First, we attempt the bath.
Yay, baths, I suspect there’s nothing better on a hot night than a lukewarm bath with a clever picture book. Well. I’m sure there are better things, but darlings, that is what I had and I didn’t mind it at all.
Putting music on my mother’s Ipod. Trying to pick things that are cheerful and bright, but not abrasive for her to listen to while she’s studying her genealogy. This is very strange to me, because it makes her sound so human. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t think my mother was human, it’s just odd to see her dig things and want to do things. She’s…something’s mellowed in her and something’s gotten into her head where it doesn’t all feel like such a big fucking deal that has to be controlled and wow, it occurs to me that maybe what she’s given up I’ve taken up like some kind of torch of martyrdom that nobody ever asks for, but the hell if you’re going to to be the one to let it go out. At any rate, we’re sidestepping the Liz Phair for mother.
We are going to Much Ado About Nothing. I am quite delighted. Shakespeare outside, in the free air. I plan to get a bit slippy and praise our beloved, problematic, sisterless except in the soul, Mr. Shakespeare. He must be all in wonderment that here we all still are, finding meat on his folio of carcasses. That’s later this month, though. It provides a decent something to look forward to when I’m foggy and wanting a good rope and a long nap instead of the strength to soldier on.
I should really start this earlier. I only get half way into it and then I feel really tired and ready for bed and I start to get very choppy in my thoughts and sentences. I start doing things for laughs that under other circumstances, I would try and be more circumspect and restrain. I start getting mushy and nostalgic in a creepy, Rose for Emily sort of way. I start yearning for sepulchres and reliquaries. An old friend from high school said hi on facebook. It’s weird to consider how you used to consider friendships and levels of friendships back then and what was acceptable given the social castes involved and now it’s just Hey. Hey. How are you? Great, fine. How’ve you been? Wow, wonderful. Been a long time. Yeah.
There’s just this collective befuddlement that the world’s somehow sustained us all for the most part. Even more bizarre is that he’s married. This is a gangly kid I used to know who never talked to anyone. Knew since elementary school. For fuck’s sake.
I know what this is. This wavering in my stomach. This is the quarter-life crisis, the storm that’s coming and I am suddenly, to quote a wise sage, smack in the middle of it. I’ve been solving it so far by drinking hard lemonade, buying pink vibrators, going to concerts and Shakespeare and sobbing over how hard my work is and traipsing hither and thither as I dodge bullets and creepiness of all orders and manners of being.
I don’t know if it’s working, but this is what I have. And tonight, I don’t mind it much.
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Nervous breakdown for one, yes, please.
I don’t want to be here so let’s go somewhere else, okay? I said I was rusty, but some ways are too well-known, too much muscle memory to ever leave completely behind.
There’s lots of places I go when I’m in trouble like I am now. They’re not places with addresses or even much concrete floors and walls, but I know them and there’s shelter there. For a short time, but time enough, I’m not the tragic creature that I proclaim I am or the even worse creature I fear I am, I am the caretaker of a great and swelling nation. More than that, I am the keeper of a lore that thousands know and trust and believe in.
