I.
how you always liked your food spicier than mine. how you always remembered to ask for water with no ice for me. how you would carry my bags no matter how often i refused. how you were more stubborn than i was. how you scraped both knees trying to prove how high you could jump. how you stayed awake at night to hold me and tell me stories because i couldn't sleep. how you knew exactly when to look over at me to catch me crying while watching a movie.  how the first thing you would do when you woke up was cover me up with the blankets and then go to the kitchen to make me blueberry pancakes. how you would burn yourself flipping eggs shirtless. how you would let me photograph you when the light was good in the mornings. how you would microwave towels for me to put on my belly when my stomach was hurting. how you left the tops off of all the bottles you drank out of. how you listened to NPR and quoted idioms from different countries. how you would laugh at me when i got things wrong but never ever made me feel stupid. how i would laugh at your mispronunciations. how you would laugh at mine.

II.
"Hopefully, I’ll have lived in so many parts of the world that I feel at home anywhere instead of nowhere. Hopefully, someone will fall in love with me and I’ll fall in love with that someone and we can create a world between us that I’ll believe in more than anything."

III.

I climb up on the cabin roof sometimes to let the stars into my eyes. But once I am up there they seem farther away than when I am on the ground. There is a constellation that reminds me of your hipbone. I think I am trying to get closer to that bundle of light.

When they say its okay to leave here, I swear I’m coming straight to see you. I should have come to see you when it was easy.

-Letter 50 from Letters to Emma Bowlcut

IV.
Excerpted from Shinji Moon's "This is what my mother has taught me":

This is how you take oil paints off of your hands with turpentine. This
is how you baste a turkey, how you dance at a club to make all the men fall in love
with you. This is where you put your hands, Shinji — you who are so
unsure of what limbs were made for.
The things you’ve inherited from me are all the characteristics of an ox.
Drive forward.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
A pair of shoulders is only made for one life. There will be a point where you will have
to take that into consideration. You live to save other people’s lives, but you are capable of
saving only yourself.

V.

I am not sure of anything
I am uncertain of nothing.

"And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm - whether it’s something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being sad in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness."

Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition

Kay Ryan (2013)

You are a
land I can't
stand leaving
and can't not.
My party ship
is pulling out.
We all have
hats. I try to
toot some notes
you'll understand
but this was not
our instrument
or plan.

i have all sorts of expletives that i want to say right now. though i might offend you... all i could think of when i read this was "jesus fucking christ"


Alberto Ruy-Sánchez's III. Concerning Time in Mogador

III. Concerning Time in Mogador

Nineteen

They say that according to the calculations of the most ancient African astronomers, the sun slows down when it passes over Mogador, lingering there more than any other place on the planet. That is why time is measured here at a leisurely pace and things in the world are perceived differently, with a certain throbbing intensity.

Twenty

Because time in Mogador passes differently under the sun than in the shade, and with even greater distinction from day to night, very infantile elders and extremely wise babies may cross our paths, as well as meticulous lovers who in the blink of an eye can cover an entire body with deep caresses and kisses that last a lifetime.

Twenty-one

Even the sand in the hourglass falls differently here, at times very quickly and at others more restrained. Each hourglass is believed to carry an internal wind that controls the shifting of its small dunes. And they say lovers with a penetratingly slow touch acquire and develop an inner wind that commands all their movements, setting, in particular, the cadence of their urgent caresses. 

Twenty-two

In Mogador, the heart is considered the most precise clock, or at least the most respected, not just for its consistency but for its ability to distinguish the profound nuances of each instant. It is a clock that falls in love, becomes frightened and aroused. Those skipped heartbeats become milestones of life shared by more than two and at times by all. The history of this city is measured by inflamed hearts. The rhythm of blood in the veins, what one poet called “the music of the body,” is a kind of national hymn for the Mogadorians. And making love with a very erratic heart is how it is best interpreted and sung, to such an extent that at official ceremonies foreigners are amazed to hear the most patriotic Mogadorians nearly moan their hymn with an enthusiasm more amorous than warlike.

Twenty-three

Another clock that is very respected in Mogador is the sea with her moving insistence. The waves rise and fall against the walls, sowing in the city a stubborn sensation of the constant rhythm that touches everything. Here, the moisture on the skin, on clothing, in corners, books, and even the air are a clear measure of time. In Mogador time is liquid. They say it calms thirst and eases the penetrations of lovers. And so the gesture of anointing a lover is often accompanied by a fluid smile and the saying, “To love, give time.”  

Twenty-four

The waves and tides are pendulums of that expansive clock of the sea. In Mogador, lovers sense that their city expands within that immense saline clock, and desire incites them to caress bellies and backs like an undulating swell. And they enter each other like tides obeying the moon, embracing with enthusiasm the magnetic allure of the stars. To love, here, is to measure time.

“Let me touch your time with my hands,” is a common but rather desperate saying, used to request a much longed for intimacy. But if someone here brashly tells a lover, “give me time,” it is considered an obvious act of pornography. For some it is insulting, while others find it very exciting. Time in Mogador leaves no one immune.

