my mouth. Midday the clock surprises me with its vigor and silence. Afternoons I’m not so frightened, and I can peer through the fog if I squint. Evenings I sip strawberry water and think of vodka but I do not crack. Midnights I dream and laugh myself awake. Mornings I duck into the bright hall and don’t always remember the pain that shuttered me in, the old tunnel from bed to bed. Hours and minutes have my permission to pique my curiosity.

075: liturgy

I used to do this, when life was scenic. Now it’s just towers steepling into the mist. Drinking until the paper is blank. Clutching rails, glaring at my reflection as it sways. Opening the book of chances and shutting it again at once. Crossing the street away from the headlights, the voices, the serene smoke. Waiting for the neighbor cat. Leaving clothes on the floor. Wandering the aisles, unable to imagine one meal. Swallowing the salad. Clinging in the dark. Scribbling out the endless liturgy of how am I doing. Promising myself I’m not at fault. Playing at real life. 

074 : how many times

How many times have I gone to that ocean, seeking something? How many times have I come at dusk and seen two stars (maybe one an airplane) over the wash of purple and blue above the islands? How many times have I seen waves lapping over black rocks, stepped onto rims of sand at low tide, admired shells beneath me, looked across to where the sunset gleams over Salem? Always, underneath everything, a question. Something too large for a house or a head.

How many times have I gone to that ocean and come away with an answer?

A few.

073: impression

Art museums are exhausting. A thousand choices to make—which paintings to stop at, which to stroll past, which placards to read. And at each painting, so much to do—first, to arrive, to pause thoughtfully. Then to draw up a response, a feeling, a thought—some kind of reaction that is both naturally conceived and correct. It is not enough to look at a painting and think, “I like this one”. You must come up with a response that has weight, heft, interest. You have lines to follow, shapes to trace, colors and gradations to dive into. A hundred times you must do this, over and over, for every piece of art, and all while being quiet and not looking at the guards too often and not giving off the impression that you’re about to steal a painting.

072: honeysuckle

The south side of the street is rimmed with honeysuckle. I walked out this morning and caught a richly floral scent, but couldn’t tell where it came from. Tonight I walked home that way, descended into the valley of the scent again—and on my left were the honeysuckle bushes, and I said, “Oh! That’s what I smelled this morning.” Only this time it was deepened, vivified, by the rain pattering around it and dripping through it. It was like tea—flowers and leaves dipped and steeped in a basket of rain, made deeper, more real, more wet, luscious, reverent.

071: river

Sitting on the deck in my not-broken chair. Sunset, on the cusp of dusk. A drippingly, deathly hot day tips gently over into a cool, dry evening. Screen doors open and shut, cars whisper by three stories below. Basements hum. Trees tremble gently. The ocean, somewhere, breathes.

Finishing Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield—a book about a little girl, drowned and then revived again—and then looking at the bookmark I have used from the beginning, a postcard, a drawing of a girl overlooking a body of water. An ocean, clearly, but it could be a river.

070: steam

It drives people in, to the interiors, into the catalogues of plates, coffee cups, small spirals of steam, concentrates of the hissing rain outside. The pavement smokes, the umbrellas cower. The people run, take shelter under anything three-dimensional. They run blindly. Everyone, everyone talks about the rain, the cold, how unseasonal, as if every summer they’ve lived through has been a straight-up glass of sunshine. I stand in the midst of the people run out of the mist, hand their plates and their coffees to them, say to them yes, I hate it too, which is a lie.

069: dust

The dust from the sky and ceiling
clusters the glass, darkens the thoughts as they appear.
Everything is sun-streaked, water-tight, empty,
over-saturated.
Our lips may as well have bled.
I remember the forget-me-nots
pouring themselves over the dell,
how you laughed at me,
how you forgot about me.
I remember the way my face looked
in the glass after the dark forced me out
of our bed and into the doorway.
The bruise that formed invisibly,
the bruise I gave myself.
The kitchen, its sketched clutter suspended
underwater, the shadows like arms
keeping me out.