There is in this land, down a winding, almost British, slightly Victorian, partially French, little road in the middle of a teeming metropolis, a bookstore. This bookstore is not immediately obvious for the cavern it is, but the door is pushed open on a rainy day and visitors tumble inside, shaking their umbrellas and overcoats and some stomp shoes not fit for the unexpected precipitation. Their eyes widen slightly as they take it in. Rapturous waves of literature. The smell of freshly printed and yellowed and tea stained covers wafts through the ozone-charged air. A tea-kettle pipes in not so much a bright hello as a piece of a song picked up by the shuffling of paper, the delicate dings of porcelain cups tapping porcelain saucers. Just enough to pull the eye all the way around the perimeter, around the stacks, to a ladder, to the legs of Mlle. de Crevecoeur as she sets a slim volume of Thoreau’s Self-Reliance between The Prince and a collection of sonnets. It’s a warm feeling, calm, but not sedate. It’s an industrious ease that permeates the shop as much if not more than the dust itself. This is why you like the shop, not because there is no screaming promotional cardboard cutouts staring, no promotional tie-ins, no branding indelibly flashing into your retinas. But because there is a book here for you and you know it. And even if you have to spelunk to find it, or flirt shamelessly with Mlle. de Crevecoeur who favors anyone who compliments the quote of the day with a free cup of tea, it’ll be worth it. It’ll be the book that breaks the weather of your life with a strange, surreal oasis not unlike the store itself. You can find that book, take that tea, sit by the fireplace and between chapters and bites of warm biscuit, watch the other customers fall through the doorway, as drowned a rat as yourself. As needy, as hungry, as unassuming. With eyes that want to see something new and more than that, something true. You pick out books for your fellow customers. Naming them, telling their stories that their body language tells you in your head, mentally guiding the tall, thick, effortlessly muscular man with a face so inset looks more like the mold of a face than an actual human visage over to this Kurt Vonnegut book. The one that isn’t famous, but was so good you wondered why you never read more Vonnegut. The little girl who needed nothing more than to be read Angelina Ballerina. The inscrutably handsome man that you made up just for the joy of imagining him furtively glancing at you out of the corner of his eye while he makes notes on an investigator’s tablet.
This is a good place, you think. This is a good place to be while the world rains and floods all else away. There’s a hope here, and oh, I am loathe to leave it for a world so much less pliable. I hope to make it back soon.
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That’s an anemic sounding car horn.
Sometimes I like the songs they play on the radio.
Irritation and frustration, saddlebags to the stars.
Things about today.
I don’t know why I was so damn chatty yesterday and now I totally cannot be arse to string together a sentence. There’s not been any movement on any front. Except maybe one, but I don’t want to jinx that by being too mouthy on the topic because mouthiness is one excuse for the obliteration of an ideal. Which sounds sort of existential, but comes down to me just wanting not to feel like a failure yet again. If I can avoid that, believe me, I will.
Things I want to do once I find a person good enough – qualified – not deranged – not unmoved to do these things with. (It is hilarious how I have to convince myself that no one I know will ever read this, because seriously, no one I don’t know is reading it, either):
Go to the zoo. Not for a day, not for every animal. We don’t need to go into the giraffe house and I have no interest in anything avian. I just want to go, see the gazelles, that crooked sign that explains the difference between dromedary and bactrian camels. People watch. Just until I start to feel bad for the animals a little bit.
….
I thought this would be a long list. That I might use it as a springboard to start to say something meaningful about my outlook on love. But I don’t have an outlook or a perspective or a toehold. I’m completely on the outside of the whole phenomenon. I try, but I find that I go backwards, what attracts me I repulse, what I repulse wants me. Ah, sweet science. I try and make a plan aside from pulling up my hemlines and sticking my leg out on street corners. But there isn’t anything particular I’m longing for. A person for outdoors, for sharing the breeze and those stunning sunsets, walking about. A person for indoors, talking about everything that’s outdoors. I don’t have big ideas. Or any ideas really.
Meanwhile, my sister may be planning her wedding, another finalizing her divorce and the other one is passing out (from donating blood.)
There’s weird conflict between us. But right now things are actually okay, something I couldn’t say a couple years ago. But it puts things in a very real relief – I’m always in waiting and yet, I have no idea what to stick my neck out for. What’s worth going through all of this for…no big plans, no real daydreams of a joined life. Just the sense that I really fucking need one for reasons beyond wanting to tell someone that the sound of the wind chimes and the air blowing tonight is amazing…even if it’s not doing a damn thing to cool me down.
I want someone for inside and outside. For sudden heat lightning in the courtyard. For the story of the walk with more than eight brown rabbits – my good luck charm (they’ve each got four feet a’piece, how can they not be lucky?) For a backrub. For a consistent murmur that I can spell, I do have a good heart, and in me there is an invincible season that is beautiful…to some folks. There’s a reason to carry on.
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