Twenty-five

Singing and dancing is yet another way to measure time in Mogador. The heart is a bass drum or, if you prefer, castanets hidden deep beneath the skin. It is a kind of ritual guitar: the gambri, with strings like arteries. Time dances in the veins of lovers and expands its volume when the uncontainable blood swells the sexual organs. And it beats and beats reinventing the rhythm of the clave (one, two, three, one-two). They dance to measure scattered time, to discover it in the body of others as in a broken mirror. And, if everything falls into place with a certain grace and finesse, the moment arrives when the time of one person is within the time of the other. And they say that a clock is within another clock when lovers are united and chime in unison to the beat of their hearts, as if dancing. But it is not advisable to coincide with absolute precision, absorbing the same fragment of time, for that is when time stops, like a heart stricken by a severe case of arrhythmia.

Twenty-six

Every day in the squares of Mogador, the story is told of a pair of clandestine lovers who began making love in an excessively rushed manner, beneath an old staircase in the marketplace, under the shadow of an ephemeral wall of flour sacks. And when, with haste and reluctance to part, the couple finished their “quickie,” more than twenty-seven years had past. Their respective spouses had remarried and their children had moved away. Unbeknownst to the lovers and without them ever being exposed, the flour that shielded them had become loaves of bread. “The inevitable happened,” says the storyteller of the Square of the Snail, “and it is not the first time this has happened in Mogador: the excessive impatience of those who desire burns the surface of time, which as everyone knows is as smooth as silk, and lovers fall into one of the abysses of the calendar. The same kind of abyss of time that always leads us to believe, whenever we are making love, that only our love is eternal.”

Twenty-seven

They say, with rhythmic insistence, that time in Mogador is another entrance to the body: an open and deep sex, a long good night, an appealing mystery. An apparition.

“Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy.”

The opening lines of John Banville's The Infinities, from the point of view of the immortals. Amazon calls it a wise look at the "terrible, wonderful plight of being human"

he sends me photographs of the blue skies outside his window.
i send him photographs of the blue skies outside mine.

though we are so far apart, it makes me feel closer to him knowing we are still sitting under the same sky.

(just so you know, after that post i promptly got up and went to eat a banana)

i.
the children of flight attendants, who leave at their whimsies

ii.
the way my mother puts cubes of watermelon in those plastic buckets that chinese restaurants give you when you order soup for take out

iii.
waking up once at 1am, another time at 3:32am, and finally again at 6:59am. each time waking up in a panic, thinking of you.

iv.
hoping someone else is as excited as i am to live on a sailboat for a few nights. no rhyme or reason, no hope even that it will cure me. just being on the water is enough.

v.
how much i love bananas. my mother calls them the lazy girl's fruit. and damn is she right. i love just peeling it open and the mushy sweetness and the perfect number of spots, and the way the black grows on the yellow peel and it's an achievement to taste it juuuust right.

vi.
reading writing that reminds me of the way i used to write, and being consumed by nostalgia for the girl who ate peanut butter off of one chopstick, who believed in soul mates, who fell asleep to the smell of tiger balm, who always painted her toenails silver.

vii.
feeling your absence like an x-ray. this is exposure, this is vulnerability, this is absolutely medical.

viii.
it's my birthday month. this month, my birthday lands on a Friday. that should be more special than zodiacs or astrology significance, combined.
 i ate my first caramel apple this year.
i had stopped answering your calls. i remember, vividly, the sheets around me that were as rumpled and as distraught as my tear-soaked cheeks. i remember floundering helplessly, on a Monday evening while the sun was almost setting, parked in an empty lot, hands shaking while they dialed your number. a few minutes later, you found me, and you stood in your perfectly pressed white dress shirt and your meticulously knotted tie.
the wind found its way toward this empty lot, and it was chasing itself against my back as i pressed my face into you. i remember that all i could think about was that i would get your work clothes all snotty. i was desperate to cry into you and terrified to do it at the same time. come to think of it, i think most of my time with you, i felt similar conflicts in my heart.
we listened to country music and rode the ferris wheel. you took my hand and won a purple dinosaur the size of my face. we ate various carnival renditions of meat. as we were leaving, i gazed at you and your smile, and then, i bit into my very first caramel apple. you saved yours for later.
that was us.

"A pier is a disappointed bridge: yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel." - Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Go down any road far enough
and you'll come to a slaughterhouse,
but keep going and you'll reach the sea.” - Dean Young, First Course in Turbulence

thank you, CS

i am of the sort that had to learn to be alone. it doesn't come easily to me. new york city taught me to walk through parks by myself, eat sandwiches under trees by myself, watch dance theatre by myself, cry in my room by myself, slurp warm japanese soup by myself. out of habit (or something), i still pack my days and weekends with dates and outings with people, but tanya davis reminds me how beautiful it can be to be yourself.


(i'm adding, in retrospect, a quote that Angie pointed out from this video:)

"Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back, like a book of blessings."