068: fleet

After my shower I was standing in the bathroom combing my hair and through the skylight I heard a motorcycle zooming up the side street, blaring music––but instead of something dark and thumping and horrific, it was, of all things, Fleet Foxes. Mykonos. A song I know, and love, and hum sometimes.

~

What kind of bird is it that perches atop a telephone pole, pauses, then nosedives into the sky below (for technically, the sky does not end when you get to the houses), disappearing from sight, thoughtless as I would be when walking from one room to another?

067: the secret beach

We found it, just like that. An overgrown, barred-off trail wound between tipping fence-slats and low dunes, past a stack of faded yellow-and-orange canoes, into a hushed cove. High houses on all sides, castles of the town’s wealthy and long-settled; us, smaller than sand-grains. We walked down the damp sand to the water, snaking among seaweeds and strewn mussels, crossed to a lip in the careening wall of rock that rounded the land’s edge. A nook in the rock, a wide chair, sun-warmed—we nestled there, dazed in the sun, dreaming of summer.

066: april

I feel empty today. Hollowed out, like a gourd with its insides scooped. Because anxiety took me over and left me feeling like a shedded skin, my living self gone elsewhere.

I left work and the streets were flowing with people, but once I got through the alley the world went quiet. The only sound the faint squeaking of wheels––a boy riding his bike in circles on the pavement. I went up the stairs, felt weary and hot. Came into my darkened living room, cast off my shoes, opened the lefthand glass door. Let the unforgiving air pour in.

065: yellow room

He brought me hot coffee as I awoke. Then he joined me under the covers and we sat there, nestled in the pillows, leaning back against that massive ornate headboard, and we sipped our coffee and ate our cranberry orange muffin and almond croissant (trying not to get crumbs in the sheets). The room was quiet, the house was quiet––the light was coming in, painting the room yellow, and as I lay there next to him with my sweets and my searing hot coffee, I said, “The next time I’m anxious, I’m going to think back to this moment.”

064: for the time being

Suddenly it’s overcast, but the air is soft and warm. I’ve opened the lefthand screen door. My room smells sweet and birthdayish, like it did when I was a kid––though that was a different room, in a different time––and while I feel less certain now who I am, in some ways I know I haven’t changed. I am still sensitive, stubborn, as malleable to the world as a handful of water in a chorus of waves. Still shy, afraid at night, longing always to be somewhere else and in some other time.

I stifle that feeling a lot. But with the slow, seeping spring, I feel it coming back. When the window is open, the sky soft grey, the air moving. When I am alone.

Note: This post is actually 127 words but it's fine because I don't care.

063: three strange old ladies in the café today

Lady who ordered mint green tea and was spotted rubbing the warm tea pot all over her face

Lady reading so intently that she did not hear or see me as I stood two inches away and said loudly, repeatedly, “Ma’am, I think I brought you the wrong tea. Ma’am? Ma’am???”

Lady who ordered three plates of food and ate steadily through them, with great care, picking apart her avocado toast like it was some craft, wearing spindly glasses, talking to no one, and when I started to take her empty plate away said “Oh no, you can leave that”

062: except nothing broke?!

I nearly broke an entire tray of water glasses and for the rest of the day I felt wragged. My nerves, frayed edges, watery and near to buckling. My wrists, the veins in them sogged with bleary gel. Everything was frayed on the edges, myself, the world, everything in it. The spaces between people, less defined, blurrier, far more dangerous.

The memory of it will stay in my mind as long as I must carry water glasses across a room. The fear, as stupid as it is, penetrative and crystalline. This particular anxiety cut into my bones, yet another specimen.

061: blessings

Sometimes I count blessings on the way to work. Number one is almost always the boy––his kisses, his face in the morning light, his cute sleeping position, his love for me. Number two was seagulls—hearing them as soon as I walked outside. It was the faintest, farthest breath of summer, of standing by the sea. Number three was a black goldendoodle, tied to a post outside a café. I held out my hand and she sniffed it, gently. Not quite close enough for me to feel the wet nose. But it was enough. It was more than enough.