Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

I try not to become too personal in this blog. My perception of what might be personal may differ from that of other people. I can explain the process of installing an IUD, the news of the suicide of an acquaintance, or my everlasting internal turmoil with regards to language without feeling unveiled. I can even admit this without feeling unveiled. I don’t mind that my life be an open book, as long as I chose which chapters may be read. For this reason, the rest of this blog will be written in code. My code. Because I can’t write without getting all this off my chest, this stuff too personal for your eyes to read through, yet that I allow you to read as a narrative. Make of it what you will, as you do with everything else you read of what I write:

There’s a light that exists in homes that cannot exist elsewhere. This light is seen through the eyes and is carried by whoever holds those eyes. And there are sounds. From kitchens. Pots and pans clattering. Knives cutting against a cutting board. Water from a tap. All dulled by the distance of rooms. Odors exist, but they are not real smells. They are memories of people and places. Sometimes, they are memories of something that was never really known, or that seems always to be forgotten. The most pungent ones are the ones that hit the senses hardest. But sometimes, when the light is right, it comes, softly. And then something is remembered, and then is forgotten. But the shimmer of what remains is enough.

So I handed him my bottle
And he drank down my swallow
Then he bummed a cigarette
And he asked me for a light

Voices and stories that are meaningless without all the meaning we attach to them. Strings of thoughts become places that existed, and still do because they once did. Lights and shadows, lying on a sofa, listening to the sounds from the kitchen dulled by the distance and walls. Eyelids drooping on a stiff upright neck, watching a sense of home manifest around me, and fill me. If people are places, they are then also terrains. And landscapes.

Perspective can’t always be seen. It takes different eyes. I’ve finished a book recently. A Million Little Pieces. An Oprah book club book. And I have really nothing to say about it that hasn’t already been said. That happens when so many people are talking about one same book, or thing. For example, I had an idea for a blog. I mentioned it to a classmate. She works in a bookstore. She inadvertently made me decide not to write it. Not now, in the least.

I am in high-absorption mode. That’s another way of saying that I am bloated. Large and fat and floating up too close to everything. I would be light if it weren’t for my being twisted strained. This dual. Between lying on the sofa watching slants of light and listening, just listening, to supper being prepared, and thrashing into everything trying to embrace it all with flapping arms & strained shoulders. My shoulders, so bony and so square, of a skinny-assed flanker, holding up a stiff neck and drooping eyelids. All I can do now is listen for familiar voices, and look forward.

I allow myself to write run-on sentences using too many commas because I am French, at times, and that’s how we French create patterns and arguments and trails of thought. We are paradigmatic and it is my license. And now, I best be going to bed.