evening with blue sea and sails
Wednesday 28 February 2007 | I like a cookie
I abruptly decide not to go to Gail’s women in religion class this afternoon. Instead I wash four loads of laundry while sewing blonde wooden buttons on a blue wool sweater from Scotland, one Maman gave me the year before she died, because it was cold in the hospital. Stop by the grocery store and buy boxes of herbal tea on sale (raspberry and blueberry, a warm spice tea the Brujo used to bring me wordlessly when he lived at his first apartment, mornings I’d wake in bed under the skylight) and, impulsively, a pair of chocolate-brown capri sweatpants for $5. They look perfect to sleep in, I decide, defensively. Come home and pin wet duvet covers and towels and jeans to the clothesline (because it’s spring, goddammit; the Brujo saw wild geese flying north yesterday morning), hands wet and frozen, hat and scarf breathlessly askew. Inside, I hang knickers and camisoles and nylons and silk long underwear on the clothes rack by the radiator. Then Pywacket watches with suspicion as I clean the house to within an inch of its life, scrambling startled from the bathroom as I repeatedly flush the toilet. I beat out the tufted aqua bathmat against the side of the house, blue fairy lights palely illuminating the puffs of dust that drift away. Vacuum and dust, rearrange, wash dishes, scrub down the coffee maker, toaster oven, countertops, stove. Discard the shredded old one and open a fresh new yellow dish sponge.
Finally, hands roughened, satisfied, sit down with lemon chamomile looseleaf tea and more sewing. Pywacket studies the thread as it lifts and slithers, eventually giving up on it and me to roll around tubbily on the floor, eviscerating her pink Dr. Pussum’s catnip pillow with powerful hind feet. I light candles, decide to be geriatric and eat granola for dinner, decide to be millennial and listen to Iron & Wine, this being the kind of evening for which Sam’s guitar and banjo are actually perfect, being vague and kind of pointless and tired, the way you feel at the end of a long good domestic day.
There was a day last week when I felt I wasn’t getting anything done. I’d started to beat myself up for it pretty roundly, sitting here at the Mac, when I remembered it was actually the two-year anniversary of getting out of the psych unit, covered in bruises and cuts and with everyone in my life either furious at me or needing something. After I realized that, I closed all the open documents, put the work away and let myself do whatever I wanted. So, I don’t get anything done. It could be so much worse, was; I could be staggering drunkenly up Atalaya to die, or slipping down along iced river rocks to crawl into my shame and never ever leave it.
Last night I lay, still panting, against the Brujo’s chest and thought, maybe because of its (unintentional?) double-entendre, of “Naked as We Came“—
one of us will
die inside these arms
eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ashes round the yard
I didn’t tell him, because he might have thought it silly, perhaps, or presumptuous, or a story there’s no use in telling (”because we lack the imaginal capacity to know how it will really be”). I just smiled and let him pull me more tightly into his arms, until we curled back to back and fell asleep.
Pywacket’s riveted to the blackness outside the window, occasionally trilling. I nibble a hangnail and watch the dark blue candle gutter and extinguish itself in its own wax. I have no idea how the B. and I will negotiate moving to an unknown new city together, or even if. Will I be an olanzapine/selegiline junkie for the rest of my days? Will I find a sustainable way to earn my keep? Will I ever publish anything longer than 2,000 words that’s not a blog post? Will there be a garden, an orchard, a piano? Will there be a daughter? Will there be someone to spread my ashes in the yard? Tonight, if only tonight, the Brujo’s at his poker game and I’m warm and fed and free and have blue fairy lights and lemon chamomile and purple thread, and it’s fine not to know.
the water’s there to warm you
and the earth is warmer when you laugh
love is a scene I render
when you catch me wide awake
love’s a dream you enter
though I shake and shake and shake you
love is the best endeavor
waiting in the lion’s mane
Or maybe Czeslaw Milosz said it better; which is quite frequently the case.
•
THE GIFT
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
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