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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Whatever it is, the Great Plan has to have some groundrules to be followed. Otherwise, I don’t think I can be held to much account for following it. I’ve been trying to think about it today, loosely, because I know that the Great Plan is wildly disparate. It can mean everything and in so doing choke itself on its own tail. It can mean nothing and literally mean nothing.
I have this piece of amber that several years ago I invested something into. I invested in this pseudo-magical-kitchen-witchery-need-to-do-something piece of amber what little I knew about what I hoped for in terms of someone coming into my life. I don’t know what I believe in, but I think that there’s something in a person’s will, in their hopes, and in their fears that can become a kind of energy, a magic that can alter what does and doesn’t happen for them. I don’t mean The Craft, I just mean….I put enough into it that I couldn’t wear it as the necklace it was meant to be. I couldn’t even bring myself to put it on because of the possibility that it could work. That it could honestly bring me someone who could be kind, and funny, and liberal and true and like bad movies and be in the right spot in terms of overcoming all my massive insecurities and troubles and then, I’d be in the terrible fix of having no good reason to rebuff him.
This was an issue because of the after. The dangerous after. An after I had no clear visioning process for. An after that could leave me really messed up or an after that I could tramp through with my army boots and destroy even just by accident. Commitment issues, sure, why not. It felt like a forever that would impact everything. That if it was the answer to everything it would stop the search, stop the wanting, stop the status quo.
So, I have this piece of amber. It’s been through the washing machine. It’s been in an out of pockets and purses, under pillows, everywhere but around my neck – hanging there, announcing that I might have some hope, some want, some sincere desire. I’m thinking about wearing it now until I do. Or until he arrives.
I know there’s the basic argument that love arrives when you least expect it, when you’re out Great Planning something else. But I’ve been doing other things for as long as I can remember, with intermittent splashes of maybe! and a boatload of depressingly unacceptable even to someone with no real standards to speak of, and nothing obvious has ever snuck into my ken.
So, one piece of the Great Plan, might be this. Wearing this necklace for whatever it means or doesn’t mean, whatever it brings or doesn’t, because I’m trying to let down these Great Walls. I had a whole Great Barrier Reef joke that didn’t quite work. But, I hope you get some of this drift.
It’s the color and shape of a honey tear.
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